Dozzle vs Portainer

Portainer is built to manage containers: stacks, volumes, networks, images and users. Dozzle is built to read their logs. Portainer has a log viewer, and Dozzle can start, stop and update containers, but each one is centered on a different job. Many people run both.

At a glance

	Dozzle	Portainer
Main job	Reading logs	Managing containers, stacks, volumes, networks and images
Live logs	Streams as lines arrive	Auto refresh
Several containers	A stack, a service or a custom group in one merged view	One container at a time
JSON logs	Detected, formatted and color coded. SQL over JSON fields	Shown as text
Search	Search and filter, including regular expressions	Search and filter by text
CPU and memory	Live charts with recent history	Live stats
Alerts	On log lines, CPU or memory, and container events. See Alerts	Not in the log viewer
Image updates	Checks for new images and updates on a schedule. See Updates	Pull and redeploy by hand
Several hosts	Agents, Swarm, Kubernetes	Environments
Setup	One container, plus an optional setup wizard on first start	One container, plus an admin account on first start

When to use Portainer instead

Pick Portainer if you want to create and edit stacks from a browser, manage volumes, networks and images, or give a team access to some environments and not others. Dozzle does not try to do any of that.

When Dozzle fits better

Pick Dozzle when the question is "what is this container doing right now?" It opens straight to logs, follows several containers at once, and makes JSON readable without any setup. It is also read-only by default: actions and shell access are off until you turn them on.

Run both

The two do not conflict. Both read the Docker socket and run on different ports:

services:
  dozzle:
    image: amir20/dozzle:latest
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - dozzle_data:/data
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
  portainer:
    image: portainer/portainer-ce:latest
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - portainer-data:/data
    ports:
      - 9443:9443
volumes:
  dozzle_data:
  portainer-data:

To jump from Portainer to a container's logs in Dozzle, see linking to a container by name.