Podman vs Docker in 2025: What's Really Different?

Docker isn't the only way to run containers anymore. Podman offers a secure, daemonless alternative with native pod support and better Kubernetes integration. In this video, we compare Docker and Podman's architectures, security models, and ecosystems to help you make the right choice for your projects. Learn about their key differences, when to use each one, and how they can even work together.

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[JayLooney]

Podman enables running individual containers without requiring a system-wide daemon. This is a really niche need, but the people who now have it available to them are very happy for it :)

[jelsonrodrigues]

The thing I like the most about Podman in comparison to Docker is it's IPv6 support. My ISP puts me behind CG-NAT, so with IPv4 there is no way to reaching my home network. But my ISP gives me IPv6 conectivity and I remeber to try setup my containers with Docker and IPv6 and it didnt work, I migrated to Podman and simply worked. I'm using ever since.

[yootoobaakko]

Sorry, had big issue with Podman on windows. Had to reset the Podman installation to make it work everytime there's some issue like pipe issue on wsl. Wsl machine is active and port is open too.
Linux was seamless. It's still docker desktop for windows users.

[cakerer]

Any image built for docker will run with podman. The image format is the same as they’re both OCI compatible.

[monketastic]

i didn't even knew podman did all that, all i thought was it was just docker but more privacy focused and open source licensing lol, btw podman-compose can be used if you want to create a podman container and got a docker-compose and docker file...

[andikunar]

Great video, thanks. One additional advantage of Podman you did not mention, is it‘s support for GPU-accelerated Vulkan in containers on Apple silicon Macs via slp/krunkit.

[ramonpereira]

I have to say that podman is really nice indeed. The low footprint is just awesome.

[randomgeocacher]

Rootless podman is extremely easy to work with for running local test/engineering work, especially as it is trivial to mount one of your directories into it and have access to mounted files with your own UID. No need to deal with root UID, nor namespaces UIDs.

Very little overhead / headache to get some promise your scripts/programs reproducible as a full build instruction while still able to do simple stuff.

[mr]

another big difference is how local privileges are handled. enviroment variables do not work in podman-compose, locally mounted volumes do not work and so on. podman just is not production ready yet.... i have struggled days to prove otherwise, but no luck.

[TheIchina]

in many cases docker desktop is not even free - "Docker Desktop is free for small businesses (fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in annual revenue), personal use, education, and non-commercial open source projects. Otherwise, it requires a paid subscription for professional use."

[riftsassassin]

Thank you for the video man!!

Been wanting to try it out but was unsure.
Thank you for the neat breakdown!

I think the video is a bit misleading on some points:
- Docker now has rootless mode as well (not daemonless though, yet?)
- Podman CLI and Docker CLI are 99% identical, saying that people will have a hard time migrating from Docker to Podman is just false IMHO
- Any image can be run using podman or docker. At some point in the video, it says there's more images for Docker. That's incorrect. I think OP means there's more plugins for docker.

[EdouardTavinor]

could you explain the prebuilt images argument a bit more? i thought both podman and docker are just different ways to run the same container images. i haven't yet found an image that docker could run but podman couldn't or vice versa

[nimya]

Yeah i use podman for years, previsouly it wasn't has polish as docker, but now it's better fo my use case. If you woek locally on k8s before déploiement podman is a better tools and is quite close to CRI-O.

[BennyPowers]

You didnt mention the absolutely most important thing : licensing

[kjw]

Great video, but I found that one key thing that prevented me from working with Podman was that Docker allowed me to work with windows containers. I had an instance where I needed a container that to leverage the User Certificate Store for windows.

[RetiredVet]

I had a network conflict when using both. I am working on a resolution.

[s.i.m.c.a]

Podman not fully support compose, only via separate script, and the external usage of docker compose and buildkit have it's own problems like not everything work as expected, for example networking (docker and podman implementation of it is totally different).

[caralrahe]

How are the compose files working on Podman nowadays?

[PatrickOnEngineering]

Podman seems good and is a good alternative to containerd, rather than Docker. Is it better to containerd? For me, it tries to reinvent too many things. I just stick to use containerd + Rancher Desktop. As for rootless, you should always configure securityContext and pass uid/gid when running K8S..