Podman is a free and open source tool for managing containers, pods, and images. Its own site describes it as a way to “seamlessly work with containers and Kubernetes from your local environment,” emphasizing four qualities: fast and light, secure, open, and compatible.
Podman’s defining architectural choice is that it is daemonless. Where Docker historically relied on a single long-running, root-privileged background daemon that all commands talked to, Podman runs containers as ordinary child processes of the command that launched them. That removes a central privileged service and makes rootless operation, where containers run entirely under an unprivileged user account, a first-class mode. This is the basis for its reputation as a more security-focused alternative.
Podman is deliberately compatible with the Docker workflow. Its command line is designed to mirror Docker’s, so that in many cases a user can alias podman to docker and keep working. It builds on the same OCI image and runtime standards, so images built for Docker run under Podman and vice versa.
The project is developed in the open by the containers community under the Apache License 2.0, with Red Hat as the principal corporate backer. The site lists deep integration with tools such as VS Code, GitHub Actions, and Kind.