KVM + Cockpit doesn’t pretend to be Proxmox or vSphere. And that’s the point. If all you want is a fast way to manage a few VMs on a box you already trust, this pair keeps it lean, clear, and predictable. Solid for labs, edge systems, internal services — or just any time you want virtual machines that don’t come with a control panel tax.
Portainer CE isn’t flashy. It’s not trying to be. What it does is fill a real gap — making container workloads manageable for the people who actually have to keep them running. When there’s not enough time to explain where the logs are, or how to restart that one container — Portainer helps.
Proxmox VE doesn’t try to be everything. But for what it does — efficient, local virtualization with sane defaults and strong tooling — it’s hard to beat. If you’ve got the hardware and want control without the usual pain, this is one of the rare platforms that lets you just build.
Harvester isn’t pretending to replace your VMware cluster overnight. But if you’re standing up your own infra, want containers and VMs in the same place, and don’t feel like choosing between Proxmox and K8s — this is a clean middle path. Especially for edge and small datacenter use, it’s more mature than you’d expect.
