--- title: Canonical LXD Reviews meta_title: 'Canonical LXD Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 16 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Canonical LXD works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 16 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-13' parent_category: name: Containerization url: https://www.g2.com/categories/containerization --- # Canonical LXD Reviews **Vendor:** Canonical Ltd. **Category:** [Container Management Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/container-management) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 16 ## About Canonical LXD Canonical LXD is a next generation system container manager.It offers a user experience similar to virtual machines but using Linux containers instead.It's image based with pre-made images available for a wide number of Linux distributions and is built around a very powerful, yet pretty simple, REST API. ## Canonical LXD Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **lightweight solution** of Canonical LXD for managing containers and VMs efficiently and reliably. (4 reviews) - Users appreciate the **easy container management** of Canonical LXD, enjoying its simplicity and quick setups for Linux. (2 reviews) - Users find the **installation process easy** , particularly appreciating its seamless integration with the Ubuntu package manager. (1 reviews) - Users praise Canonical LXD for its **fast and reliable performance** , making management of Linux Containers and VMs effortless. (1 reviews) - Users praise the **simplicity** of Canonical LXD, appreciating its effortless management of containers like virtual machines. (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **complexity of repackaging ISO files** for Windows VMs cumbersome compared to Linux VMs. (1 reviews) - Users find the **complex setup** daunting, especially for basic tasks like USB and file mapping. (1 reviews) - The **difficult learning curve** of Canonical LXD can be challenging initially, but it proves valuable once mastered. (1 reviews) - Users find LXD to be **not user-friendly** due to its CLI-only interface, making it less intuitive for many. (1 reviews) - Users find the **poor UI design** of Canonical LXD makes simple tasks unnecessarily complicated and frustrating. (1 reviews) - Resource Limitations (1 reviews) ## Canonical LXD Reviews ### 1. Lightweight, VM-Like Isolation That Makes Multi-Tenant Dev Environments Easy **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Suhail C. | System Administrator, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 01, 2026 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** The biggest advantage for me is how lightweight it is while still giving strong isolation, almost like a VM. We’re running multiple dev and project containers on the same hosts, and it handles that without much overhead. It fits really well for our setup where each developer has their own container and projects are separated. Spinning up a new container is quick, and with a few scripts in place we can get a full environment ready in minutes, which saves a lot of time. OVN networking and proxy devices are also pretty flexible once configured, so routing traffic and exposing services works fine. Overall it makes managing a multi tenant setup much easier without going full VM. **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** Some parts still feel a bit rough in day to day use, especially around networking. OVN itself is fine, but ACLs can silently block traffic and it’s not always clear what went wrong. We spent a fair amount of time debugging things like SSH egress and basic connectivity issues. Permissions with mounted directories can also be confusing. The UID mapping part isn’t very intuitive, so you end up manually fixing ownership on the host, and it’s easy to mess up if you’re not used to it. SELinux relabeling is another small thing that gets missed sometimes. Port forwarding with proxy devices also feels a bit manual, especially when you have multiple containers. We ended up writing scripts to handle that and keep things consistent. Once everything is set up it runs well, but getting there definitely requires some experience, it’s not something that works perfectly out of the box. **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** It mainly helps us run multiple dev and project environments on the same hardware without things clashing. Each developer and project has its own container, so there are no dependency conflicts or “works on my machine” problems anymore. Isolation is a big benefit too. If something breaks in one project, it doesn’t affect anything else. We can just restore a snapshot or rebuild the container instead of fixing a shared system. Provisioning is much faster now as well. With a few scripts in place, spinning up a new dev or project container takes minutes instead of hours. OVN networking adds another layer of separation, so each container only talks to the services it actually needs. Overall it lets us run this kind of setup without needing a lot more servers or extra ops overhead. ### 2. Best environment to work virtually **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hinal S. | Search Engine Optimization Executive, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2023 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** I'm really impressed by Canonical LXD! It's like a supercharged way to manage containers that feels as easy as using virtual machines. They've got these ready-to-go setups for lots of types of Linux, and their simple system makes it all work. Big shoutout to the tech that makes it tick, too! **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** Learning curve was a bit steeper than expected but once I got the hang of it, Canonical LXD proved its worth! Also, keep an eye on system resources it's efficient, but might need a beefier setup. **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** By utilizing Canonical LXD for our container engine, our remote workforce collaborates seamlessly, resulting in enhanced ROI and boosted productivity. ### 3. Canonical LXD the best **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sindhura K. | Associate Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2023 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** They run a full operating system inside them, you can run any type of workload, and you manage them exactly as you would a virtual or a physical machine. Run as easily as possible **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** Nothing all the thinks which is using is the best gui ever I have been working with hope the review will go much better and every one need to use this cononical LXD. **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** They run a full