Podman is ideal if rootless security and daemonless architecture matter to you.
From my experience running containers in production at a security-conscious organization, Podman’s rootless model was a game-changer.
Unlike Docker, which uses a persistent daemon (running as root), Podman runs containers without requiring root access at all, making it inherently more secure.
It’s daemonless, so each container runs as a child of the invoking process, and it integrates cleanly with systemd (great for long-running services on Linux).
If you’re operating in an enterprise or managing containers on shared servers, Podman is safer by design and integrates well with system tooling.
That said, Docker is still more polished when it comes to developer experience, especially on non-Linux systems.