Docker vs Pulumi

Docker is cheaper at entry: Personal is free, Pro is $11 per user/month billed monthly or $9 with annual billing, and Team is $16 monthly or $15 annually. Team caps at 100 users; Business is $24 per user/month with no user cap. Docker also has a free DHI Community tier, while DHI Select starts at $5,000 per repo and Enterprise pricing is custom.

Pulumi also has a free plan, but its paid entry is $40/month for Essentials, with 40 Pulumi Credits, up to 500 managed resources, unlimited users, and one primary cloud account. Pro is $400/month and includes 400 credits, up to 2,000 managed resources, and 10 primary cloud accounts. Additional usage draws down credits; one credit costs $1, and excess is billed in arrears. Compare included capacity, not sticker prices: Docker charges per user, while Pulumi's listed paid plans are monthly platform tiers plus metered usage.

Docker and Pulumi solve different layers of the stack, so feature counts are a poor way to pick between them. Docker centers on building, shipping, and running applications in containers through Docker Desktop. Its agent offering adds microVM-isolated sessions, locked-down network access, filesystem controls, and governance features such as sandbox and MCP policies and identity-bound audit logs. It also lists hardened images with signed, continuously patched builds; DHI Community includes verifiable SBOMs, SLSA Build L3 provenance, and unsuppressed CVE visibility. The homepage says agents can run locally or in cloud sandboxes using existing images, registries, and CI.

Pulumi is for declaring and managing cloud infrastructure. It supports TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET, Java, and YAML, plus HCL in its feature list, and offers reusable components, centralized secrets, external secret stores, OIDC-based short-lived credentials, policy as code, audit trails, and compliance tracking. Pulumi Neo adds AI-assisted infrastructure workflows, while resource discovery can surface managed and unmanaged cloud resources. Pick Docker for app and container workflows and agent isolation; pick Pulumi when infrastructure itself needs programmable provisioning and governance.

Neither product is a like-for-like replacement, and the learning curve depends on what the team already runs. Docker centers on Docker Desktop and the container development loop; its platform-independent, OCI-compliant positioning may suit teams already working with images, registries, and CI. Agent sandboxes add controls for network access and filesystems, but governance and hardened-image requirements can bring separate plans or add-ons into the decision.

Pulumi asks teams to define infrastructure in supported programming languages or YAML, then manage stacks, secrets, policies, and cloud accounts through its platform. That is a fit when engineers want infrastructure represented as reusable code, but it is more to learn than selecting containers alone. The available published material does not publish setup times or a learning-curve comparison. Our practical split: Docker for application packaging and agent sandboxing; Pulumi when the work is provisioning and governing cloud resources.