operating system inside them, you can run any type of workload, and you manage them exactly as you would a virtual or a physical machine.its acts like a physical machine ### 4. Best to use in virtual machines **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nitish r. | Benefits Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 28, 2023 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** I used to manage linux container,and it can be used with minimal resources, while running it will use system hardware so that this will make it more smooth and fast **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** Its web management view need to upgrade as per latest scenario, lack of automation in process. Everytime it will redirect you to mapping to run from a source. Over all need to implement more tools. **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used canonical lxd to manage linux container as well as other os while integrating gpt in the process. Monitoring the web management view while progress for gpt. ### 5. Good Product for Multi-Environment workloads **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shwetank D. | Lead Software Engineer - AVP, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 04, 2023 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** It's beneficial for workloads that rely on host operating systems like containers and need robust execution irrespective of the platform in order to be platform-independent. **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** The repackaging of the ISO file in the case of the Windows Virtual Machine needs a distrobuilder, which is a cumbersome process compared to the Linux virtual machine **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helped set up services running on multiple containers ( in some cases VMs in case of binding regulatory policies for some banking workloads), which require minimal setup ( at least on Linux Kernels). ### 6. Efficient Container Management and Virtualization with Canonical LXD **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ayush S. | Lead DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 05, 2023 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** lightweight approach to container management and offers web-based graphical interface (LXDUI) that simplify container creation, configuration, and management and easy to use. **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** The only thing which can be improved with time is the limitation for users with highly complex and large-scale container deployments and managing those resources **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Canonical LXD helps us with Efficient resource utilization. With this it assists us in cost optimizations and also provides better network security between the containers ### 7. Works really good for development environments **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Harshal G. | Software Engineer 2 (Embedded Linux), Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** Ability to create VM or container with same utility **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** No built in gui, it is being developed but so far it is not released. Too complicated for simple setup like redirecting usb devices or ports or mapping files **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use lxd mainly for development environments with different dependencies. ### 8. Easy way to run any linux distribution **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arcko D. | Founder & General Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 29, 2023 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** Easy to manage and run linux in a managed way. **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** No updated version seems released in project home page **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Help me a lot with container management. ### 9. Excellent resource & Nice Lightweight Containers **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Scott T. | Retired, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 17, 2022 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** LXD containers are a lean, efficient and secure containerization system that is easy to manage. I use around 30 LXD containers and about 5 LXD VMs in my home lab. The lightweight nature of them makes it easy to host. I very much like the LXD forum for getting my questions answered. **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** I wish that there were more coverage of offering PCI bus and USB container resources through LXD and LXD VMs. It seems that my YouTube channel is a major source of this information (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxZPAzkw5Bj-j4vihnjpCVQ). **Recommendations to others considering Canonical LXD:** Be prepared to migrate off traditional VMs and be prepared for a bit of a learning curve. **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Really, the lightweight nature of LXD containers helps minimize resource usage. ### 10. Nice solution to manage virtual machines/containers on Ubuntu Linux **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Networking | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 12, 2023 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** Canonical LXD is a nice and lightweight solution to manage Linux Containers or VMs. It is easy to install with the Ubuntu package manager and offers a fast and reliable way to use machines. **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** LXD is a very powerful tool but not so intuitive for some users as it is a CLI-only based tool. **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is lightweight and runs in the background on Ubuntu PCs/servers ### 11. Canonical LXD **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 05, 2022 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** LXD provides support for system containers and virtual machines. When running a system container, LXD simulates a virtual version of an entire operating system. To do this, it uses the functionality provided by the kernel running on the host system. When running a virtual machine, LXD uses the host system's hardware, but the virtual machine provides the kernel. Therefore, virtual machines can be used to run, for example, a different operating system. **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** LXD can also be used with other platforms and tools, like Ansible, Juju, MAAS, Terraform, and more. Self-service, remote Windows, CentOS, ESXi, and Ubuntu on real servers turn your data center into a bare-metal cloud.MAAS integrates with LXD to provide easy creation of virtual machines. **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Secure by design (through unprivileged