Podman

Podman is an open-source container engine built by Red Hat as a daemonless, OCI-compliant alternative to Docker. Rather than relying on a long-running background service with root privileges, Podman launches each container as a direct fork/exec child process of the command that started it. Containers run rootless by default, executing under the invoking user's own permissions instead of requiring elevated access to a privileged daemon socket — a meaningful difference for security-conscious teams operating under zero-trust or compliance requirements.

The CLI is designed as a near drop-in replacement for Docker: most docker commands work unchanged when aliased to podman, and images, registries, and the underlying OCI image format are fully interoperable, so existing Dockerfiles and container registries need no changes to adopt it. Beyond individual containers, Podman introduces pods — groups of containers that share a network namespace and can be managed as a single unit — and can generate native Kubernetes YAML directly from a running pod, giving teams a lightweight bridge from local development to cluster orchestration.

Podman integrates closely with systemd, allowing containers and pods to run as standard system services with automatic restarts and boot-time startup. It's complemented by two companion tools from the same project family: Buildah for building OCI images without a daemon, and Skopeo for inspecting and copying images between registries. On macOS and Windows, Podman runs containers inside a lightweight Linux virtual machine (podman machine), mirroring the architecture Docker Desktop uses under the hood.

As an Apache-2.0 licensed project with no commercial tier, Podman carries no per-seat or per-organization licensing cost at any scale. It ships as the default container engine in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, and has seen steady adoption among enterprise and public-sector teams for whom a root-privileged daemon is treated as an unacceptable liability.