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Why Docker Business over Alternatives

Docker Business empowers your development team and engineering organization

Alternatives offer only partial solutions
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Rapidly ship high-quality secure applications

Docker Business empowers development teams and engineering organizations to boost productivity, enhance security, and foster innovation, ultimately enabling developers to spend more time on delivering competitive advantages and value to their businesses through high-quality applications.

Benefits of Docker Business over alternative approaches

Streamline enterprise administration

Docker Business offers centralized management with a web-based console that includes compliance, adoption insights, and productivity metrics. Alternatives lack centralized admin, adoption insights, and robust enterprise admin capabilities.

Scale securely

Docker Business offers a powerful container registry, certified secure and trusted content, software supply chain vulnerability analysis, image management, and policy enforcement. Alternatives offer basic security but lack integrated supply chain capabilities, requiring extra tools, services, and engineering.

Increase developer team and engineering organization productivity

Docker Business enhances productivity with robust enterprise features, accelerating delivery and leveraging backups, debugging, and security. Alternatives lack the scale, support, and features needed for efficient, secure development, leading to slower, riskier processes and a smaller partner ecosystem.

Enterprise-grade support and training

Docker Business provides enterprise-grade professional support, priority case routing, proactive monitoring, a dedicated customer success manager, and extensive training. Most alternatives lack official SLA-backed support, relying instead on community resources with very limited professional options and training.

Consider the total cost of ownership (TCO)

If you decide to pursue open-source and DIY alternatives, you must ensure doing so is a worthwhile use of your engineering resources due to the amount of resources and budget required to integrate and maintain the alternative solution. Docker Business is an integrated suite of products that work together out of the box with enterprise-grade security and 24-hour SLA commercial support.

Comparison of Docker Business and alternatives

The following compares capabilities of Docker Business and DIY OSS-Based Alternatives

Docker Business

DIY w/ Docker Engine

Alternatives

Integrated product suite engineered, maintained, and supported by Docker

Docker containerization technology

Stand-alone containerization tools

Container build, run, manage (Docker Desktop)

Container runtime

Kubernetes integration

OS compatibility (macOS, Linux, Win.)

limited

Enhanced enterprise security

limited

limited

Private extensions & marketplace

limited

limited

Container management app

limited

limited

Image registry (Docker Hub)

Private and public repos

limited

limited

Native integration with image registry

limited

limited

Marketplace functionality

–

–

Fully integrated vulnerability analysis

–

–

Secure & trusted content

–

–

Remote build (Docker Build Cloud)

Cloud-based container build

–

–

Multi-platform support (ARM /AMD)

–

–

CI tool integration

limited

limited

Parallel remote builds

–

–

Shared team build cache

–

–

Container vulnerability analysis (Docker Scout)

Vulnerability analysis and reporting

limited

limited

Security SDLC integrations

limited

limited

External system integration w/ API

–

–

Policy library and evaluation

–

–

Alerting and notifications

–

–

CVE suppression and exception

–

–

Container testing (Testcontainers Cloud)

Inner loop integration testing

–

–

Central test dashboard

–

–

Test infra. provision & cleanup

–

–

Local and cloud testing

–

–

Testing with real dependencies

–

–

Additional capabilities (Docker Business)

Integrated solution
(Integrated suite of products that enhance productivity, scalability, security)

Engineered & maintained by Docker for devs, teams, orgs, enterprises

limited
Easy integration with Docker products with manual intervention

–
Not an integrated suite of products that work together

Enterprise administration
(Central mgmt, compliance, RBAC, logs, SSO, SCIM, Auto LCM)

Enterprise-ready for large development teams and organizations

limited
Limited enterprise admin. Requires manual intervention

limited
Limited or no enterprise admin capabilities

Enterprise / commercial support
(Enterprise-grade, 24-hour support response for all products)

Proven support processes, strong SLO/A, robust documentation

limited
Community-based support. Strong docs and knowledge base

limited
Community-based support or limited subscription support

Partner and tool ecosystem
(Tech providers, dev toolchains, registries, extensions)

Large and highly useful ecosystem for developers

limited
Can leverage the Docker ecosystem

limited
Limited, smaller, or no ecosystem

Docker Business for your team and organization

Alternative approaches require additional products, ongoing engineering, continuous maintenance, and risk mitigation. Docker Business offers a secure enterprise-grade integrated solution and extensive professional support, freeing developers to focus on rapidly shipping high-quality, secure applications.
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