There's little technical difference. Both BSD and Linux provide set of kernel-level mechanisms that allow you to run "containers", ie. process trees that are completely isolated from each other and from the host OS. They are roughly comparable, I believe, with mostly minor technical differences.

The huge practical difference right now is that on Linux, Docker and LXC (as in linuxcontainers.org) provide a high-level, fairly opinioned framework and set of infrastructure pieces to build, run and manage containers — and there are no fully equivalent tools on BSD, at least none that are as featureful or mature.

If you want to do containerized deploys on BSD, you'll be writing scripts that set up jails, call rctl, set kernel parameters with sysctl, and so on. There's ezjail [1], but it's nowhere near Docker in terms of scope.

I actually wish there was something on Linux that was less monolithic and better designed than Docker. Its image management is badly designed and annoying to use, and after all this time it still suffers from design flaws such as needing to be the parent of all containers (completely unnecessary given that we have cgroups).

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/j...