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Podman

Score9.5 out of 10

6 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Podman?

Podman.io is an open source container, pod, and container image management engine designed to streamline container management for small to large-sized companies. With its versatile features and intuitive user interface, Podman caters to the needs of DevOps engineers, software developers, system administrators, IT operations teams, and cloud-native application developers across various industries.

Key Features

Daemonless Container Management: According to the vendor, Podman eliminates the need for a separate daemon process, providing a fast and resource-efficient container management experience.

Secure Rootless Containers: The vendor claims that Podman supports rootless containers, enhancing security by running containers with reduced privileges, minimizing the risk of attacks.

Open Source First: According to the vendor, Podman prioritizes open source principles and practices, allowing users to manage containers from any engine, including Docker, without being locked into a specific vendor.

Compatibility with Docker: Podman is said to seamlessly work with Docker, enabling users to run their existing Docker containers and docker-compose files without any modifications.

Kubernetes Integration: The vendor states that Podman offers seamless integration with Kubernetes, enabling users to create, manage, and deploy pods directly from the Podman interface.

Growing Set of Compatible Tools: Podman is claimed to be compatible with a wide range of tools in the container ecosystem, including popular ones like Visual Studio Code, Cirrus CLI, GitHub Actions, and Kind.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Podman has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 6 ratings of Podman's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Security and Isolation

    Product provides effective tools to isolate containers, nodes, and clusters and protect them from threats.

    Category average: 8.5

Areas for Improvement

Reviews

What users are saying about Podman.
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Docker alternative that is both secure and open source

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As our primary servers are on CentOS and Fedora, a lot of our workload goes through podman which it comes with as default. We run all the containers in podman for not really the licensing reasons of docker, but more it being daemonless and not requiring root user.

Pros

  • It’s daemonless, so somewhat more secure.
  • It works exceptionally well and is compatible with Docker compose
  • Podman Desktop actually makes individual usage also pretty easy.
  • It can be used as Docker alternative with almost no additional steps

Cons

  • Podman desktop is getting more stable with each version, but does need more UX friendliness as well.
  • Official support for development tools and IDEs is missing for most tools
  • It works well with Kubernetes, but I wouldn’t mind additional improvements

Return on Investment

  • We definitely feel more secure.
  • We do not suffer from memory or cpu overuses as it uses fedora coreOS which is lightweight
  • We do not have to worry about license payments for our basic usages.
  • It’s open source so quick fixes imminent with maximum transparency.

Alternatives Considered

Docker, SUSE Rancher and K3s Lightweight Kubernetes

Other Software Used

Kubernetes, GitLab, OpenJDK