Best Container Engines for Startups
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Compare the Top Container Engines for Startups as of April 2025
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What are Container Engines for Startups?
Container engines are software platforms that facilitate the creation, deployment, and management of containers in a computing environment. Containers are lightweight, portable, and consistent units of software that include everything needed to run an application, such as the code, libraries, and system tools. Container engines enable developers to package and isolate applications in a way that allows them to run uniformly across different environments, making them ideal for cloud, microservices, and DevOps workflows. These engines typically support features like container orchestration, scalability, resource management, and container lifecycle management. Compare and read user reviews of the best Container Engines for Startups currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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Google Cloud Run
Google
Google Cloud Run supports the use of container engines like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), enabling seamless deployment and management of containerized applications at scale. With GKE, users can manage Kubernetes clusters and integrate them with Cloud Run for orchestrating containerized services, enhancing flexibility in deployment strategies. While Cloud Run itself abstracts the Kubernetes management layer, it provides a powerful engine that allows developers to utilize containers in their application delivery pipeline. The $300 in free credits available to new customers can be used to explore how Cloud Run integrates with container engines to streamline and optimize application management. This integration is particularly valuable for teams that want the benefits of Kubernetes without the overhead of managing clusters directly. Cloud Run ensures that containerized workloads are easy to deploy, manage, and scale with minimal manual configuration.Starting Price: Free (2 mil requests/month) -
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Docker
Docker
Docker takes away repetitive, mundane configuration tasks and is used throughout the development lifecycle for fast, easy and portable application development, desktop and cloud. Docker’s comprehensive end-to-end platform includes UIs, CLIs, APIs and security that are engineered to work together across the entire application delivery lifecycle. Get a head start on your coding by leveraging Docker images to efficiently develop your own unique applications on Windows and Mac. Create your multi-container application using Docker Compose. Integrate with your favorite tools throughout your development pipeline, Docker works with all development tools you use including VS Code, CircleCI and GitHub. Package applications as portable container images to run in any environment consistently from on-premises Kubernetes to AWS ECS, Azure ACI, Google GKE and more. Leverage Docker Trusted Content, including Docker Official Images and images from Docker Verified Publishers.Starting Price: $7 per month -
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Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat
The Kubernetes platform for big ideas. Empower developers to innovate and ship faster with the leading hybrid cloud, enterprise container platform. Red Hat OpenShift offers automated installation, upgrades, and lifecycle management throughout the container stack—the operating system, Kubernetes and cluster services, and applications—on any cloud. Red Hat OpenShift helps teams build with speed, agility, confidence, and choice. Code in production mode anywhere you choose to build. Get back to doing work that matters. Red Hat OpenShift is focused on security at every level of the container stack and throughout the application lifecycle. It includes long-term, enterprise support from one of the leading Kubernetes contributors and open source software companies. Support the most demanding workloads including AI/ML, Java, data analytics, databases, and more. Automate deployment and life-cycle management with our vast ecosystem of technology partners.Starting Price: $50.00/month -
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Ambassador
Ambassador Labs
Ambassador Edge Stack is a Kubernetes-native API Gateway that delivers the scalability, security, and simplicity for some of the world's largest Kubernetes installations. Edge Stack makes securing microservices easy with a comprehensive set of security functionality, including automatic TLS, authentication, rate limiting, WAF integration, and fine-grained access control. The API Gateway contains a modern Kubernetes ingress controller that supports a broad range of protocols including gRPC and gRPC-Web, supports TLS termination, and provides traffic management controls for resource availability. Why use Ambassador Edge Stack API Gateway? - Accelerate Scalability: Manage high traffic volumes and distribute incoming requests across multiple backend services, ensuring reliable application performance. - Enhanced Security: Protect your APIs from unauthorized access and malicious attacks with robust security features. - Improve Productivity & Developer Experience -
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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides fast, flexible, and affordable compute capacity to fit any workload need from performant bare metal servers and VMs to lightweight containers. OCI Compute provides uniquely flexible VM and bare metal instances for optimal price-performance. Select exactly the number of cores and the memory your applications need. Delivering high performance for enterprise workloads. Simplify application development with serverless computing. Your choice of technologies includes Kubernetes and containers. NVIDIA GPUs for machine learning, scientific visualization, and other graphics processing. Capabilities such as RDMA, high-performance storage, and network traffic isolation. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure consistently delivers better price performance than other cloud providers. Virtual machine-based (VM) shapes offer customizable core and memory combinations. Customers can optimize costs by choosing a specific number of cores.Starting Price: $0.007 per hour
