Portainer CE
Free tierManage containers from a browser — logs, shell, config, restart
A web management interface for Docker and Kubernetes. Container lists, live logs, an in-container shell, image and volume management, and deploying or updating compose stacks all happen in the browser instead of over ssh. The community edition is open source under Zlib and functionally complete.
Why we picked it
Community edition under Zlib, 38,500 stars.
Once you self-host several services the daily actions are few and repetitive: find out why a
container died, restart it, change an environment variable, pull a new image. Typing docker logs
and docker compose up -d over ssh is not hard, but doing it from a phone is miserable.
Portainer moves that into the browser. The container list shows at a glance what is running and what is not, clicking through gives live scrolling logs, and debugging opens a shell inside the container. Compose stacks can be pasted in as YAML to deploy and update.
To be clear about:
- It is itself a container, and a highly privileged one. Managing other containers requires mounting the Docker socket, which hands control of the host to this interface. It must never sit unprotected on the public internet; use a strong password, and a reverse proxy with authentication in front is safer still.
- The commercial edition adds RBAC, multi-team support and audit logs. Personal self-hosting is fully served by the community edition.