Incus vs Proxmox vs Micro Cloud: Feature Comparisons

Incus
1

Has anyone done a general comparison of the advantages / benefits Incus has over Canonical Microcloud or Proxmox virtualisation solutions.

2

I am new to Incus, but not LXC. I personally would trust Incus to do the same stuff, the biggest advantage of Proxmox is their Proxmox Backup Server.

On the Network side they have “SDN” if you are using VLAN, its all done via GUI.
Also Ceph is well and easy setup same for ZFS.

BTRFS is experimental as of now. Experimental means it works, but you have to go for the CLI and some features maybe missing like replication but I don’t know the exact state.

Why not just go with Incus?

3

sounds like a question to ask perplexity, deepseek, etc if you are looking for a consolidated report (kind of).

4

It depends what result you are going to get.

  • microcloud is a configuration wrapper on top of ldx, microceph and microovn packages. So it could simplify bootstrapping your local cloud. However, I migrated from lxd to incus due to slow progress by Canonical teams development and resolving critical to me bugs. I continue using microceph instead as my cluster storage backend.
  • Proxmox is exceptional platform, but it does not support arm platform yet.

Personally for me the incus is optimal for my Raspberry Pi cluster. The incus team provides exceptional effort in development, provides feedback and resolves issue much faster than canonical for the sister product.

5

Think it also depends on what kind of support and license you are willing to accept / require.

I started with LXD a few years back and was annoyed about using snap to get it installed. Went down the path to compile it on my own to avoid it. As soon as Incus LTS was released I migrated because of the direct support, quicker bug fixing, OCI integration and never looked back.

Can’t speak much about Proxmox or Micro* but I think it comes back on what your requirements are and how good your cmd knowledge is. Working through a GUI is great and usually simple but for a complex setup you properly need to use cmd tools to get it configured correctly.

If you are after a Proxmox equivalent take a look at TrueNas Scale the next release will use Incus under the hood for VM’s and container support. My guess is OCI support will follow.

1 Like
6

I prefer Incus over Proxmox. Incus runs on all of my Ubuntu desktops and laptops, and also in the datacenter. It’s easy to prototype guests, move them from host to host. The Incus command line makes it easy to script and automate. Proxmox requires a dedicated host, and is primarily GUI oriented.

1 Like