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Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. It is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances. Cloud Foundry has a container-based architecture that runs apps in any programming language. Deploy apps to CF using your existing tools and with zero modification to the code. Instantiate, deploy, and manage high-availability Kubernetes clusters with CF BOSH on any cloud. By decoupling applications from infrastructure, you can make individual decisions about where to host workloads – on premise, in public clouds, or in managed infrastructures – and move those workloads as necessary in minutes, with no changes to the app. -
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Salad
Salad Technologies
Salad allows gamers to mine crypto in their downtime. Turn your GPU power into credits that you can spend on things you love. Our Store features subscriptions, games, gift cards, and more. Download our free mining app and run while you're AFK to earn Salad Balance. Support a democratized web through providing decentralized infrastructure for distributing compute power. o cut down on the buzzwords—your PC does a lot more than just make you money. At Salad, our chefs will help support not only blockchain, but other distributed projects and workloads like machine learning and data processing. Take surveys, answer quizzes, and test apps through AdGate, AdGem, and OfferToro. Once you have enough balance, you can redeem items from the Salad Storefront. Your Salad Balance can be used to buy items like Discord Nitro, Prepaid VISA Cards, Amazon Credit, or Game Codes. -
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Turbo
Turbo.net
Turbo lets you publish and manage all of your enterprise applications from a single point to every platform and device. Book a demo with our team to see Turbo in action. Deploy custom containerized applications on desktops, on-premises servers, and public and private clouds. The student digital workspace brings applications to every campus and personal device. Deliver applications everywhere from a single, configurable container environment. Freely migrate between devices and platforms with rich APIs and connectors. Deploy to managed and BYOD PCs with no installs. Stream to HTML5, Mac, and mobile with Turbo Application Server. Publish to existing Citrix and VMware VDI environments. Dynamically image applications onto non-persistent WVD instances. Bring course applications directly inside Canvas, Blackboard, and other major LMS systems. Authoring environment for creating your own containerized applications and components.Starting Price: $19 per month -
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rkt
Red Hat
rkt is an application container engine developed for modern production cloud-native environments. It features a pod-native approach, a pluggable execution environment, and a well-defined surface area that makes it ideal for integration with other systems. The core execution unit of rkt is the pod, a collection of one or more applications executing in a shared context (rkt's pods are synonymous with the concept in the Kubernetes orchestration system). rkt allows users to apply different configurations (like isolation parameters) at both pod-level and at the more granular per-application level. rkt's architecture means that each pod executes directly in the classic Unix process model (i.e. there is no central daemon), in a self-contained, isolated environment. rkt implements a modern, open, standard container format, the App Container (appc) spec, but can also execute other container images, like those created with Docker. -
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Apache Mesos
Apache Software Foundation
Mesos is built using the same principles as the Linux kernel, only at a different level of abstraction. The Mesos kernel runs on every machine and provides applications (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch) with API’s for resource management and scheduling across entire datacenter and cloud environments. Native support for launching containers with Docker and AppC images.Support for running cloud native and legacy applications in the same cluster with pluggable scheduling policies. HTTP APIs for developing new distributed applications, for operating the cluster, and for monitoring. Built-in Web UI for viewing cluster state and navigating container sandboxes. -
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Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) is an Oracle-managed container orchestration service that can reduce the time and cost to build modern cloud native applications. Unlike most other vendors, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides Container Engine for Kubernetes as a free service that runs on higher-performance, lower-cost compute shapes. DevOps engineers can use unmodified, open source Kubernetes for application workload portability and to simplify operations with automatic updates and patching. Deploy Kubernetes clusters including the underlying virtual cloud networks, internet gateways, and NAT gateways with a single click. Automate Kubernetes operations with web-based REST API and CLI for all actions including Kubernetes cluster creation, scaling, and operations. Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes does not charge for cluster management. Easily and quickly upgrade container clusters, with zero downtime, to keep them up to date with the latest stable version of Kubernetes.
