Docker with Portainer is really simple and much more straightforward to use than having to remember what services run on what ports, etc. I have been self hosting a bunch of apps and web services on an Asustor for a couple of years now, with Cloudflare CDN in front of it, and everything runs smoothly and never breaks.
I just went to the Portainer websites and I can't figure out what it does, exactly. All I know is they've chosen nice fonts. Do you mind explaining what it does for you?
It adds a GUI to Docker so that you can manage your containers from a web page instead of the cli (create, configure, start/stop, etc.) You don't need it if you know Docker well but it's a nice to have.
Thanks. Sounds a bit like Docker Desktop.