That sucks. It was one of the few GUIs that did a good job with most aspects of Docker Swarm. I knew it was heading in a shitty direction, but I was hoping something else would come along to fill the gap in the mean time.
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
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I dumped Portainer on my home server when they did the 'Fortnite' graphical rebranding. Now using Arcane to manage my servers and edge nodes. Very much enjoying the CVE scan tools and in-place image updating.
I just finished setting up Komodo because I couldn't find other alternatives that seemed to fit my needs. I didn't see Arcane amongst those ones I researched. Neat, thanks.
This was obvious to anyone who's used it for any length of time. I'm just surprised the monetisation enshittification didn't win the race.
The only thing I've used Portainer for in the last few years is to easily tidy up my old images.
Sure, it's trivial on CLI, but why not. 😄 In short: nothing of value lost.
Phew. Dodged a bullet just by adhering to SLSA.
Embarrassing
I switched from Portainer to Komodo a while back. I like how everything is declarative. It almost has a Argo CD feel to it without needed kubernetes.
Declarative is awesome.
My devs prefer Docker, and don’t want Kubernetes! We have a fix for that: Portainer-D2K. Portainer-D2K is a Docker translator for Kubernetes
As someone who was using mostly podman and is now switching to kubernetes I can confidently say that the cli interface was not what was holding me back. Instead it was the sheer amount of setup and complexity kubernetes can bring into an environment. Kubernetes is great when you want most or all the features it offers, it is horrible if you want to deploy 3 containers for your application on one host.
Oh well, not like I have to care, I wasn't interested in portainer to begin with.
I use 100% kubernetes at work and help other teams get their app working but at home I don't run anything that supports it.
Right? Why do they offer a community version and a pro version that's free for 5 nodes - meaning very small environment, your typical homelab - and push so much for stuff used to manage enterprise-sized deployments?
They want to be a competitor to openshift and rancher.
Dropped portainer years ago. Managing some compose files isn't hard, and Dockhand is better for managing updates
I completely forgot portainer was a thing and I've used compose files for a few years. If I try anything new a unified dashboard (for managing multiple hosts) would be cool.
Portainer has worked well for me but it has so much that I don't need or use. It looks like Dockhand has a Home Assistant integration which is nice, so I'll check that out thanks for the rec.
Man, I didn't even know dockhand had a HA integration, I know what I'm doing when I get home.
Another good option is Arcane. Its project structure gives you a good place to put bind mounts which you can edit the contents of in app (like configs and such). It's pretty handy. I am in the process of switching to it from komodo for all of my stacks
Very happy when I migrated over to dockhand. Fits exactly my needs for a simplistic overview of all of my containers and their resources.
How does it compare to dockage? I haven't used either.
I unfortunately can't speak to dockage as I have only used Dockhand and Portainer.
Guess I’ve figured out how I’m going to spend my Friday evening.
Welp, no more portainer for me
Maybe it helps if you have a gigantic stack of containers, but I've honestly never seen the point of Portainer when I can just look at my compose file.
I set it up years ago when I still had Ubuntu desktop running on an old laptop. Just kept using it even after using and learning kubernetes at work on an enterprise scale. Also the automatic image checks, easy to check metrics, logs, and endpoints. I have 33 containers right now, it's just simple to see them all in one screen.
Does your compose file in itself give you a nice, easily readable status display, analytics, metrics, logging, etc. interface?
No, but I've never needed them.
Portainer was outdated 5 years ago, and it sucked at the job it did.
I'ma stick with dockge and argocd
I went from Dockge to Dockhand, though both are good. Dockge was my UI of choice for the last couple of years, so slim and simple. I tried Dockhand on a whim and the extra features won me over, without having a bazillion buttons and confusing UI.
For a lot of my remote hosted services managed with compose, I've just been hand rolling the compose files and ssh'ing in.
How do you detect outdated containers?
I was using the watchtower updater until it got archived, thankfully there is a maintained fork now
https://github.com/nicholas-fedor/watchtower
I still need to figure out a auto update solution for my Argo managed services
Not who you responded to, but I do the same and have Pullio set up, which is lightweight and easy enough for my uses cases.
I have a few containers set up for notifying only, but most my services I just let auto-update