Rancher vs. Portainer - Which one should I choose?

Rancher vs. Portainer, which one is better" Which one should I choose? Can Portainer manager Kubernetes? Can Rancher manage Kubernetes? We answer all these questions and more in this quick, no fluff video. Side note, this is one of the most asked questions in my live streams.

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#Rancher #Portainer #HomeLab

"Shadowboxing" is from Harris Heller's album Breaker.

Thank you for watching!

[kosikond]

Latest Portainer also can process Docker Compose v3 yaml, finally 🙌

[eformance]

Point of interest: If you create a docker swarm and run portainer agent as a service, you can manage containers running on all members of the swarm, allowing you to deploy here and there. The biggest shortcoming of the Portainer/docker relationship is the lack of a default Registry to allow you to share the same images across all members of the swarm. You must download images to every member in the swarm and you must be careful when running docker builds to ensure the builds is run on the same host you plan to launch the container on, or you have to manually copy the image to other members of the swarm.

[reesericdotci]

rancher has objectively more features, so the choice is clear for me. I also love that reverse proxy, ingress and then cert-manager auto-deploys certificates with ACME and an internal ca. love rancher, love k8s

[lukescomputers]

Awesome video! By far one of the best self hosted/homelab channels I've seen!
One thing I learned about rancher vs portainer is that if you are using an older or low power computer (sometimes this can be true for raspberry pi's too), portainer runs better. With rancher I saw large cpu usage and rancher kept restarting when I opened the webui while being run on an old dell. Portainer ran fine, but I agree for running it on newer hardware rancher is my first choice.

[ApexFPS]

Still blows my mind how do you don't have over a 100k followers yet!

[charlescc]

Perfect timing. Been using Docker-compose for a while but recently began diving into considering Portainer as well as considering moving my containers over to K8s

[daledriver]

I have used both rancher and portainer. However, I find portainer use much less resource on my budget server. I like rancher better, maybe when I migrate to a more powerful server someday.

[JanBebendorf]

There is a key difference between Portainer and Rancher: While Portainer just allows you to connect to an EXISTING kubernetes cluster and roughly manage resources deployed inside, Rancher will actually completely manage your kubernetes cluster and makes setup and maintainance a charm. Like you said, for plain docker i would always go for Portainer and i love it. Even if you don't use the Portainer dashboard it's a great way to get an authenticated proxy for the docker api. Still when it comes to Kubernetes i would always go for Rancher for cluster management and K8S Dashboard + Rancher Dashboard for resource management inside the cluster.

[squalazzo]

simply: both! I've a proxmox server, where i installed docker directly on host, too, to spin up small containers i don't need to be replicated (like a small dns, or haproxy), and there i installed portainer and rancher, too... and used rancher yesterday (following your videos, thanks!) to install a 3master+3workers cluster, awesome how easy it was!

[TheBrettDuncan]

I'm running Portainer mostly because I'm not really utilizing Kubernetes. I also found the Portainer UI to be a little more inviting. I think I'll spin up a Rancher instance this weekend and check it out, though.

[RonDLite]

Thank you for confirming my pick of Rancher

[SlipperyCarrot]

Was just asking myself that exact same question this morning.
Thanks a mill for this, and the other videos. Youre doing a great job 👍🏻

[jig]

I'm portainer guy.. it suits my needs really well. I really only use docker-compose, I tried rancher and Kubernetes but it seems overly complicated for what I'm doing. One thing I love about using docker is I create my compose files in my test environment and then when all is working as expected I can deploy that same file to my prod environment. With rancher it seems like I had to use the GUI to enter in all of my attributes. That may not be the case but I didn't get much further than that. I used your video that you put out last year on rancher and Kubernetes, it was great, easy to follow, and it got me up and running. Once it was all going I just figured it was too complex for me. I really do appreciate you making these videos, they are educational and entertaining.

[spaceco]

I had followed your video for setting up Portainer, and then tried to follow your video for containerizing Plex. I wasn't able to mount my TrueNas SMB share in Portainer (and found some posts mentioning that this is not (yet) possible in Portainer if you are only running Kubernetes). I am going to try out Rancher now and see whether that fits me more.
Thank you for all you amazing tutorials!

[rickytorres]

We been trying to find alternatives of running game servers in containers because the de facto software of Pterodactyl is quite inaccessible to me. However someone mentioned that Portainer lacks the ability to view files and edit them. As well as issuing an SSL for the UI. I wish there were a "simple" single node solution to managing containers. Which comes with the basics (logging, file manager, editing files, etc) and can be installed and managed relatively easily.

[thehollowbox]

Nice short and concise video. I like it.

[julian]

Hey Tim, thanks for the great Video. Maybe you could compare both Solutions by conparing their used ressources in the Future. I mean the load that Rancher produces is damn high.

[jvm-tv]

My favourite tech teacher. Well explained!

[RobertMizen]

I could not really decide, but i am going to have a play with Rancher. Purely due to the tutorial you did on self hosting services and exposing services via rancher to the web. But as you said, spin up Portainer and see what it feels like too.

[majorgear]

If you run each container stack in it's own linux container ( lxc ) under proxmox for flexibility like I do, Portainer is not an option as you'll need an expensive business license to allow enough agents. Having a separate linux container for each docker stack is nice as you can easily manage it's resources and move it to another proxmox host from the Web UI.