Portainer Industrial & IoT is a container management platform that deploys, updates, and secures containerized applications across factories, fleets, and distributed edge sites for industrial operations, energy, logistics, and enterprise IoT teams, without requiring them to replace the systems already running the business.
Most manufacturing modernization advice assumes a clean slate. Rip out the decades-old machine, standardize the stack, and start fresh. Portainer is an overlay management layer that meets operations and IT teams where they are instead of asking them to start over. Our industrial and edge platform is built for brownfield environments, legacy hardware, mixed runtimes, intermittent connectivity, and air-gapped sites.
Portainer Business Edition is the control plane and agent architecture that manages containerized applications across every site from a single interface. It gives IT and OT teams one place to deploy, configure, and troubleshoot software instead of managing each site by hand.
KubeSolo is Portainer's ultra-lightweight, OCI-compliant single-node Kubernetes runtime. With Portainer D2K embedded, one device accepts Helm, Kubernetes manifests, Docker Compose, the Docker CLI, and containerized AI inference workloads down to the factory floor.
The Industrial App Portal is Portainer's beta governed app delivery built for operational technology teams, not developers. It lets OT teams deploy approved applications through a controlled catalog instead of relying on IT to push every update manually.
Portainer offers extended team support through two tiers of managed services. Whether fractional support or fully managed operations, our team helps companies without a large platform function gain the operational depth of one.
Many tools can help you build a cluster, and they're pretty easy to use. The problem is, however, that these tools don't help configure or support the tech post-deployment. Docker and Kubernetes, by themselves, aren't a platform; they're components of one. To use either, you will end up deploying tools for deployments, observability, monitoring/alerting, security, and logging.
k3s, MicroK8s, and bare Kubernetes each require individual cluster management and the kind of Kubernetes expertise most OT teams don't have on staff, so the management burden scales directly with fleet size. With Kubernetes trained/certified engineers in extremely limited supply, Portainer governs the whole fleet from one place and is operable without prior Kubernetes expertise.
Portainer requires no inbound firewall rules and no outbound connection to a vendor cloud, so it runs in fully air-gapped and ISA-95-isolated environments. Azure IoT Edge and AWS Greengrass, for example, both require outbound connectivity to their respective clouds, putting air-gapped and OT-isolated sites outside their design scope entirely.
Portainer supports native integration with AD, LDAP, and OIDC, giving full fleet-wide RBAC regardless of identity stack. Azure IoT Edge's RBAC is bound to Entra ID and Balena lacks enterprise RBAC, policy propagation, or identity integration at all in its self-hosted option.
Portainer natively handles GitOps, deployment promotion, container RBAC, registry management, and runtime visibility across mixed Docker and Kubernetes environments. Ansible, Puppet, and Chef weren't designed for container lifecycle management and don't scale to multi-runtime fleets the way a container-native platform does.
Portainer licenses per node, instead of spanning message volume, device count, or other data measures that create a structure that's harder to forecast at fleet scale.
Docker and Kubernetes have steep learning curves. It often takes an average IT Admin/Operator months to become technically competent enough to use it in critical production scenarios. Portainer helps teams across sectors succeed with the tech today, regardless of their current skill level.
Neil Cresswell created Portainer when he couldn't find usable tooling for “containers as a service,” for those who found Kubernetes and Docker too tricky. A veteran of over 25 years in IT, he began his career with 12 years at IBM before leading VMware consulting at ViFX across Asia-Pacific and serving as CEO for cloud service providers. Today, Cresswell serves as the CEO of Portainer.io. Follow Neil on LinkedIn and Substack.
Tobias Mühlnikel leads the Industrial and IoT Business Unit at Portainer, where he manages Industrial IoT, IoT, and edge computing projects focused on simplifying the deployment and management of software containerized applications across various industries. With a strong background in automotive and smart manufacturing, he has driven digital transformation projects including AI-based predictive maintenance, shopfloor connectivity, and industrial data management since 2014. Follow Tobias on LinkedIn.
Customers engage directly with the Portainer IIoT team to work through licensing, node counts, and hardware class tiers, along with support terms, security assessment, and vendor onboarding. Managed Services customers get either fractional platform engineer support (Platform Plus) or a full managed operations team with on-call coverage (Platform Enterprise), depending on tier. Every engagement starts as a conversation with our team and when you're a customer, support routes through portainer.io's established support channel.
| Company Name | Portainer Industrial & IoT is part of Portainer.io, the world's leading container management platform |
|---|---|
| Type | Software Development |
| Founded | 2017 |
| Leadership | Neil Cresswell, CEO & Co-Founder of Portainer.io Tobias Mühlnikel, Head of Industrial & IoT Business Unit |
| Headquarters | Portainer.io The Hanger, 2/2 Boundary Road Hobsonville Point, Auckland 0616, New Zealand |
| Website | portainer.industries |
| Core Offering | Self-hosted operational control plane for container platforms in industrial & IoT environments |
| Pricing | Portainer licenses Edge and IIoT nodes by hardware class rather than vCPU count. This reflects the real-world constraints of industrial and IoT hardware and creates a structure that's easier to forecast at fleet scale. Free enterprise trial licenses are available upon request. Learn more about our pricing. |
| Contract Terms | Portainer licenses per node with flexible terms on the Professional plan and custom terms on Enterprise |
| Services | Aside from the Portainer container management platform and KubeSolo single-node Kubernetes, Portainer offers managed services through fractional support or fully managed operations to help companies gain the operational depth of a large platform team. |
| Communication | Reach out to Portainer to get a demo, talk to sales, or get support. |
| Notable clients | See our case studies from Cummins, Volkswagen, and Aveiro Tech City |
| Customers Served | Manufacturing, automotive, banking and finance, government, technology, defense, managed services, oil and gas |
| Projects delivered | 3.4B+ downloads, 650K+ active users, 1M+ total users, 25K+ GitHub stars |
| Competitors | Compare Portainer Industrial & IoT with our competitors like Azure IoT Edge, AWS Greengrass, Balena, as well as k3s, MicroK8s, Ansible, Puppet, and Chef for containers. |
| Social | Portainer Industrial & IoT showcase page on LinkedIn |
The operator control plane for Docker, Kubernetes, and other container runtimes in industrial & IoT environments. It's built to deploy OT software (MES systems, SCADA platforms, historians, edge analytics, and vendor applications) across distributed operations, from manufacturing floors to retail locations, connected vehicles to oil fields.
Portainer.industries is the dedicated site for Portainer Industrial & IoT container management under the Portainer.io umbrella. Portainer.io supports enterprise Kubernetes platform management and Portainer.ai focuses on Portainer's AI solutions.
No, Portainer is built to work with brownfield environments, including legacy hardware, mixed runtimes, and air-gapped or low-connectivity sites. You don't need to standardize your infrastructure before you start.
Portainer is built for OT-specific constraints from the start rather than adapted afterward: air-gapped and ISA-95-isolated network support, hardware-class licensing instead of vCPU-based, and no Kubernetes expertise required to operate it.
Every engagement starts with a conversation, not a checkout. Customers talk directly with our Industrial & IoT team to get a demo tailored to their requirements. Free enterprise trial licenses let interested companies test in their environment and the Portainer team will assess licensing needs, hardware class and node counts, security posture, and support terms.
Volkswagen runs it for shopfloor integration. Cummins uses it for software-defined vehicles. Aveiro Tech City Living Lab manages more than 100 edge nodes on it as part of its smart city infrastructure. Check out all our case studies.
Talk to our industrial team about your OT deployment.