Canonical Multipass
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What is Canonical Multipass
Canonical Multipass is a local VM management tool that provisions and runs Ubuntu virtual machines on a developer workstation using a simple CLI and optional GUI. It targets developers, QA, and IT practitioners who need disposable Linux environments for testing, demos, or lightweight local infrastructure. Multipass abstracts the underlying hypervisor (for example, Hyper-V, QEMU, or VirtualBox depending on OS/version) and focuses on fast instance lifecycle operations such as launch, shell access, snapshots, and deletion.
Fast local Ubuntu provisioning
Multipass creates Ubuntu VMs with a small set of commands and sensible defaults, reducing setup time for local test environments. It supports common workflows such as launching instances, opening a shell, transferring files, and removing instances. This makes it practical for repeatable dev/test setups where a full cloud account or on-prem cloud stack is unnecessary.
Cross-platform developer workflow
Multipass runs on major desktop operating systems and provides a consistent CLI across them. It hides many hypervisor-specific details, which helps teams standardize local environment instructions. This can reduce friction compared with managing different VM tools per OS.
Simple instance lifecycle controls
The tool provides straightforward controls for starting, stopping, listing, and deleting instances, and it supports features such as snapshots on supported backends. It also supports basic networking and mount/file-sharing capabilities for integrating VM workloads with the host. These capabilities cover many day-to-day needs for local infrastructure-style usage without requiring a full virtualization management platform.
Not a true IaaS platform
Multipass runs VMs on a single host machine and does not provide multi-tenant cloud features such as IAM, billing, regions, or elastic capacity. It is not designed to manage fleets across clusters or data centers. Organizations looking for production-grade IaaS capabilities typically need additional infrastructure layers beyond Multipass.
Ubuntu-centric guest focus
Multipass is primarily oriented around Ubuntu images and Ubuntu-based workflows. While this is suitable for many Linux development scenarios, it can be limiting for teams that require a broad catalog of operating systems and prebuilt images. Mixed-OS testing may require separate tooling.
Backend and feature variability
Supported hypervisors and some capabilities can vary by operating system and Multipass version (for example, differences between Hyper-V, QEMU, and VirtualBox backends). This can lead to inconsistent behavior across developer machines, especially in heterogeneous environments. Teams may need to standardize host OS/hypervisor choices to avoid workflow drift.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Completely free / Open-source Price: $0 — free to download and use (no paid plans or tiers listed on official product pages) License: GPL-3.0 (open-source) as published by Canonical (see Snap Store / docs) Distribution & install: Available via Snap (sudo snap install multipass) and platform installers for Windows/macOS; official product page and docs provide install instructions. Notes: No subscription, tiered plans, or usage-based billing are listed on the official Multipass product pages or documentation. No enterprise/paid offering referenced on the product site.
Seller details
Canonical Ltd.
London, United Kingdom
2004
Private
https://canonical.com/
https://x.com/Canonical
https://www.linkedin.com/company/canonical-ltd-/
