Portainer vs Quay.io
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Portainer and Quay.io.
Quick Verdict
4.1/5
Portainer
0 reviews
3.7/5
Quay.io
0 reviews
Portainer is rated higher (4.1 vs 3.7). Portainer is an open source container management UI for Docker, Kubernetes, and Docker Swarm. Deploy containers, manage stacks, and monitor resources through a browser. Free Community Edition available. Red Hat's hosted container image registry: unlimited free public repos, per-private-repository pricing from $15/month, automatic Clair v4 CVE scanning, robot accounts, teams, and exportable audit logs.
Portainer GUI for managing Docker and Kubernetes | Quay.io Hosted container registry from Red Hat: free public repos, CVE scanning, per-private-repo pricing | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.1 (0 reviews)✓ | 3.7 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Teams and homelabbers managing Docker and Kubernetes estates who want a GUI with real RBAC and governance, plus industrial operators running offline edge fleets | Open-source projects needing free public image hosting, and Red Hat-centric enterprises wanting managed registries with SSO, robot accounts and audit logging |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tieropen sourceself hostable | free tierteam featuresssoapi access |
| Visit Portainer → | Visit Quay.io → | |
Portainer
Pros
- + Business Edition free forever for 3 nodes with the complete feature set; Community Edition fully open source
- + Published per-node pricing — rare transparency with no contact-sales wall before Starter and Scale
- + One license covers Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes, and Podman environments together
- + Strong governance: RBAC, SSO/LDAP, audit logs, GitOps, fleet policies with drift remediation
- + Edge capability is real: offline-first, air-gap capable, industrial fleets at scale
Cons
- - Self-hosted only — you own the servers and the underlying platform problems
- - Starter's 16 vCPU-per-node cap and community-only support push upgrades sooner than expected
- - Cost scales with both node count and node size; Enterprise is quote-only
- - A UI over Kubernetes does not remove deep Kubernetes debugging when things break
Quay.io
Pros
- + Unlimited free public repositories with automatic CVE scanning on every push
- + Public, predictable per-repository pricing from $15/month for 5 private repos
- + Robot accounts, team permissions, SSO and exportable audit logs aimed at compliance teams
- + Decade-plus production track record (launched 2013) with a supported upgrade path to self-managed Red Hat Quay
- + Full API, image rollback, zero-downtime garbage collection and Git build triggers
Cons
- - Per-repository billing punishes micro-repo layouts; large tiers get expensive fast
- - No published uptime SLA for the hosted service
- - Clair does not cover every language ecosystem, and remediation is entirely on the customer
- - Free tier fair-use caps (100 GB storage, 1 TB egress) are enforceable quotas
- - Overlapping product lineup (Quay.io vs Red Hat Quay vs OpenShift Platform Plus) complicates buying
Stay in the loop
Get weekly updates on the best new hosting and infrastructure providers, deals, and comparisons.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.