Item: Portainer
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Portainer

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Portainer has significantly improved productivity by allowing me to easily manage all Docker containers in one place. Its intuitive interface reduces complexity, enabling quicker deployments and streamlined monitoring. This efficiency saves time, lowers operational costs, and simplifies container management, making it accessible even for teams with limited DevOps expertise. I really like managing stacks with it since it even has build in version control.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Version control of stacks
Clean GUI
Easy install
Simple updates

Cons

Port tester to see if ports are open from outside network
Monitoring tools and graphs
Customized alerts could be nice

Return on Investment

Time managing dependencies was almost reduced to 0, no more "works on my machine"
Initial learning curve seams to be quite bad for some people, about 2 weeks for basics at worst
Costs were a bit lowered since we moved a bit of stuff from cloud to local

Usability

Accessibility for Non-Experts: even with some people having a bit longer on-boarding it is still very simple

Quick setup is insanely useful, we can get it running in 10 seconds after installing docker

Portainer has once again super clean UI and is very user friendly. Deployment/monitoring and management are super easy. I can tell just from a glance if something is out of date (watching at you Watchtower not doing your job for some reason)

Alternatives Considered

Dyrectorio was nice but it feels unpolished
Ugreen has docker management on its UGOS Pro and it seems quite nice for start but its UI is quite a bit worse then Portainer
Another downside is that its GUI seems to be locked on a specific port for now

Key Insights

Do you think Portainer delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Portainer's feature set?

Yes

Did Portainer live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Portainer go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Portainer again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Windows Server, Linux Mint

Likelihood to Recommend

My friend was getting into Linux servers. I recommended him Portainer and we are still both using it.

It seems like it is less appropriate in business world but it is mostly due to people not wanting change and not any software problems that Portainer has, in my specific case, it was rejected from work for hosting simple web apps.

Simplifies Containers