There are different User Interfaces that help use Docker.
Web UI
Desktop UI
TUI (Terminal UI)
My Experiences
I first started using Docker with Podman CE in openmediavault. OMV-Extras.org used to have an easy install option for Docker + Portainer CE.
I see OMV 7 no longer has Portainer CE and the current guide recommends using openmediavault-compose plugin instead. Of course, Portainer can still be installed manually.
Initially, I was using the Portainer Web UI to deploy containers manually, until I learned about Docker Compose and Portainer Stacks. I quickly noticed that defining all the services in one file was quicker and more reproducible than manually configuring containers in Portainer. I continued using Portainer Stacks as my main form of container deployment, eventually transferring all my existing containers to stacks. I noticed that compose stacks that are deployed outside Portainer can be viewed but not managed by the Portainer UI, so I defaulted to deploying all Stacks through Portainer.
I am aware that some people don’t like Portainer for various reasons. However, it has been rock-solid for me through the years that I’ve been using it. I’ve also never found the Community Edition of Portainer to be too limiting. There are a few minor things that I don’t like about it, but I still appreciated having a UI, and even experimented with some of Portainer’s more advanced features like Agents/Edge Agents (for management of multiple nodes) and GitOps. Eventually, I learned how to use the Docker CLI and docker compose commands well enough to the point that I don’t need the Web UI for anything, however I still like having a UI for my homelab.
Throughout the years, there have been many other Web UIs. I tried some of them including Yacht. Some of these UIs did not survive and got abandoned eventually (including Yacht). Portainer continued to be maintained. It’s likely the fact that Portainer is a company with paid solutions helped. Interestingly, I see Portainer much more in the homelab community than in the professional world, so I don’t know how much the company is really making. Nevertheless, Portainer looks like it’s here to stay and recently went through a rebrand (Why we rebranded Portainer).
More recently, I have heard about two newer Web UIs, Komodo and Dockge. Both look good, though part of me wonders whether they will last a long time like Portainer, or get abandoned eventually like Yacht.
On the Desktop UI front, I have avoided using Docker Desktop for many years. I felt like I had no need for it since I had Portainer CE working well as a Web UI, and also learned to use the Docker CLI commands. I was also concerend about the Docker Desktop license agreement. Unlike Docker CLI, Docker Desktop is not open-source.
I did briefly try Docker Desktop a few months ago before uninstalling it. It is useful on Windows, however I found that installing regular Docker inside WSL also works well.
I have also tried Podman Desktop. Unlike most of the tools in this note, Podman Desktop is not a Docker UI but instead a Podman UI. Nevertheless, Podman can run Docker containers thanks to the Open Container Initiative.
My Choice
I’m in the process of fully moving my homelab from Docker to a Kubernetes cluster. My Kubernetes UIs of choice are Argo CD (Web UI and GitOps), kubectl (CLI) and K9s (TUI), though there are many others as well which I may try.
I still want to try Komodo some day. I imagine, if I were to ever re-engineer my homelab, but choose to go back to Docker instead of Kubernetes, I would want to have a Web UI and some type of GitOps solution. Portainer and Komodo both have GitOps support. Dockge doesn’t which rules it out for me.
Featured image by Venti Views on Unsplash.