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MicroK8s
Canonical
Low-ops, minimal production Kubernetes, for devs, cloud, clusters, workstations, Edge and IoT. MicroK8s automatically chooses the best nodes for the Kubernetes datastore. When you lose a cluster database node, another node is promoted. No admin needed for your bulletproof edge. MicroK8s is small, with sensible defaults that ‘just work’. A quick install, easy upgrades and great security make it perfect for micro clouds and edge computing. Full enterprise support available, with no subscription needed. Optional 24/7 support with 10 year security maintenance. Under the cell tower. On the racecar. On satellites or everyday appliances, MicroK8s delivers the full Kubernetes experience on IoT and micro clouds. Fully containerized deployment with compressed over-the-air updates for ultra-reliable operations. MicroK8s will apply security updates automatically by default, defer them if you want. Upgrade to a newer version of Kubernetes with a single command. It’s really that easy. -
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Sandboxie
Sandboxie
Sandboxie is a sandbox-based isolation software for 32- and 64-bit Windows NT-based operating systems. It is being developed by David Xanatos since it became open source, before that it was developed by Sophos (which acquired it from Invincea, which acquired it earlier from the original author Ronen Tzur). It creates a sandbox-like isolated operating environment in which applications can be run or installed without permanently modifying the local or mapped drive. An isolated virtual environment allows controlled testing of untrusted programs and web surfing. Since the Open Sourcing sandboxie is being released in two flavors the classical build with a MFC based UI and as plus build that incorporates new features and an entirely new Q’t based UI. All newly added features target the plus branch but often can be utilized in the classical edition by manually editing the sandboxie.ini file. -
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Oracle Solaris
Oracle
We’ve been designing the OS for for more than two decades, always ensuring that we’ve engineered in features to meet the latest market trends while maintaining backward compatibility. Our Application Binary Guarantee gives you the ability to run your newest and legacy applications on modern infrastructure. Integrated lifecycle management technologies allow you to issue a single command to update your entire cloud installation—clear down to the firmware and including all virtualized environments. One large financial services company saw a 16x efficiency gain by managing its virtual machines (VMs) using Oracle Solaris, compared to a third-party open-source platform. New additions to the Oracle Solaris Observability tools allow you to troubleshoot system and application problems in real time, giving you real-time and historical insight and allowing for unprecedented power to diagnose and resolve issues quickly and easily. -
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Podman
Containers
What is Podman? Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Simply put: alias docker=podman. Manage pods, containers, and container images. Supporting docker swarm. We believe that Kubernetes is the defacto standard for composing Pods and for orchestrating containers, making Kubernetes YAML a defacto standard file format. Hence, Podman allows the creation and execution of Pods from a Kubernetes YAML file (see podman-play-kube). Podman can also generate Kubernetes YAML based on a container or Pod (see podman-generate-kube), which allows for an easy transition from a local development environment to a production Kubernetes cluster. -
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balenaEngine
balena
An engine purpose-built for embedded and IoT use cases, based on Moby Project technology from Docker. 3.5x smaller than Docker CE, packaged as a single binary. Available for a wide variety of chipset architectures, supporting everything from tiny IoT devices to large industrial gateways. Bandwidth-efficient updates with binary diffs, 10-70x smaller than pulling layers in common scenarios. Extract layers as they arrive to prevent excessive writing to disk, protecting your storage from eventual corruption. Atomic and durable image pulls defend against partial container pulls in the event of power failure. Prevents page cache thrashing during image pull, so your application runs undisturbed in low-memory situations. balenaEngine is a new container engine purpose-built for embedded and IoT use cases and compatible with Docker containers. Based on Moby Project technology from Docker, balenaEngine supports container deltas for 10-70x more efficient bandwidth usage. -
