Podman

Podman
Original authorRed Hat
DeveloperCloud Native Computing Foundation
Stable release
5.8.1 / 11 March 2026 (11 March 2026)
Written inGo
Operating systemLinux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD
TypeOS-level virtualization
LicenseApache-2.0 license
Websitepodman.io
Repository

Podman (pod manager) is an open source Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant container management tool created by Red Hat used for handling containers, images, volumes, and pods on the Linux operating system, with support for macOS and Microsoft Windows via a virtual machine. Based on the libpod library, it offers APIs for the lifecycle management of containers, pods, images, and volumes. The API is identical to the Docker API. Podman Desktop provides an alternative to Docker Desktop.