containers, resource restrictions, authentication) Intuitive (with a simple, clear API and crisp command line experience) Scalable (from containers on your laptop to clusters of thousands of compute nodes) Event-based (providing logging, operation, and lifecycle events) Remote usage (same API used for local and network access) Project support (as a way to categorize sets of images and profiles) ### 12. The flexibility of deploying containers **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ahmed S. | Infrastructure Team Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 25, 2021 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** The ease of deploying a container in just few simple steps. **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** There is a problem in Lxd as this software has no pqckage in the apt of debian or ubuntu and you need to install it with snap and this will put layer of file system that you don't need. **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Main problem that I need a software which can deploy a container with easy setting no complex things to do , and I found thag lxd is straightforward container manager as you can deploy , destroy, attach devices , deattch them , storage management. Of course all of these things made my life easier when deploy a container. ### 13. Containerization using Canonical LXD **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sudhanshu S. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2021 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** CoreAPI: which is very scalable, event-based, and has excellent product support. Backup And Restore: All objects are managed by LXD and using CRUI, we can do live migration. **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** It cannot be integrated with K8s, Jenkins, public cloud technology stacks. Not very popular like docker, so not too many discussions are available at StackOverflow. **Recommendations to others considering Canonical LXD:** If you wish to do an OS virtualization, then Canonical LXD will be a worthy choice. **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are re-utilizing our existing hardware to set up Operating System Virtualization for setting up a private cloud, integrating with our current OpenStack, which our application teams can leverage. ### 14. The simplest and usefully way to start with containers **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 04, 2021 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** Easy of use, minimal resource requirements **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** Lack of an integrated web management view **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Web hosting is cheaper and easier to manage in our servers now ### 15. Middle ground for those who need monolithic systems with the performance of containers **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mike B. | C-Level Executive / Platform Architect / Advisor, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 29, 2019 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** High performance due to running in LXC (Linux Containers), but for single system installs. Compatible with existing Vagrant box workflow via vagrant-lxd provider (and can be coupled without a cloud provider such as vagrant-digitalocean for a high performance local dev that can match affordable staging and production environments and can even spin them up), or via lxdock (less robust and not well maintained anymore). **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** Setup can be difficult to newcomers, Snap version available for non-Ubuntu distros seems to have some issues. **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Avoiding the dreaded "It works on my local!" without switching team to a multi-container Docker setup. ### 16. Excellent **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pablo S. | Owner, Computer & Network Security, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 01, 2018 **What do you like best about Canonical LXD?** optimization in the use of resources of the server, for the company it is important to be able to take full advantage of a server, without falling into underutilization. It is the software that occupies less resources, very close to the hardware, easy to configure, but it lacks a graphical interface for its administration. In our case we use it with high network availability. I recommend this software 100%, because having powerful servers to offer robust architectures for business is an imperative for any team working within a company.I think that in the near future, the fact of passing a container running from a machine A to a machine B, will be easy to use and quite simple. **What do you dislike about Canonical LXD?** sometimes the configurations are a bit complex and it lacks an administration and configuration interface **Recommendations to others considering Canonical LXD:** The world need a gpahical interface for to manage **What problems is Canonical LXD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Provide virtualization services for clients, It is not necessary to buy server hardware, it can be reused ## Canonical LXD Discussions - [Should I use LXC or LXD?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/should-i-use-lxc-or-lxd) - 3 comments, 1 upvote - [Is LXD a hypervisor?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-lxd-a-hypervisor) - 2 comments - [What is LXD used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-lxd-used-for) - 2 comments - [View Canonical LXD pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/canonical-lxd/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-16+01%3A37%3A07+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=fd13663e-7292-498c-bbb8-5c5b36be5838&secure%5Btoken%5D=1e0bc326133088877a334fb8fb29f946d0e494b37f84f33d4a7abe79f748c4df&format=llm_user) ## Canonical LXD Integrations - [Bitbucket](https://www.g2.com/products/bitbucket/reviews) - [Elasticsearch](https://www.g2.com/products/elastic-elasticsearch/reviews) - [MariaDB](https://www.g2.com/products/mariadb/reviews) ## Canonical LXD Features **Management** - Access Control - Network Isolation - File Isolation **Organization** - Packaging - Container Networking - Orchestration **Development** - Developer Toolkit - Architecture - Datacenter - Virtualization ## Top Canonical LXD Alternatives - [DigitalOcean](https://www.g2.com/products/digitalocean/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (738 reviews) - [Akamai Cloud Computing](https://www.g2.com/products/akamai-cloud-computing/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (387 reviews) - [Red Hat OpenShift](https://www.g2.com/products/red-hat-red-hat-openshift/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (290 reviews)