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KubeSphere
KubeSphere
KubeSphere is a distributed operating system for cloud-native application management, using Kubernetes as its kernel. It provides a plug-and-play architecture, allowing third-party applications to be seamlessly integrated into its ecosystem. KubeSphere is also a multi-tenant enterprise-grade open-source Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated IT operations and streamlined DevOps workflows. It provides developer-friendly wizard web UI, helping enterprises to build out a more robust and feature-rich Kubernetes platform, which includes the most common functionalities needed for enterprise Kubernetes strategies. A CNCF-certified Kubernetes platform, 100% open-source, built and improved by the community. Can be deployed on an existing Kubernetes cluster or Linux machines, supports the online and air-gapped installation. Deliver DevOps, service mesh, observability, application management, multi-tenancy, storage, and networking management in a unified platform. -
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Flockport
Flockport
One-click migration from your existing VM workloads. Get instant mobility of your applications across on-prem and clouds. Why settle for one-way cloud migration when you can have continuous mobility. Migrate from on-prem to the cloud, across clouds, or back. Embrace the cloud your way. Business continuity needs application mobility and a multi-cloud approach. Leave behind long drawn out and expensive VM migration projects. Instashift gives you single-click automation. No need to adopt complex approaches. Migrate your VMs complete with applications, databases, and states. Benefit from continuous mobility for your instashifted applications. Move to the cloud or back to on-prem in a click. Need to move thousands of VMs. Instashift gives you an automated solution that works seamlessly. A new innovation platform for sovereign and emerging cloud providers to deliver the same capabilities and flexibility users have come to expect from the public cloud. -
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FreeBSD Jails
FreeBSD
Since system administration is a difficult task, many tools have been developed to make life easier for the administrator. These tools often enhance the way systems are installed, configured, and maintained. One of the tools which can be used to enhance the security of a FreeBSD system is jails. Jails have been available since FreeBSD 4.X and continue to be enhanced in their usefulness, performance, reliability, and security. Jails build upon the chroot(2) concept, which is used to change the root directory of a set of processes. This creates a safe environment, separate from the rest of the system. Jails improve on the concept of the traditional chroot environment in several ways. In a traditional chroot environment, processes are only limited in the part of the file system they can access. The rest of the system resources, system users, running processes, and the networking subsystem are shared by the chrooted processes and the processes of the host system. -
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WebSphere Hybrid Edition is a flexible, all-in-one solution for WebSphere application server deployments that can enable organizations to meet current and future requirements. It will enable you to optimize your existing WebSphere entitlements, modernize your applications, and build new cloud-native Java EE applications. An all-in-one solution to help you run, modernize and create new Java applications. Use IBM Cloud® Transformation Advisor and IBM Mono2Micro to help assess the cloud readiness of your applications, explore options for containerization and microservices, and get assistance in adapting code. Explore and unlock the benefits of the all-in-one IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition solution for your application run time and modernization features. Identify which WebSphere applications can easily move to containers for immediate savings. Manage costs, enhancements, and security proactively throughout the application lifecycle.
