Komodo vs Portainer vs Dockge: Which Docker Manager Wins in 2026?

Portainer, Dockge, and Komodo all solve the same problem — managing your Docker containers without SSHing into every box — but they come at it from three very different angles. Portainer is the full-featured dashboard most people start with. Dockge keeps things lean and built around your compose files. Komodo goes the GitOps route with a Core-and-agents model made for many machines. Here's how they actually differ, and which one fits which home lab.

I've spent more Saturday nights than I'd like to admit staring at a Docker dashboard, trying to work out why a stack refused to come up. For a good stretch, that dashboard was Komodo. I ran it across my home lab — the Core piece on my main Ubuntu VM, with its lightweight agents on the other hosts.

But before I landed on Komodo, I did the thing we all do: I opened a dozen browser tabs and tried to figure out whether I wanted Portainer, Dockge, or Komodo. They kept getting recommended in the same breath, as if they were interchangeable. They're not.

So this is the head-to-head I wish someone had handed me first — written from actually living with one of them, not from reading a feature table.

First, what even is a "Docker manager"?

If you're newer to this, quick definition. When you run apps in Docker, you normally control everything from the command line — typing docker commands, editing YAML files, tailing logs over SSH. A Docker manager is just a web app that sits on top of all that and gives you buttons, dashboards, and log views in your browser instead. Same Docker underneath; friendlier front door.

All three tools here are that kind of front door. Where they split is philosophy:

• Portainer — the full-fat GUI. Broadest feature set, most buttons, manages the most things. Current release is Portainer CE 2.39.5 LTS.
• Dockge — deliberately simple, built around your Docker Compose files. It edits the actual compose.yaml, so you never lose sight of what's really running. Latest is v1.5.0, and it's actively maintained.
• Komodo — the GitOps option, with a Core server and small agents on each host. Built for managing several machines at once. Komodo 2.0 landed in March 2026.

If Docker itself is still new to you, I wrote up why Docker earns its place in a home lab separately — that's the "why" this whole post assumes.

Setup and architecture: one box or many?

This is the split that matters most, and it's where beginners get tripped up. The big question is: are you managing containers on one machine, or several?

Portainer runs as a single server with a slick GUI. Managing one host is dead simple. For extra hosts, you install a small Portainer Agent on each one. (An "agent," if that's a new word, is just a little helper program you install on a remote machine so your main dashboard can reach in and control its Docker.)

Dockge started life as a proudly single-host tool, and honestly that's still its sweet spot. But since v1.4 it can run agents too — you drop a Dockge agent on each remote box and they all show up in one UI. It just doesn't make a big production of it.

Komodo is the one designed for many hosts from day one. You run Komodo Core — the brain that holds all your state and serves the web UI — on one machine, then install a lightweight Periphery agent on every host you want to manage. Core tells the agents what to do; the agents do the actual deploying.

That Core/Periphery model is exactly why I picked it. I ran Komodo Core on my primary Ubuntu VM and Periphery agents on my other Docker hosts — all of it living on a single Proxmox box. One dashboard, every host, no SSH hopping.

Day to day: deploying, updating, logs, secrets

Architecture is nice, but you live in the boring stuff: pushing a new stack, updating it, reading logs when something breaks, and hiding your secrets.

Portainer is the most point-and-click of the three. It has a stack editor, one-click app templates, and a genuinely broad reach — it manages plain Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and even Podman. If you want the most capable dashboard and don't mind that "most capable" also means "most menus," it's the obvious pick. Worth knowing: the free Community Edition is generous but the fancier access-control features live in the paid Business tier.

Dockge takes the opposite stance. You deploy by editing a real Compose file in an interactive editor, and it can even convert a docker run command into Compose for you. Nothing hidden, no magic layer — what you see in the editor is what's running. For people who already think in Compose, it feels less like a tool getting in the way and more like a nicer window onto the files you'd write anyway.

Komodo sits further along the automation line. You define a stack once — pointed at a Git repo or a resource definition — and deploy it across hosts from the Core UI. Logs and even in-browser terminals live right in the dashboard, which is what sold me: when a container misbehaved on a host I wasn't sitting at, I could still get eyes on it in a couple of clicks.

GitOps: where Komodo pulls ahead (and where it's overkill)

Here's the concept that separates Komodo from the pack, so let me explain it plainly first.

GitOps means your configuration lives in a Git repository, and your tool's job is to make reality match that repo. You change a file, commit it, and the manager brings your containers in line with what the file now says. The payoff is that every change is version-controlled and auditable — you can see exactly what changed, when, and by whom, and you can roll back by reverting a commit. Your home lab's state stops living in someone's memory and starts living in Git.

Komodo leans into this with Resource Syncs: point it at a Git provider, and it keeps your stacks synced to what's declared in the repo. Across a handful of hosts, that's genuinely great — the whole lab becomes reproducible, and rebuilding a host is closer to "clone and apply" than "remember what I did last spring."

The honest flip side: for two containers on one machine, this is overkill. Setting up a repo, a Git provider, and sync resources just to run Pi-hole and a reverse proxy is a lot of ceremony for very little gain. Portainer can do Git-backed stacks too, but the whole app is heavier. Dockge simply doesn't play in this space, and that's a feature, not a gap — it's aimed at people who want less machinery, not more.

So which one should you run?

No universal winner here — it genuinely depends on the size of your lab and how much complexity you actually want. My honest breakdown:

One box, and you just want it simple: Dockge. It's light, it's fast, and it keeps you close to your Compose files without burying them under menus. If you like living in YAML, you'll feel at home.

One box, but you want all the buttons: Portainer. It's the friendliest on-ramp for people who'd rather click than type, and if you ever wander into Kubernetes or Podman, it already speaks those.

Several hosts, and you like Git: Komodo. The Core/agent model and GitOps workflow are built for exactly this, and Komodo 2.0 pushed further into fleet territory with things like Docker Swarm management and a tougher auth model. If your lab is growing and you want it reproducible, this is the one.

For me, with containers spread across multiple hosts and a soft spot for keeping things in Git, Komodo was the right call at the time — and I'd still point anyone with a growing multi-host lab at it. Full disclosure: I've since moved my own lab onto a different manager, but Komodo is what I actually lived with while making this comparison, which is more than I can say for a lot of "versus" posts. If you want a proper walkthrough of Komodo on its own, I dug into it in my Komodo intro post.

The good news is that none of these are wrong answers. They're three sensible takes on the same problem, and the worst outcome is picking one, outgrowing it, and switching — which, as it turns out, is exactly what I did. That's not failure; that's a home lab doing its job.

Want to poke at the source yourself? Here's Komodo, Portainer, and Dockge.