InitWare aims for a high level of compatibility with the core interfaces of systemd. Unit-files, the systemctl, loginctl, and journalctl commands (provided as svcctl, sessionctl, and evlogctl respectively), the systemd1 and Login1 D-Bus APIs, the sd_notify API, the journald stream and datagram socket protocols, and several other interfaces are all subject to this aim.

Comprehensive compatibility with every interface is impractical on some platforms; some unit options are entirely GNU/Linux-specific and while most have alternatives in spirit on other platforms (e.g. Linux namespaces and FreeBSD jails), a perfect mapping of semantics between these is not practical. Nonetheless, it is important to us that InitWare should be able to run with little or no modification the vast majority of systemd unit-files, and that they should behave reasonably.