Incus vs youki
Incus
linuxcontainers.orgyouki
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Incus | youki |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Runtime Software | 8.7 (#2) | 7.5 (#20) |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 8.7 (#3) | 7.5 (#19) |
| Integrations | The documentation links to third-party tools and documents storage drivers including Btrfs, LVM, ZFS, Ceph, LINSTOR, and TrueNAS. | The README shows how to configure Docker to use youki as a container runtime and includes a Podman example. |
| License | Incus is free software developed under the Apache 2 license. | The repository provides the software under the Apache License, Version 2.0. |
| Purpose | Incus is a system container, application container, and virtual machine manager. | youki is an implementation of the OCI runtime specification written in Rust, similar to runc. |
| Security | The project highlights unprivileged containers, resource restrictions, and authentication as security measures. | Security issues can be reported through GitHub Security Advisories or by emailing the project committers. |
| What it does | Incus is a system container, application container, and virtual machine manager. | youki is a container runtime written in Rust that implements the OCI runtime specification. |
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.
youki
youki is a Linux container runtime written in Rust that implements the OCI runtime specification. It provides commands to create, start, list, inspect, and delete containers, and can run containers without root privileges. The project documents using it as a runtime with Docker and Podman, and reports passing containerd’s end-to-end test and adoption in several production environments. Building locally requires Rust edition 2024 and Linux kernel 5.3 or later; local builds are supported on Linux, with Vagrant environments and GitHub Codespaces available for trying it elsewhere. The project is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project. youki is free under the Apache License, Version 2.0, which grants no-charge, royalty-free copyright and patent licenses subject to its terms. Security reports can be sent through GitHub Security Advisories or to the committers by email. The committers aim to triage reports and respond within seven days, though a fix may take longer.