I personally prefer podman, due to its rootless mode being "more default" than in docker (rootless docker works, but it's basically an afterthought).

That being said: there's just so many tutorials, tools and other resources that assume docker by default that starting with docker is definitely the less cumbersome approach. It's not that podman is signficantly harder or has many big differences, but all the tutorials are basically written with docker as the first target in mind.

In my homelab the progression was docker -> rootless docker -> podman and the last step isn't fully done yet, so I'm currently running a mix of rootless docker and podman.