Compare the Top Container Engines as of July 2025

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

  • 1
    Google Cloud Run
    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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  • 2
    Docker

    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
  • 3
    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
  • 4
    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
  • 5
    Cloud Foundry

    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.
  • 6
    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.
  • 7
    Mirantis Kubernetes Engine
    Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (formerly Docker Enterprise) provides simple, flexible, and scalable container orchestration and enterprise container management. Use Kubernetes, Swarm, or both, and experience the fastest time to production for modern applications across any environment. Enterprise container orchestration Avoid lock-in. Run Mirantis Kubernetes Engine on bare metal, or on private or public clouds—and on a range of popular Linux distributions. Reduce time-to-value. Hit the ground running with out-of-the-box dependencies including Calico for Kubernetes networking and NGINX for Ingress support. Leverage open source. Save money and maintain control by using a full stack of open source-based technologies that are production-proven, scalable, and extensible. Focus on apps—not infrastructure. Enable your IT team to focus on building business-differentiating applications when you couple Mirantis Kubernetes Engine with OpsCare Plus for a fully-managed K8s experience.
  • 8
    Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes
    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.
  • 9
    Oracle Solaris
    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.
  • 10
    balenaEngine
    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.
  • 11
    KubeSphere

    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.
  • 12
    IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
    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.
  • 13
    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
  • 14
    OpenVZ

    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.
  • 15
    LXD

    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.
  • 16
    Ondat

    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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