EDIT: For some context, I recently gave podman another go. I have a few services on my homelab server set up in docker containers, so I tried migrating to podman.
After the second major bug (open issue on github) I encountered looked like it would require completely dropping using compose files to work around, I gave up and went back to docker.
I like the idea of podman, but it’s just not stable. I’ll try again in a year or so.
As a bonus, docker’s CLI is significantly nicer.


In almost all cases podman will work as a drop-in replacement. Problems usually arise from podman not being rootful by default, which does make a difference in most scenarios that involve volume mounts, exposing ports or other kinds of host resource access. You can run podman as root and nowadays even docker as rootless (though at that point you might be better off with podman).