TL;DR: The thing that actually forced my hand wasn't performance or security — it was a Slack message from our finance team asking why we had a $21/seat/month line item for "Docker Business" across 40 developers. Docker Desktop's licensing change (introduced back in 2022 but increasing 📖 Reading time: ~31 min What's in this article Why I Started Looking Past Docker The Contenders I Actually Tested Podman: The Closest Drop-In nerdctl + containerd: What CI Actually Uses Lima on macOS: The Missing Piece Buildah: When You Only Need to Build Images Rancher Desktop: The 'It Just Works' Option Side-by-Side Comparison Why I Started Looking Past Docker The thing that actually forced my hand wasn't performance or security — it was a Slack message from our finance team asking why we had a $21/seat/month line item for "Docker Business" across 40 developers.…