Compare RancherOS to these popular alternatives based on real-world usage and developer feedback.

Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers.

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. FreeBSD is an operating system including a kernel and other software.

The CentOS Project is a community-driven free software effort focused on delivering a robust open source ecosystem. For users, we offer a consistent manageable platform that suits a wide variety of deployments. For open source communities, we offer a solid, predictable base to build upon, along with extensive resources to build, test, release, and maintain their code.

A clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.

Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.

It is the operating system that presently powers many of the mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It is designed to make your iPhone and iPad experience even faster, more responsive, and more delightful.

It is a mobile platform which powers phones, tablets, watches, TVs, cars etc. It makes doing business easier, in the office or out in the field. Manage entire fleets of devices with a touch. Keep corporate data protected with built-in security. And help your employees get more done.

A series of personal computer operating systems produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows NT family of operating systems.

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Desktop, laptop and home computers, and by web usage, it is the second most widely used desktop OS, after Microsoft Windows.

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Argo is an open source container-native workflow engine for getting work done on Kubernetes. Argo is implemented as a Kubernetes CRD (Custom Resource Definition).

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that provides users with access to the latest free and open source software, in a stable, secure and easy to manage form. Fedora is the largest of many free software creations of the Fedora Project. Because of its predominance, the word "Fedora" is often used interchangeably to mean both the Fedora Project and the Fedora operating system.

A lightweight and flexible Linux distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.

It is a brand name for a group of server operating systems released by Microsoft. It includes all Windows operating systems, Increase security, evolve your data center, and innovate faster with Microsoft Windows Server, the cloud-ready operating system.

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

It is an addictive Inversion of Control container for .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, .NET 4.5.1+, Universal Windows apps, and more. It provides activation events to let you know when components are being activated or released, allowing for a lot of customization with little code.

Machine lets you create Docker hosts on your computer, on cloud providers, and inside your own data center. It creates servers, installs Docker on them, then configures the Docker client to talk to them.

It is the latest iteration of the Microsoft operating systems and has been optimized for home PC performance in a wide variety of applications from serious work to after-hours gaming.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the industry-leading Linux that provides the foundation for next-generation architectures, with support for all major hardware platforms and thousands of commercial and custom applications.

The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.

It brings new features inspired by its most powerful users, but designed for everyone. Stay better focused on your work in Dark Mode. Automatically organize files using Stacks.

It is a Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at advanced Penetration Testing and Security Auditing. It contains several hundred tools which are geared towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Security research, Computer Forensics and Reverse Engineering.

An operating system for a variety of platforms which focuses on features, speed, and stability. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large community.

It is the world's easiest way to create, manage, and deliver your teams' container applications. It is the perfect home for your teams' applications.

It is designed for security, consistency, and reliability. Instead of installing packages via yum or apt, it uses Linux containers to manage your services at a higher level of abstraction. A single service's code and all dependencies are packaged within a container that can be run on one or many machines.

Harbor is an open source cloud native registry that stores, signs, and scans container images for vulnerabilities. Harbor solves common challenges by delivering trust, compliance, performance, and interoperability. It fills a gap for organ

Run your container image builds in a fast, consistent, and reliable environment on Google Cloud Platform. Build in any language and package your build artifacts into Docker containers for deployment.

It is an accessible, friendly, open-source Linux distribution and community. Based on Arch Linux, it provides all the benefits of cutting-edge software combined with a focus on getting started quickly, automated tools to require less manual intervention, and help readily available when needed.

It is the only IDE you’ll ever need to take control of your Kubernetes clusters. It is a standalone application for MacOS, Windows and Linux operating systems. It is open source and free.

The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

It is optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware. It provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 35,000 packages, pre-compiled software bundled in a nice format for easy installation on your Raspberry Pi.

It is a Java library that supports JUnit tests, providing lightweight, throwaway instances of common databases, Selenium web browsers, or anything else that can run in a Docker container.

lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment -- including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications -- directly on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a traditional virtual machine or dualboot setup.

It is a Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management. Built on top of the Nix package manager, it is completely declarative, makes upgrading systems reliable, and has many other advantages.

The openSUSE project is a worldwide effort that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. openSUSE creates one of the world's best Linux distributions, working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source Software community.

It implements a local Kubernetes cluster on macOS, Linux, and Windows. Its goal is to be the tool for local Kubernetes application development and to support all Kubernetes features that fit.

It is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode.

The Oracle Cloud offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, plus best-in-class database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more informati...
Top-like interface for container metrics. Ctop provides a concise and condensed overview of real-time metrics for multiple containers, as well as an expanded view for inspecting a specific container.

Certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. Supports something as small as a Raspberry Pi or as large as an AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB server.

It's a free, open source, cross-platform, local development environment and DevOps tool built on Docker container technology and developed by Tandem. Designed to work with most major languages, frameworks and services, it provides an easy way for developers of all skill levels to specify simple or complex requirements for their projects, and then quickly get to work on them.

Skaffold is a command line tool that facilitates continuous development for Kubernetes applications. You can iterate on your application source code locally then deploy to local or remote Kubernetes clusters. Skaffold handles the workflow for building, pushing and deploying your application. It can also be used in an automated context such as a CI/CD pipeline to leverage the same workflow and tooling when moving applications to production.

Marathon is an Apache Mesos framework for container orchestration. Marathon provides a REST API for starting, stopping, and scaling applications. Marathon is written in Scala and can run in highly-available mode by running multiple copies. The state of running tasks gets stored in the Mesos state abstraction.
An industry-standard container runtime with an emphasis on simplicity, robustness, and portability

It is a tool that automatically ensures that the state of your Kubernetes cluster matches the configuration you’ve supplied in Git. It uses an operator in the cluster to trigger deployments inside Kubernetes, which means that you don’t need a separate continuous delivery tool.

It provides tools and services to get the most out of your (big) data. It also provides runtime containers, libraries and services that power microservices.

K9s provides a curses based terminal UI to interact with your Kubernetes clusters. The aim of this project is to make it easier to navigate, observe and manage your applications in the wild. K9s continually watches Kubernetes for changes and offers subsequent commands to interact with observed resources.