Yes, it’s still worth it if you don’t have too many servers to set up a real cluster to benefit from load balancing.
Docker Swarm Mode comes with Docker Engine natively. You don’t need to install extra softwares. You just enable it.
It’s sharing most of the YAML format with Docker Compose, so you don’t have to learn a completely new thing.
Similar to other container orchestration tools, it gives you the ability to do rolling updates, scaling up/down, etc…
If Swarm Mode provides you with enough features, be happy with it.
The Docker company has recently marketed more about their support for Kubernetes, but it’s still developing its own Swarm actively. Just yesterday I received their invitation to a webinar presented by Citizens Bank about moving from Swarm to Kubernetes and back to Swarm again. Interesting!
Conclusion
Swarm is not going anywhere anytime soon, don’t worry about that. Plan to migrate to Kubernetes when your startup needs to run thousands of containers.