[peachy_no_pie]

Podman uses runc as the default container runtime. Nerdctl uses containerd. There are probably other differences but that's a substantial one imo.

[mroche]

This depends on the platform you're using. On Fedora and RHEL 9, the default runtime is crun. On RHEL 7 and RHEL 8, the default is runc. In any case they can be swapped as needed.

https://github.com/containers/crun

[raesene9]

I think that's mixing apples with oranges really, as containerd uses runc as well.

nerdctl is a client app which speaks to containerd, which is a long running daemon.

podman uses a different architecture (no long running daemon)

Both projects use runc to actually launch the containers.