Incus vs OpenVZ
Incus
linuxcontainers.orgOpenVZ
openvz.orgSide by side
| Figure | Incus | OpenVZ |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Runtime Software | 8.7 (#2) | 7.3 (#22) |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 8.7 (#3) | 7.3 (#23) |
| Integrations | The documentation links to third-party tools and documents storage drivers including Btrfs, LVM, ZFS, Ceph, LINSTOR, and TrueNAS. | The comparison page lists OpenVZ API for Ruby and LibVirt. |
| Purpose | Incus is a system container, application container, and virtual machine manager. | OpenVZ provides container based virtualization for Linux, allowing multiple isolated containers to run on one physical server. |
| Support | Community support is available through the Linux Containers forum, and Zabbly provides commercial support for users of its Debian or Ubuntu packages. | The project provides public mailing lists for users, developers, Debian specific questions, CRIU development, and announcements. |
Plans
In their own words
Incus
Incus is free software for managing system containers, application containers, and virtual machines. Instances can share storage and networking, and administrators can manage them through a command-line tool, REST API, or third-party integrations. The software supports snapshots, backup and recovery, migration, configurable storage pools and networks, and resource controls. The project describes its API as suitable for use from a laptop through clusters of thousands of compute nodes. Documented integrations include Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, Packer, Distrobuilder, GARM, Kubernetes Cluster API, and Incant. The daemon runs on Linux; client applications are available for Windows and macOS, with FreeBSD client packages also listed. Upstream does not directly provide packages, so installation is through Linux distributions, third-party repositories, or source. Incus is developed under the Apache 2 license. Containers are unprivileged by default, but access to the Unix socket grants full control, so it should be limited to trusted users. The 6.0 LTS release is supported until June 2029; feature releases are normally supported until the next release.