The best alternative to Docker Desktop on macOS is to abandon the GUI entirely use colima to create the linux VM.

    brew install colima docker docker-buildx docker-completion docker-compose
    export DOCKER_HOST="$HOME/.colima/docker.sock" >> ~/.zshrc
    source ~/.zshrc
    colima start --cpus 8 --vz-rosetta --ssh-agent --mount $HOME:w

then add this line to your $HOME/.docker/config.json

    "cliPluginsExtraDirs": ["/opt/homebrew/lib/docker/cli-plugins"],

that will get you a fast virtiofs VM with the latest docker, including compose and buildx. it may seem scary to replace an officially blessed tool like Docker Desktop, but i have had zero issues with colima. it isn't "docker compatible". it's docker. just need to run `brew upgrade` and `colima update` every once in a while to keep it up to date.

I've been using Finch (https://runfinch.com/) for the last few years, it basically is a managed Lima, nerdctl, containerd and BuildKit.

I just alias docker to finch and it just works.

If you're going full CLI on macOS, I've had the best experience with:

    brew install podman

Podman manages the linux vm for you automatically.

I've come to enjoy podman more than docker on my linux hosts anway; the default runtime (crun) is lighter than docker (runc), podman-kube-play is great for managing multi-container pods and is compatible with kubernetes. It also integrates very neatly with systemd. Of course there is the whole daemon-less and rootless side of the things as well..

I’ve been using OrbStack instead of Docker Desktop and gotta say, I’d not replace it with anything else. So if anyones looking for a more automated alternative, check out OrbStack.

I hear great things about OrbStack; unfortunately the licensing tied to their free offering doesn't play nicely with corporate environments (and we're cheap!).

I switched to Colima instead and couldn't be happier.

Thank you!!! Been struggling with time skew on Podman desktop for around a year now with no fix in sight. At least in the initial test since I saw your comment a few hours ago, this is working great!

Does this support volume bind mounts and port forwarding?

You can see the command above mounting a volume

”—mount $HOME:w”

Tried Podman about a month ago; UI was kinda meh, 'compose' was beyond unusable... then tried Colima (+ lazydocker, a lightweight, beautiful TUI providing the little overview I need) and haven't looked back for a single second.

Same, been running on colima for years now and haven't had a single issue with it

I you fancy needing a GUI, rancher desktop is decent.

I tried to use podman desktop for a bit but I ran into some screwy compatibility issues. It just wasn't as smooth as docker.

I really really want an alternative to docker desktop. I don't like the path they're going down. I don't like the AI crap in the UI. The licensing is crazy. It just doesn't feel right.

So I've been lately using rancher by SuSE. Surprisingly, it's been all right. So far it just works. I'm using this on Mac OS.

If anybody's looking for an alternative that's one worth considering.

I'm still confused by why anyone wants to use either Docker or Podman desktops. The the docker/Podman CLIs seem like a much better way to interact with containers/images. Maybe it's just my usecase.

The API is pretty extensive too. It works on a local socket that you can start on demand. (Lest people think there's a daemon or root requirement)

I can't speak to docker, but the Podman desktop UI on MacOS doesn't really offer any functionality that the CLI doesn't. It's more like a status dashboard than anything else. I personally never look at it. I don't see how you can get very far managing containers, images, etc using _just_ the UI in any case.

I personally use Docker Desktop because it was the easiest way to install Docker on my Mac. I launch Docker Desktop, close the window but keep the app running in the background, then use the docker tool on the command line :)

OrbStack is a very compelling alternative on macOS. The GUI launches instantly due to being a Swift app and not Electron. Container filesystems are visible in Finder. You can spin up full-blown VMs with it (only Linux ones though). Storage is managed dynamically, so you don't have to reserve or resize the virtual disk. Free for personal use, with zero nags or upsells.

Does anyone know if the company is still active. Haven't seen any updates for a while now. I like the product a lot, but products like this need security updates at the very least.

Last release was November 2025 which isn't that terribly long ago. https://docs.orbstack.dev/release-notes. They do look to have stopped blogging on orbstack.dev for more than a year now. They have a discord channel, but I'm not up for dealing with discord to check on it.

I can attest, Orbstack has been a gamechanger. Happily paying for the pro license.

How are you deploying? I’m on dokploy so I’m not sure of compatibility

I use good old `docker compose`. It's 100% compatible, since it uses the same moby engine underneath. I've also run k3d on it, so I'm pretty sure it'll handle anything you throw at it.

Orb is definitely the winner. It’s fast. It does the job well. Never had an issue with it in two years.

I put off podman for a while because of claims of compatibility issues, which is unfortunate because I've had an excellent experience since switching over. Can you point as specific issues you've had (not doubting, just curious)?

I also have heard a lot of recommendations for OrbStack, but I haven't had problems with speed either. And I could never stomach using a proprietary system for such a core part of my workflow.

For context I use containers for practically everything and I run some decently complex workflows on them: fullstack node codebases, networking, persistent volumes, mounting, watch mode, etc. Red Hat knocked it out of the park with podman!

