Docker Desktop changed its licensing in August 2021, and the ripple effects are still spreading. Large organizations — roughly anyone above 250 employees or $10 million in annual revenue — are now required to pay a subscription that starts at $9 per user per month. For a 50-person engineering team, that is $5,400 per year for software that was free the day before the announcement. The result: a sustained migration toward alternatives that run the same Docker engine without the licensing overhead.
The three that keep showing up are OrbStack, Colima, and Rancher Desktop. Each replaces Docker Desktop's core job — running containers through the familiar docker CLI — but they approach it from entirely different angles. OrbStack is a macOS-native app optimized for speed. Colima is a minimal CLI wrapper around Lima, a Linux virtual machine manager. Rancher Desktop wraps a full Kubernetes distribution and exposes Docker as a side effect. Choosing between them means choosing which set of tradeoffs you can tolerate.
We installed all three on a 2023 MacBook Pro (M3 Pro, 36 GB RAM) running macOS Sequoia and a Linux workstation (Ubuntu 24.04, 32 GB RAM). We ran the same workloads: a baseline Compose stack pulling six services (Postgres 16, Redis, two Node.js APIs, a background worker, and an Nginx reverse proxy), docker build on a multi-stage Dockerfile, and a Kubernetes deployment of three pods. Here is what held up.
