Buildah vs Podman

Buildah vs Podman
Fact	Buildah	Podman
Language	Go	Go
Licence	Apache-2.0	Apache-2.0
Stars	9.1k	33k
Latest	v1.45.1	v6.1.3
Last push	2026-10-06	2026-10-06
Release cadence	about 5 days between releases	about 7 days between releases
Active contributors	23 commit authors on the default branch in the last 90 days	90+ commit authors on the default branch in the last 90 days
Flags	none	none

How they relate

Both replace Docker Engine (Moby). Alternatives to Docker Engine (Moby) →
PartialBuildahBuilds OCI images from Dockerfiles or shell scripts without a daemon; running them is left to Podman.
Drop-inPodmanDocker-compatible CLI, daemonless and rootless by default.

v1.43.42026-09-15[release-1.43] Bump Buildah to v1.43.3
v1.45.12026-09-15[release-1.45] vendor: bump golang.org/x/crypto to v0.56.0 - CVE-2026-78662, CVE-2026-56855
v1.43.32026-09-15[release-1.43] fix packit
v1.45.02026-07-30Bump Buildah to v1.44.0, then to v1.45.0-dev
v1.44.12026-07-21[release-1.44] Add new CI github actions CI to this branch

v5.8.82026-09-29This release addresses CVE-2026-94603, where a podman run on a checkpoint image (any image with the io.podman.annotatio…
v6.1.32026-09-29This release addresses CVE-2026-94603, where a podman run on a checkpoint image (any image with the io.podman.annotatio…
v5.8.72026-09-16This release addresses (CVE-2025-11395), where importing images containing crafted layer tarballs with the podman load…
v6.1.22026-09-16This release addresses (CVE-2025-11395), where importing images containing crafted layer tarballs with the podman load…
v6.1.12026-09-02This release addresses CVE-2026-17106, where a crafted tar archive could write outside the extraction directory through…

✓ signed The latest release, v1.45.1, carries a signature GitHub verified.

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✓ signed The latest release, v6.1.3, carries a signature GitHub verified.

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