I've had a ton of issues trying to use Podman instead of Docker on Fedora. SELinux keeps blocking Podman from doing stuff it needs to, while Docker just works.

I've also experienced Podman "getting stuck" sometimes: it's just running a build, but ctrl+c somehow doesn't stop the build system and instead freezes Podman. Doesn't really happen with Docker.

What sort of compatibility issues were you encountering? (disclaimer: I'm on the Podman Desktop team)

If it was compose + docker compatibility issues, that's on the roadmap for improvement :). Compose support is flakey at times (it's essentially a wrapper around the open source binary https://github.com/docker/compose)

The most common one I run into is with volumes, when the full path doesn't already exist. Docker will just make the path, Podman throws an error. It's been called a "bug" in docker but the fact is everyone just expects the paths to be created. I want it to just work, not make everyone in the industry redo their dockerfiles to be "correct."

https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/6234

It looks like there was some work done to resolve this in 2023 and 2024 but I know this was still happening for me in mid 2025. Podman is technically correct here but functionally broken in a way that keeps pushing me away because I don't have time to deal with that :(

Running a docker container having side effects on the host seems bad. You've just convinced me a little bit I want podman, and not docker.

Not me, docker is the standard, works great for me, if it didn't, I'd look at alternatives.

Podman also works great but one has to stop trying to use it as if it were docker.

I’ve encountered this one:

https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/6460

Also, there’s Podman’s decision to drop CNI support. Sure, I get that they want to support the full stack, but netavark is really not especially capable, and CNI allows all kinds of interesting (and frequently overcomplicated) things.

> https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/6460

This was just fixed today :)

If you're open to questions, I'm switching my teams from Docker to Podman on macOS. I'm hitting blockers for multi-user setups i.e. each developer has a non-admin account on the machine, whereas brew runs in its own account with admin permissions.

I would love a way to have Podman installable in userspace meaning in a non-admin account, or installable without brew, or with a dependency list such as QEMU or whatever else needs to be installed by an admin ahead of time, or with a sudousers config list, etc.

I know this is an atypical setup. Any advice from anyone here is much appreciated about multi-user non-admin macOS container setup for Podman or Docker or equivalent.

I had issues with performance/power management, and had to abandon Podman Desktop on Windows. Have not checked out recently, but my issues may possibly be solved by

https://github.com/podman-desktop/podman-desktop/issues/1035...

Basically I had a 5 second periodic CPU spike after some update. Also I had some compose issues, and some issue with Fedora based WSL. These together were blockers for me at that point, but I'm using podman on my pet Fedora server, and it works (using quadlets there) perfectly there, and will retry it on Windows also when I get the time.

No watch support in compose: https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues/792

I love rancher too and I have less issues of docker using all of my local disk. Learned about it at a local Python meetup.

Sorrt for may be a complete ignorant question but whats the use case of docker desktop as opposed docker cli

Docker Engine (the "CLI") only works on Linux. "Desktop" is supposed to offer a unified experience across platforms, it offers a GUI, ships Docker Engine inside a virtual machine so that it works on Windows and MacOS, and tries to make the VM as transparent/invisible as possible (with varying success) with filesystem mounts and network configuration.

It also includes a local k8s cluster. So you get 2 in 1 package.

Why would you want that?

Another alternative (although Mac OS-only) is [0] OrbStack. Some devs in my team are running it as a more performant alternative to Docker Desktop for Mac and they are very happy so far.

[0]: https://orbstack.dev

I got into problems with test containers on podman and I have no idea how to solve them. Have you fought with that by any chance?

I'll just add another vote for OrbStack. I found it way faster on M1 and M5 and never found any compatibility issues.

I also like that Rancher Desktop supports nerdctl. Colima is another similar project.

I imagine that OrbStack has containerd buried inside somewhere and could support ctr and (awkwardly) nerdctl, but if so it’s pretty well hidden.

I build containers for multiple platforms using orbstack, and that requires the containerd backend. So yes, it's in there somewhere.

Huh. Are you actually talking to containerd directly or are you just doing something via the docker frontend that requires containerd to function?

Presumably it's talking to the docker daemon which itself farms some piece out to containerd? I'm really not sure how the integration works.

I love podman. it’s my default whenever i need to run containers locally. Ive also used it to run containerized systemd services.

Selling enterprise licenses is a smart move from Redhat: they actually build/contribute to production grade container orchestration platforms like openshift. Unlike Docker Inc which looks like it only has the docker registry and Docker Desktop.

Man, I feel bad for Docker, the company. Created the open source project that almost single-handely revolutionized deployments, development environments, and cloud computing, but sorta never managed to stick a product.

I'm equally shocked nobody has bought them out to keep them well funded and not focused on trying to monetize (outside of just billing for private images). Every cloud provider like CloudFlare (I think?), Azure, AWS, GCP, etc benefit from Docker, it seems like a no brainer to me... You would then condense the org to just developers and PMs. Then marketing and other employees could be shifted to another part of the parent org and condense it down to a core group that builds and makes the tooling stronger.

