Compare the Top Free Container Engines as of April 2025

What are Free Container Engines?

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 Free Container Engines currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Red Hat OpenShift
    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
  • 2
    Ambassador

    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
  • 3
    Turbo

    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
  • 4
    Apache Mesos

    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.
  • 5
    Sandboxie

    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.
  • 6
    Podman

    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.
  • 7
    Cloudfleet Kubernetes Engine (CFKE)
    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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