Podman is a RedHat project that delivers containerization, very similar to Docker. Yet Podman offers some distinct advantages:
- daemonless containers
There is no service running. This is an advantage on some levels but makes autostarting containers different. You need to handle that via systemd units or openrc scripts.
- rootless
Podman is able to run containers without root privileges
- better networking
In Version 4.0 of Podman a new networking backend called netavark surfaced. It offers native IPv6 support.
The command line tool podman works exactly the same as the docker command line tool so people tend to set an alias and keep using the docker command, even though podman is being used.