LXD Alternatives for System Containers and VMs on Linux

LXD is a manager for system containers and virtual machines on Linux. Its home changed in 2023. The Linux Containers notice dated July 4, 2023 says LXD is no longer part of that project and now lives on Canonical's websites, and that a community fork, Incus, has taken its place. In December 2023 Canonical relicensed LXD to AGPLv3 and required its contributor licence agreement, which, as Incus maintainer Stéphane Graber explained, stopped Incus from taking LXD changes into its Apache 2.0 code.

LXD itself works fine and ships a feature release every two to four months. People leave because of the licence and CLA, because they want a project run by a community rather than one company, or because they want a fuller web UI for a homelab. The seven picks start with Incus, the direct replacement, then cover a full virtualization platform, app container engines and lighter tools.

Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

Incus

Incus carries on LXD's design under community control. It manages system containers, application containers and VMs through the same style of CLI and REST API, and it is led by many of the people who originally built LXD, per the project page. The licence stays Apache 2.0 with no CLA.

Two tracks exist. Incus 7.0 LTS came out in May 2026 and is supported until June 2031, while 6.0 LTS now gets security fixes only. Monthly feature releases move faster; 7.6.0 came out at the end of October 2026. The image server at images.linuxcontainers.org publishes daily builds of many distributions, the same kind of images LXD users are used to.

Best for: LXD users who want the same model under a permissive licence and community control.

Pricing:

• Free, Apache 2.0
• No paid edition from the project

Watch out for:

• Upstream does not ship packages. You install Incus from your distribution or a third-party repository, so versions differ between distros.
• The server runs on Linux only. Windows and macOS get a client that talks to a Linux host.

Official site: Incus.

Proxmox VE

Proxmox VE is a Debian-based install that turns a server into a host for LXC containers and KVM VMs, managed from a browser. Version 9.2 shipped on May 21, 2026 on Debian 13.5 with a 7.0 kernel and LXC 7.0, and an arm64 build followed in August, per the roadmap.

Since 9.1 it can create LXC system containers from OCI images pulled from a registry, which narrows the gap with Docker for homelab users. Clustering, backups and storage live in the same browser console, so a homelab needs no separate tools for them.

Best for: Homelabs and small businesses that want containers and VMs in one web console.

Pricing:

• Software: free, with paid support
• Community: 120 euros per CPU socket per year, forum only
• Basic: 370 euros per socket per year, 3 tickets
• Standard: 550 euros per socket per year, 10 tickets
• Premium: 1,100 euros per socket per year, unlimited tickets

Watch out for:

• It wants the whole machine. Proxmox VE is a bare-metal distribution, not a package you add to an existing Ubuntu host the way LXD is.
• Running OCI images as application containers is still a technology preview, per the roadmap.

Official site: Proxmox VE.

Podman

Many LXD containers are really one service each, such as a database or a web app. For that job, an OCI app container engine is simpler, and Podman is the one closest to LXD's daemonless, unprivileged spirit. It runs rootless by default and has no central daemon. The latest release is v6.1.4 from October 12, 2026.

Quadlet turns containers into systemd units, so services start at boot like LXD's autostart. Our Podman alternatives page compares it with Docker, nerdctl and others.

Best for: Single-service containers on Fedora, RHEL or any systemd host.

Pricing:

• Free, Apache 2.0

Watch out for:

• It does not boot a full OS under its own init the way an LXD system container does. You manage one process tree per container.
• On macOS and Windows it runs inside a VM through podman machine, which adds startup time.

Official site: Podman.

Docker

Docker is the default for app containers, with Compose files and CI images for almost everything. On a Linux server, Docker Engine is open source and free for any use through the Moby project, per Docker's pricing FAQ.

Docker Desktop is the paid piece and matters only on laptops. Free use is limited to personal use, non-commercial open source and companies under 250 employees and US $10 million in revenue.

Best for: Teams moving LXD app workloads to images and Compose files that the rest of the world already uses.

Pricing:

• Docker Engine on Linux: free
• Personal: $0
• Pro: $9 per month billed yearly
• Team: $15 per user per month billed yearly
• Business: $24 per user per month billed yearly

Watch out for:

• The daemon runs as root by default. Rootless mode exists but is not the default, unlike LXD's unprivileged containers.
• No VMs and no system containers, so LXD users running full distros per container need another tool.

Official site: Docker.

systemd-nspawn

If your Linux host already runs systemd, you already have a system container tool. systemd-nspawn can boot a full Linux OS in a lightweight namespace container with --boot, and machinectl runs those containers as system services, per the systemd 262 manual.

There is no daemon to install and no image server. You point it at a directory tree built with debootstrap, dnf or a downloaded image, and it starts.

Best for: Admins who want simple OS containers with nothing extra installed.

Pricing:

• Free, part of systemd

Watch out for:

• Security depends on user namespaces. The manual warns that without them a process inside the container can get around the sandbox, and that untrusted code must always run in a user namespace.
• No clustering, no REST API and no VMs, so it replaces only the simplest LXD setups.

Official site: systemd-nspawn.

libvirt with virt-manager

For LXD users who mostly ran VMs, libvirt is the long-standing alternative on Linux. virt-manager is its desktop front end; it primarily targets KVM but also manages Xen and LXC containers, with creation wizards and a built-in VNC and SPICE console, per its site.

Packages are in Fedora, Debian and most other distributions, and the same VM definitions can be run headless on a server with virsh.

Best for: Linux desktops and servers running KVM VMs with a GUI.

Pricing:

• Free, open source

Watch out for:

• There is no image server like LXD's. You install each VM from an ISO or cloud image yourself.
• The project says it primarily targets KVM, so LXC containers are a side feature rather than the focus they are in LXD.

Official site: libvirt with virt-manager.

Multipass

Multipass is Canonical's other tool, and for developers it often replaces lxc launch ubuntu on a laptop. It starts Ubuntu VMs with one command on Windows, macOS or Linux and configures them with cloud-init, using Host Compute System on Windows, Apple Virtualization on macOS and QEMU on Linux, per its product page.

It is GPL-3.0 and version 1.17.1 was tagged on October 21, 2026.

Best for: Developers on Mac or Windows who used LXD for throwaway Ubuntu machines.

Pricing:

• Free, GPL-3.0

Watch out for:

• Multipass runs Ubuntu images.
• It runs VMs only, no containers, and it has no clustering or project features.

Official site: Multipass.

How to choose

When to stay with LXD

Stay on LXD if you run Ubuntu servers and want Canonical's support through Ubuntu Pro, or if the AGPLv3 licence and CLA do not affect you. It is actively maintained, with LTS releases every two years supported for five years, per Canonical's LXD page. The 6.10 releases form the new LXD 6 LTS series, and the older 5.21 LTS line is still getting point releases.

Frequently asked questions