Incus vs systemd-nspawn
Incus
linuxcontainers.orgsystemd-nspawn
freedesktop.orgSide by side
| Figure | Incus | systemd-nspawn |
|---|---|---|
| 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 Engines | 8.7 (#3) | 7.5 (#18) |
| License | Incus is free software developed under the Apache 2 license. | The systemd repository includes an LGPL 2.1 license file. |
| Purpose | Incus is a system container, application container, and virtual machine manager. | systemd-nspawn runs a command or a full Linux-based operating system in a lightweight namespace container. |
| Security | The project highlights unprivileged containers, resource restrictions, and authentication as security measures. | For untrusted code, the manual says to use a user namespace because the sandbox can be circumvented without one. |
| Support | Community support is available through the Linux Containers forum, and Zabbly provides commercial support for users of its Debian or Ubuntu packages. | The systemd project lists its mailing list, IRC channel, and Matrix channel as support options. |
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.
systemd-nspawn
systemd-nspawn has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.