Here’s the Deal

Rancher vs Docker Compose

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When comparing Rancher vs Docker Compose, the Slant community recommends Docker Compose for most people. In the question“What are the best Docker orchestration tools?” Docker Compose is ranked 4th while Rancher is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Docker Compose is:

All that's needed to setup a multi-container application with Compose is a single file configuration file. Finally the application can be spun up with only a single command.

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Common Questions

What are the best Docker orchestration tools?

Pros

Pro
Web GUI cluster management

Intuitive and easy to use web gui.

Pro
Mult-environment cluster system

Cattle (Rancher default)
Swarm
Kubernetes
Mesos

Pro
Service catalog is easy

Rancher provides a catalog of application templates that make it easy to deploy complex stacks.

Rancher certified catalog
Community service catalog

Pro
Self-service application stack for self-monitoring

Great contributions from the co community who build the service stack catalog.

One of them is the "Prometheus" template which deploys a collection of containers for monitoring a platform. It's capable of querying all aspects of your environment with some nice pre-built dashboards.

Pro
Access control polices

Detailed role-based access control policies can be defined independently for each cluster.

Pro
Easy setup

All that's needed to setup a multi-container application with Compose is a single file configuration file. Finally the application can be spun up with only a single command.

Pro
Great for local development

Docker-compose isn't really meant (yet) for distributed deployment, but using it to deploy a website locally for testing is awesome. You could use it, with care (like handling faults), on a single server as well.

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Cons

No cons yet!

Con
More geared towards development

No really made for production.

Con
Not ready for production yet

While Compose is very good for staging servers, CI and development environments, it's still not ready for production and it's not recommended to be used in production yet.