Two tools with different goals
Proxmox VE is a complete virtualisation platform: a web interface to manage VMs and containers, clusters, shared storage, backups with Proxmox Backup Server. It's designed for people who run their servers from its interface.
Incus is a VM and container manager started in 2023 by the Linux Containers community, as the continuation of LXD. It doesn't have an interface meant for everyday work: it has a clean REST API that does everything. It's designed to be driven by other software.
For whoever sells VPSs to end customers, the second part is what counts: the panel must create, resize, suspend, snapshot and back up hundreds of VMs without anyone clicking anything.
The differences that matter to a provider
| Proxmox VE | Incus | |
|---|---|---|
| KVM VMs | yes | yes |
| Containers | LXC | LXC (system containers) |
| API | REST, the same one its web interface uses | REST as the main interface, with async operations and events |
| Storage | LVM, LVM-thin, ZFS, Ceph, directory, NFS and more | ZFS, LVM, btrfs, dir, Ceph |
| VM networking | Linux bridges and SDN | bridge, routed, macvlan, OVN |
| Backups | vzdump and Proxmox Backup Server | instance export (streamable), pool snapshots |
| Licence | AGPL, subscription for the enterprise repository and support | Apache 2.0 |
In practice, two things make the difference:
routedNICs. Incus can give a VM a public IP routed by the host, with no bridge on the server's interface and no virtual MAC. It's the simplest way to use additional IPs from OVHcloud, Hetzner or Contabo without breaking datacenter anti-spoofing rules. KoaVM uses it for provider IPs and for IPv6.- One API for everything. CPU, RAM and network limits, disk growth, snapshots, backup export: they're all fields of the same resource. The panel doesn't have to talk to different tools.
What we kept from Proxmox
Proxmox is still excellent, and many providers already use it. That's why KoaVM imports VMs from Proxmox VE with near-live migration: LVM-thin disks, qcow2, UEFI VMs, several disks per VM. In our tests downtime was about 13 seconds.
What KoaVM adds on top of Incus
Incus alone knows nothing about customers, plans and invoices. KoaVM adds:
- plans with CPU, RAM, disk, speed and monthly traffic (throttle, suspend or just warn);
- customers and a client area with console, reinstall, snapshots, backups, reverse DNS;
- provider IPs via API, IPv6, address blocks;
- backups to another node or to S3, on a schedule;
- public API, WHMCS module and Koabilling;
- migration from other panels.
In short
If you run a few servers by hand, Proxmox is convenient. If you sell VPSs and want everything to go through a panel and a billing system, Incus is a simpler base to automate. You can try it with KoaVM: the free trial includes 1 node and 5 VPSs. Join the waitlist.