A Docker image is a lightweight, standalone, and executable software package that includes everything needed to run an application—code, runtime, libraries, and settings. It is essentially a snapshot of an environment at a specific point in time. A Docker container, on the other hand, is a running instance of a Docker image. While an image is the blueprint or template, a container is the actual runtime environment that’s created from the image, isolated from the host system but able to interact with it. In simple terms, images are static, and containers are dynamic.