If you don’t have strong opinions one way or the other, then docker is the easy answer. Way, way more widespread, which generally tends to mean better docs, more guides and examples, more tooling and open-source support…

I use podman with the podman-docker compatibility layer and native docker-compose. Podman + podman-docker is a drop-in replacement for actual docker. You can run all the regular docker commands and it will work. If you run it as rootful, it behaves in exactly the same way. Docker-compose will work right on top of it.

I prefer this over native Docker because I get the best of both worlds. All the tutorials and guides for Docker work just fine, but at the same time I can explore Podman’s rootless containers. Plus I enjoy it’s integration with Cockpit.

I would say Docker. There is no substantial benefit in running podman, while docker is a widely adopted tool (which means more tooling in the ecosystem, easier to find answers to questions etc.). The difference is not huge tbh, and some time ago the biggest advantage for podman was being able to run rootless, while docker was stuck with a root daemon. This is not the case anymore (docker can run rootless), so I would say unless you have some specific argument to use podman, stick with docker.

Podman is slightly better, but most tutorials are for docker.

So, podman if you’re comfortable looking through docs, man-pages, scarce Internet resources, and trial and error for finding things out. Especially if you care about having better security with rootless mode.

Podman also has a different way for managing many containers at once, and the interaction between them.

I personally prefer podman, due to its rootless mode being “more default” than in docker (rootless docker works, but it’s basically an afterthought).

That being said: there’s just so many tutorials, tools and other resources that assume docker by default that starting with docker is definitely the less cumbersome approach. It’s not that podman is signficantly harder or has many big differences, but all the tutorials are basically written with docker as the first target in mind.

In my homelab the progression was docker -> rootless docker -> podman and the last step isn’t fully done yet, so I’m currently running a mix of rootless docker and podman.