Incus vs Podman Desktop
Incus
linuxcontainers.org
Podman Desktop
podman-desktop.ioSide by side
| Figure | Incus | Podman Desktop |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Runtime Software | 8.7 (#2) | 7.3 (#23) |
| Integrations | The documentation links to third-party tools and documents storage drivers including Btrfs, LVM, ZFS, Ceph, LINSTOR, and TrueNAS. | Extensions can add container engines such as Podman or Docker, virtual machine integrations such as Lima, and tools such as Kind or Compose. |
| Purpose | Incus is a system container, application container, and virtual machine manager. | Podman Desktop is a graphical developer tool for creating, managing, and running containers, pods, and Kubernetes workloads locally. |
| Security | The project highlights unprivileged containers, resource restrictions, and authentication as security measures. | The product site describes Podman's security foundations as daemonless, rootless containers, SELinux support, network policy enforcement, and immutable containers. |
| Support | Community support is available through the Linux Containers forum, and Zabbly provides commercial support for users of its Debian or Ubuntu packages. | The documentation directs users to troubleshooting guides and the project repository for unresolved issues; extension documentation points users to Discord for assistance. |
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.
Podman Desktop
Podman Desktop has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.