I wish we had tax exceptions for companies maintaining open-source projects full time to be reasonable write offs or something, with strict checks so companies dont just make random "open source" projects to write off, it should be something with known sizable impact and/or use, it would make some critical open source projects attractive "buy outs" or options to fully fund for some of these giants that benefit from them. Imagine if the devs entire salary (up to a point) could be written off completely. Some of these people are working on key infrastructure for the modern web, and even other critical systems, think of Chromium (tricky because of Chrome being not-open source but a proprietary end-product), Firefox, Linux, openssl, and obviously Docker, as good example.

> Every cloud provider [...] benefit from Docker

How ? Docker didn't invent the underlying technology and can't control it (through patents, etc...). It's all open and Docker tools are just the most popular but there are alternatives. Why pay when you can get it for free ?

To keep it maintained.

Cloud providers have no reason to. If Docker disappeared today, the alternatives would take over.

I think they are now doing better than ever. And they have been bought out already by Mirantis, unless I missed something.

Podman isn't really a competitor at this point, it's just the "docker at home" NIH project from redhat. It works fine, but docker isn't going anywhere really.

I personally prefer the Podman CLI however as you don't need the daemon running in the background and prefer Kubernetes like yamls for local development. I definitely don't need a polished desktop GUI that shows me how many images I have though - I've never understood the use case for that.

Same. I switched to podman just so I don't have to troubleshoot why the docker daemon isn't running again.

Used docker for over a decade, never ran into this docker daemon intermittently stops running issue.

It's unclear to me from this post, or Red Hat's announcement[0] what makes it an enterprise build, aside from offering some support SLA.

Are there any material differences between this and the free OSS Podman Desktop[1] released 4 years ago?

0: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-build-pod... 1: https://podman-desktop.io/

Isn't that what most enterprise software is? A number to call and some kind of contract on it?

My Podman starts containers in arch x86-64-v3 with rosetta on for 27 seconds which Docker does it in 9s. I wonder what's wrong. I've already upgraded Mac to Tahoe (which has x86-64-v3 support included into rosetta)

There is definitely something wrong with your setup. I can run an amd64 container on my Macbook Pro M3 in well under a second:

    [~]$ podman pull --arch=amd64 debian:13
    Resolved "debian" as an alias (/etc/containers/registries.conf.d/000-shortnames.conf)
    Trying to pull docker.io/library/debian:13...
    Getting image source signatures
    Copying blob sha256:866771c43bf5eb77362eeeb163c0c825e194c2806d0b697028434e3b9c02f59d
    Copying config sha256:a3624ddeb711bef28c29e6de1502fc3ef9df132c220d1db5a121b2a1e2a74256
    Writing manifest to image destination
    a3624ddeb711bef28c29e6de1502fc3ef9df132c220d1db5a121b2a1e2a74256

    [~]$ time podman run --rm -ti debian:13 uname -m
    WARNING: image platform (linux/amd64) does not match the expected platform (linux/arm64)
    x86_64
    podman run --rm -ti debian:13 uname -m  0.03s user 0.02s system 9% cpu 0.456 total

I've checked and there is no difference between podman and docker on my machine.

However when running a spring boot over eclipse-temurin:25-jdk-ubi10-minimal image there is this huge difference

  podman run   0.02s user 0.01s system 0% cpu 24.960 total

you can see the java app starting slowly. I've double checked that rosetta is enabled on podman.

  % podman machine inspect podman-machine-default
  ...

        "Rootful": true,
        "Rosetta": true
     }
  ]

Ahhh, one of the reasons could be that Docker Desktop by default uses 50% of your RAM when they create their VM and the maximum amount of CPUs.

Podman Desktop by default has a much lower RAM (4GB) + CPU usage (50% CPU). That's something that could be improved... I've opened up an issue: https://github.com/podman-desktop/podman-desktop/issues/1634... :)

No I checked it against the amount of RAM. Podman with 8GB does not increase speed, Docker with 4GB is still 9s

  podman run   27->24
  docker run   9.4->9.769 total

(I increased limit in podman and decreased limit in docker). This happens with amd64 arch images (which I for some reason need in my work and cannot rebuild)

now I'm curious why it's still slow even with the increase of ram + cpu, I'll sync up with the podman core team why it's benchmarking much faster in docker vs podman (assuming both are using rosetta 2 on your machine)

I have double checked if my rosetta is enabled. I also requrested using "apple virtualization" instead of libkrun

> now I'm curious why it's still slow even with the increase of ram + cpu

Because podman doesn't work as well as docker.

are you by any chance one of those Claw raging robots? really? created an issue?

(The poster works on podman for redhat)

Pretty sure this guy works in that project.

Is Podman still not supported natively on macOS?

Congratulations to the Podman Desktop team. They’ve worked hard on the product, Red Hats processes for launching a new offering include some daunting gates. Good job, team.

Never saw the point of these desktop apps. Docker (and podman) works just fine from the CLI only.

Is anyone paying for this things?