Podman (GitHub)

Podman is a daemonless, rootless container engine for building, running, and managing OCI (Open Container Initiative) containers and container images. Developed by Red Hat since 2018 as part of the containers ecosystem (alongside Buildah, Skopeo, and CRI-O), Podman has over 25,000 stars on its primary code repository as of 2026. Podman is designed as a drop-in replacement for Docker, supporting the same CLI commands (podman run, podman build, podman ps, podman images, podman push, podman pull, and aliasing docker to podman), while fundamentally differing in architecture: Podman does not require a long-running daemon process, instead launching containers as child processes of the podman command, which improves security, resource efficiency, and reliability. Key features include: rootless containers (running containers as non-root users using user namespaces and slirp4netns for networking), pod management (grouping containers into pods that share network and IPC namespaces, similar to Kubernetes pods), systemd integration (generating systemd unit files for containers via podman generate systemd, enabling container management as native systemd services), Docker Compose compatibility (via podman-compose for running docker-compose.yml files), Kubernetes YAML support (podman play kube for deploying Kubernetes manifests and podman generate kube for exporting pod configurations as Kubernetes YAML), full OCI runtime support (using crun or runc as the default runtime), image building with Containerfile (Dockerfile-compatible syntax), volume management, network management (CNI plugins and Netavark for rootless networking), image signature verification via cosign and GPG, podman desktop GUI for visual container management, and REST API compatible with Docker API (enabling tools like docker-compose, docker-py, and Docker SDK to work with Podman).