The main benefits of using containerization in software development include enhanced portability, scalability, and efficiency. Containers encapsulate applications and their dependencies, allowing them to run consistently across various environments, such as development, testing, and production. This minimizes conflicts and accelerates deployment processes. Furthermore, container orchestration tools streamline management, enabling automated scaling and load balancing. Containerization significantly reduces resource consumption and improves team collaboration by providing isolated environments for development, ultimately leading to faster time-to-market for applications.