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Open Container Initiative (OCI)
Open Container Initiative (OCI)
The Open Container Initiative is an open governance structure for the express purpose of creating open industry standards around container formats and runtimes. Established in June 2015 by Docker and other leaders in the container industry, the OCI currently contains two specifications, the runtime specification (runtime-spec) and the image specification (image-spec). The runtime specification outlines how to run a “filesystem bundle” that is unpacked on disk. At a high-level an OCI implementation would download an OCI Image then unpack that image into an OCI Runtime filesystem bundle. At this point the OCI Runtime Bundle would be run by an OCI Runtime. The Open Container Initiative (OCI) is a lightweight, open governance structure (project), formed under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, for the express purpose of creating open industry standards around container formats and runtime. The OCI was launched on June 22nd 2015 by Docker, CoreOS and other leaders. -
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runc
Open Container Initiative (OCI)
CLI tool for spawning and running containers according to the OCI specification. runc only supports Linux. It must be built with Go version 1.17 or higher. In order to enable seccomp support, you will need to install libseccomp on your platform. runc supports optional build tags for compiling support of various features, with some of them enabled by default. runc currently supports running its test suite via Docker. To run the suite just type make test. There are additional make targets for running the tests outside of a container but this is not recommended as the tests are written with the expectation that they can write and remove anywhere. You can run a specific test case by setting the TESTFLAGS variable. You can run a specific integration test by setting the TESTPATH variable. You can run a specific rootless integration test by setting the ROOTLESS_TESTPATH variable. Please note that runc is a low-level tool not designed with an end-user in mind. -
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Cloudfleet Kubernetes Engine (CFKE)
Cloudfleet OÜ
From datacenter to cloud to edge, Cloudfleet delivers the Kubernetes experience as it was meant to be. Just-in-time infrastructure, automated upgrades, and advanced permissions management, all seamlessly controlled through a single pane of glass for your clusters. Cloudfleet is a fully managed multi-cloud and hybrid Kubernetes service that simplifies your infrastructure setup with automated server provisioning across on-premises environments and 12 cloud service providers.Starting Price: $0 -
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OpenVZ
Virtuozzo
Open source container-based virtualization for Linux. Multiple secure, isolated Linux containers (otherwise known as VEs or VPSs) on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each container performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; a container can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files. -
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LXD
Canonical
LXD is a next generation system container manager. It offers a user experience similar to virtual machines but using Linux containers instead. It's image based with pre-made images available for a wide number of Linux distributions and is built around a very powerful, yet pretty simple, REST API. To get a better idea of what LXD is and what it does, you can try it online! Then if you want to run it locally, take a look at our getting started guide. The LXD project was founded and is currently led by Canonical Ltd with contributions from a range of other companies and individual contributors. The core of LXD is a privileged daemon which exposes a REST API over a local unix socket as well as over the network (if enabled). Clients, such as the command line tool provided with LXD itself then do everything through that REST API. It means that whether you're talking to your local host or a remote server, everything works the same way. -
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LXC
Canonical
LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers. LXC containers are often considered as something in the middle between a chroot and a full fledged virtual machine. The goal of LXC is to create an environment as close as possible to a standard Linux installation but without the need for a separate kernel. LXC is free software, most of the code is released under the terms of the GNU LGPLv2.1+ license, some Android compatibility bits are released under a standard 2-clause BSD license and some binaries and templates are released under the GNU GPLv2 license. LXC's stable release support relies on the Linux distributions and their own commitment to pushing stable fixes and security updates. -
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Ondat
Ondat
Accelerate your development by using a storage layer that works natively with your Kubernetes environment. Focus on running your application, while we make sure you have the persistent volumes that give you the scale and stability you need. Reduce complexity and increase efficiency in your app modernization journey by truly integrating stateful storage into Kubernetes. Run your database or any persistent workload in a Kubernetes environment without having to worry about managing the storage layer. Ondat gives you the ability to deliver a consistent storage layer across any platform. We give you the persistent volumes to allow you to run your own databases without paying for expensive hosted options. Take back control of your data layer in Kubernetes. Kubernetes-native storage with dynamic provisioning that works as it should. Fully API-driven, tight integration with your containerized applications.
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