Welcome

Welcome to Portainer's official documentation site.

About Portainer

Portainer Community Edition (CE) is our foundation. With over half a million regular users, CE is a powerful, open source toolset that allows you to easily build and manage containers in Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Azure ACI.

Portainer Business Edition (BE) is our commercial offering. With features geared towards businesses and larger organizations such as Role-Based Access Control, registry management, and dedicated support, Portainer BE is a powerful toolset that allows you to easily build and manage containers in Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Podman and Azure ACI.

Portainer Business Edition requires a license key to install and use. If you don't currently have a license key, you can request three nodes free of Portainer Business Edition or purchase a license.

Portainer hides the complexity of managing containers behind an easy-to-use UI. By removing the need to use the CLI, write YAML or understand manifests, Portainer makes deploying apps and troubleshooting problems so easy that anyone can do it.

Our team is here to help you on your journey. Community and five/three nodes free users can get assistance through our community support channels, and paid Business customers through our business support channels.

Documentation

We're working hard to ensure that our documentation keeps up with our ever-growing Portainer community. If you have a question we encourage you to start with the documentation (right here!). If you can't find what you're looking for, please visit our Knowledge Base or one of our support channels.

For more detailed step-by-step guides to Portainer, we're building out the Portainer Academy with more courses regularly.

As an open source product we rely on users in our community to support one another by asking questions, engaging in discussions and sharing knowledge. Together with the documentation found on this site and our YouTube channel, we cover a lot of ground but there may be gaps.

Getting support

Community Edition, Five/Three Node Free and Home & Student Users

Community Edition, five/three nodes free and Home & Student users can get support through the following channels:

• Ask our AI bot by clicking the Ask AI button in the bottom right of this documentation site. Our AI chatbot pulls from a number of sources and is a great place to start when looking for help.

• Ask questions either in our GitHub Discussions forum or the community Slack channel. Other platforms exist (Reddit, Discord, Stack Overflow) but we are less active in those spaces.

• Log bugs in GitHub Issues so they can be properly managed.

• Flag vulnerabilities by emailing [e-mail] so we can deal with them immediately.

• Flag documentation issues via our GitHub documentation channel (or start contributing and make our documentation better!).

Business Edition Customers

If you are a Professional or Enterprise tier Portainer Business Edition customer, you can log tickets directly with our team via email or filling out the Request Support form. You can report a bug, ask a question, tell us about an issue with documentation, or request a feature. Tickets are checked and resolved by Portainer staff within the SLA.