containerd Alternatives (January 2026)

containerd

containerd – An industry-standard container runtime with an emphasis on simplicity, robustness and portability

https://container.io/

An industry-standard container runtime with an emphasis on simplicity, robustness, and portability

4.7/5

11+ reviews

Reviewed on:

G2
1.
Canonical LXD
https://canonica
.com/lxd/

Low-touch virtual infrastructure with LXD at any scale. Built on top of Linux containers, LXD offers a unified user experience in managing system containers, virtual machines and clusters. Easily configurable, flexible and secure way to run your workloads.

2.
Run containers on embedded edge devices - balenaOS
https://www.balen
.io/os/

balenaOS: An OS optimized for running Docker containers on embedded devices, focusing on reliability and a productive developer workflow.

3.
Docker: Accelerated Container Application Development
https://www.docke
.com/

Docker is a platform designed to help developers build, share, and run container applications. We handle the tedious setup, so you can focus on the code.

4.
Nomad by HashiCorp
https://www.nomadprojec
.io/

Nomad is a highly available, distributed, data-center aware cluster and application scheduler designed to support the modern datacenter with support for long-running services, batch jobs, and much more.

5.
Apache Mesos
https://mesos.apach
.org/

Apache Mesos abstracts resources away from machines, enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively.

6.
MicroK8s - Zero-ops Kubernetes for developers, edge and IoT
https://microk8
.io/

MicroK8s is the simplest production-grade conformant K8s. Lightweight and focused. Single command install on Linux, Windows and macOS. Made for devOps, great for edge, appliances and IoT. Full high availability Kubernetes with autonomous clusters and distributed storage.

7.
Kubernetes
https://kubernete
.io/

Production-Grade Container Orchestration

8.
The world's most advanced service mesh. | Linkerd
https://linker
.io/

Linkerd adds critical security, observability, and reliability to your Kubernetes stack, without any code changes.

9.
GitHub - weaveworks/weave: Simple, resilient multi-host containers networking and more.
https://githu
.com/weaveworks/weave/

Simple, resilient multi-host containers networking and more. - weaveworks/weave