Apple Container
FreeApple's own container tool — one lightweight VM per container
An open-source command-line tool from Apple, written in Swift, that runs Linux containers on Apple silicon Macs. Each container gets its own lightweight virtual machine launched through the macOS Virtualization framework, giving stronger isolation than approaches that share a single VM. It is fully OCI-compatible, so images from Docker Hub run unmodified.
Why we picked it
Version 1.0 landed on 9 June 2026. Apache-2.0, 49,800 stars.
The direct reason to list it is Docker Desktop's licensing: companies above 250 employees or ten million dollars in annual revenue need a paid subscription for commercial use. Apple Container has no such layer — Apache-2.0, free commercially, no feature paywalls.
The technical difference is isolation granularity. On a Mac, Docker Desktop runs one shared virtual
machine with every container inside it. Apple Container gives each container its own lightweight
micro-VM through the macOS Virtualization framework, so the security boundary is sharper and one
container blowing up does not touch the others. At the image level it is fully OCI-compatible, so
anything you would docker pull still runs.
To be clear about:
- Apple silicon only, and macOS 26 or later. Intel Macs cannot use it at all and should stay on Docker Desktop or another option.
- No Docker Compose. Multi-container orchestration is on you, and this is the most visible gap against Docker Desktop today.
- The project is young and lacks many of the small conveniences the Docker ecosystem accumulated. Fine if your day is "run a few containers"; hold off if you lean heavily on Compose and a GUI.