Choosing between Proxmox and Incus? This simple guide breaks down the key differences to help you pick the right hypervisor for your lab or business.

A friend of mine was in a pickle the other day. At his job, they’re looking to replace their old virtualization setup. He’s a fan of Proxmox, but his colleague is making a strong case for something called Incus.

Their main job is to spin up virtual machines to test client products—firewalls, routers, all sorts of things—and then tear them down just as quickly. They don’t need clustering right now, but it’s something they might want down the road.

He asked for my take, and it got me thinking. This isn’t just a simple feature-by-feature comparison. It’s about two different philosophies for how to get things done. So, if you’re in a similar boat, let’s talk it through.

So, What’s Proxmox All About?

Think of Proxmox as the well-established, all-in-one toolkit. It’s been around for years and has a huge community. It’s built on a solid Debian Linux foundation and bundles everything you need into a single package.

With Proxmox, you get:
* A powerful web interface: This is its main attraction. You can manage virtual machines (using KVM for full virtualization) and Linux containers (LXC) right from your browser. No command line needed for 99% of tasks.
* Features galore: Clustering, high availability, various storage options, backups—it’s all built-in. You install it, and you have a complete, enterprise-ready platform.

Proxmox is like a Swiss Army knife. It has a tool for almost every situation, all neatly folded into one handle. It’s reliable, powerful, and you can manage your entire virtual world from a single, graphical dashboard. It’s the safe, comfortable, and incredibly capable choice.

And What’s the Deal with Incus?

Incus is the new kid on the block, but with a familiar face. It’s a fork of LXD, which was developed by Canonical (the makers of Ubuntu). The project’s lead developer forked it to create a truly community-driven version, and Incus was born.

Incus feels different. It’s leaner, faster, and more focused.
* Command-line first: While there are third-party web UIs, Incus is designed to be controlled from the terminal. This makes it incredibly powerful for automation and scripting.
* Blazing speed: Its reputation is built on speed, especially when creating and destroying system containers. It treats containers as first-class citizens, making them feel almost as lightweight as a regular process. It can also manage full virtual machines, just like Proxmox.

If Proxmox is a Swiss Army knife, Incus is a set of high-quality, perfectly weighted chef’s knives. Each one is designed for a specific purpose, and in the hands of a pro, they’re faster and more precise. It’s less of a “platform in a box” and more of a powerful component that you build your workflow around.

The Head-to-Head Breakdown

Let’s get down to it. When should you choose one over the other?

Management and Ease of Use

This is the biggest difference. Do you want a graphical interface where you can see and click on everything? Go with Proxmox. Its web UI is fantastic and makes managing a handful of servers incredibly simple.

Are you a developer or admin who lives in the terminal? Do you want to automate everything with scripts? You’ll probably love Incus. Its command-line client is clean, logical, and incredibly powerful.

The Core Philosophy

Proxmox gives you a complete, integrated solution. The experience is curated for you. This is great if you want something that just works out of the box without much fuss.

Incus gives you a powerful, streamlined tool. You have more freedom to build the exact system you want, but you also have to make more decisions. It’s more modular.

The Best Fit for the Job

So, back to my friend’s problem: spinning up and tearing down test VMs and containers all day.

For this specific task, Incus has a clear edge. Its speed is a massive advantage when you’re constantly creating and destroying instances. The clean command-line interface makes it trivial to write a simple script that says, “Create this VM with these specs, run my test, and then delete it.” It’s built for this kind of temporary, high-churn workload.

But that doesn’t mean Proxmox is a bad choice. If my friend’s team is more comfortable with a GUI, or if they also have a number of long-running, “pet” servers to manage, Proxmox might be the better all-around tool for the team. Its integrated backup and high-availability features are also more mature and easier to set up for persistent workloads.

My Final Take

There’s no single winner here. It truly depends on you and your team’s workflow.

• Choose Proxmox if: You value an all-in-one solution with a brilliant web UI and a rich, built-in feature set for a wide range of tasks.
• Choose Incus if: Your priority is speed and automation, you’re comfortable on the command line, and you prefer a more focused, modular tool for high-frequency tasks.

Honestly, the best way to decide is to try both. Set up a spare machine and install them. Spend a day creating, managing, and destroying a few VMs and containers. One of them will just feel right for the way you work. For my friend, the speed of Incus was tempting, but the team’s familiarity with graphical tools meant Proxmox was the path of least resistance. And sometimes, that’s the most important factor of all.