Coolify: Open-source and self-hostable Heroku / Netlify / Vercel alternative

Tried it for a bit. Paid one month of the subscription.<p>The dashboard is incredibly clunky and at the time they didn&#x27;t have SSL for db connections (not sure about now). A lot of stuff you need to know what you&#x27;re doing like configuring tags for Traefik etc.<p>The deal breaker was it didn&#x27;t have zero downtime deploys. Any pending request when you update an app is simply killed.<p>I was expecting something like Heroku or Vercel but this ain&#x27;t it.<p>Ended up concluding that if I wanted to run&#x2F;deploy apps on my own VPS I&#x27;d just use Kamal or Dokku. Both have zero downtime deploys, certbot, proxy, etc.

I was also looking at alternatives -<p>K8S-based -<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cozystack&#x2F;cozystack">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cozystack&#x2F;cozystack</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kubero-dev&#x2F;kubero">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kubero-dev&#x2F;kubero</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pluralsh&#x2F;plural">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pluralsh&#x2F;plural</a><p>DCR-based -<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coollabsio&#x2F;coolify">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coollabsio&#x2F;coolify</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dokku&#x2F;dokku&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dokku&#x2F;dokku&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Dokploy&#x2F;dokploy">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Dokploy&#x2F;dokploy</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;swiftwave-org&#x2F;swiftwave">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;swiftwave-org&#x2F;swiftwave</a><p>Most of these projects are maintained by a single maintainer; for business critical apps look elsewhere.

I&#x27;ve been using Coolify for about a year now and have been very happy with it. It&#x27;s really low maintenance, it has built in backups for your apps and databases, decent security by default, and is super easy to use. I log into the underlying VMs once per month to do an apt update&#x2F;upgrade, and that&#x27;s about it.

I highly recommend Coolify. I evaluated every option when looking for a Heroku alternative, and Coolify is clearly the best as long as you don’t absolutely require zero downtime deploys.<p>We are hosting over 100 services on it for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackclub.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackclub.com</a> and it’s been great. We’re 3 months in now.<p>The key is to think about it as a GUI on top of Docker, not as a fully managed solution.<p>It’s one of those PHP apps that’s weirdly reliable. I see lots of other comments recommending Dokku &#x2F; Dokploy &#x2F; others. None of those options are nearly as mature as Coolify in my experience.

I don&#x27;t mean it as discouragement but, at least for me, I would choose Heroku or Netlify because I don&#x27;t want to self host it. I want someone else to manage all those bits for me.<p>It&#x27;s good experience building the app though and good to have alternatives available.

I&#x27;ve been fascinated by how little developers know how to take a service they have, and make it accessible on something like their home network.<p>It&#x27;s honestly a shocker to me. There&#x27;s so much knowledge about the stack that gets lost with these services.

Remember all those horror stories about ridiculous bills from public cloud providers? I also got $4.5k bill once for simple mistake on AWS.<p>So I decided to build Vercel for your own servers - DollarDeploy, which manages servers and deploys NextJS apps (without docker) and docker compose configs to your server. We don&#x27;t have self hosted or open source but cloud version starts from $1&#x2F;mo

I argue a &quot;self hosted&quot; alternative to &quot;Heroku &#x2F; Netlify &#x2F; Vercel&quot; is by definition not an alternative to &quot;Heroku &#x2F; Netlify &#x2F; Vercel&quot;.

I’m happy using coolify. I self host on my Mac Studio as the control plane and deploy to digital ocean. I’m currently looking to host in Canada instead, but not having much luck. I considered hosting my deployments locally as well, I don’t get much traffic, but haven’t made a decision yet.<p>Overall it’s good software that just does what it says it will. My needs aren’t particularly complex, but they aren’t totally trivial either. It does a great job orchestrating things without me needing to worry much about the inner workings.<p>I’ve done these things manually for a long time and I would be fine continuing to do that, but… I’ve got a job, kids, other hobbies, etc. It has been great to have a simple control plane to automate a lot of it for me. I find it makes it more likely for me to build and deploy something in the first place, which is what really counts for me at the end of the day.<p>The discord has also been a good resource. They’re very helpful and the vibe is very positive in my experience. It has been, and still seems like an ecosystem worth investing in.

Been using coolify to host my blog + analytics + a couple personal projects for around 6 months.<p>Good for 1-click installs that “don’t need” a lot of maintenance, like Ghost, Plausible, etc.<p>Had some issues with spikes in CPU usage (similar case: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coollabsio&#x2F;coolify&#x2F;issues&#x2F;3226">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coollabsio&#x2F;coolify&#x2F;issues&#x2F;3226</a>) Monitoring is not enough but I just go straight to the container im looking for and htop it.<p>For not 1-click I still sometimes feel like bumping into a brick wall, and go for a standalone docker-compose setup outside of coolify. Coolify is too high-level to debug small Docker intricacies (or maybe it’s that I’m bad with that).

Been running Cool for about a year. Drop a couple thousand on a 1U and throw it on a $100&#x2F;mo colo and it&#x27;s crazy bang for the buck. It makes it so easy to spin up new projects it&#x27;s hard not to like it. Definitely when launching some containers and open source projects it&#x27;s not as seamless as it could be-- can require fiddling with vars and compose files-- but on the whole very stable, lightweight, fast deploys, and conceptually pretty simple.<p>One thing I&#x27;ve noticed is I&#x27;ve starting using much more open source software for various things. When you can just jump into the UI, paste in the github link, and have it running on a wildcard domain in 60 seconds I find myself giving OSS a try more often before looking elsewhere.

I highly recommend coolify. Been hosting it on a dedicated server with 16 core and 64 GB ram and it powers following things for me right now<p>- prefect for ai and other automations.<p>- metabase<p>- postiz<p>- open webui<p>- jupyter notebook<p>- few experimental Db<p>backup is an issue but the best way I have found is to create a dedicated folder for your containers volume and edit docker compose in coolify UI to use this path for all volumes. Now you can backup coolify data and this container volumes folder.<p>You can assign a wildcard subdomain to it and it can then assign subdomains easily to any project with ssl. Pretty nifty.<p>Think of coolify as ui for docker and other network things on server. I use lazydocker to manage containers via command line too on server when coolify won&#x27;t bend to my will. So both combined together gives a solid control and ease.

I really wanted Coolify to work, as I like the idea behind it. I gave it a go some time ago, and I ended up spending the entire evening battling issues like the proxy not running, with no helpful UI feedback whatsoever.<p>So I came to the conclusion that if I have to dig through abstractions built by someone else, only to find out that in the end I have to manually restart the underlying containers anyway, I might as well stick to using Docker directly.<p>And truth be told, it’s not even that difficult to handle it all yourself. And it’s definitely very educational. It gives me a nice feeling of being in control and knowing my server. And on top of that it’s fun too.

I have a big issue with any self hosted alternative to <i>name your paas here</i>. Every time I try one I find myself maintaining the PaaS instead of maintaining my app, which defeats the whole purpose of a PaaS

I have also been using Coolify happily since its early(?) days (mid 2022 IIRC). One big plus for me is that there is nothing to be installed on the client: No CLI, etc. In my specific use case, I switch laptops I work with, so it&#x27;s a huge advantage that I can just open the UI in the browser and do my work. Of course there is room for improvements in many corners of it, but I couldn&#x27;t get any of the alternatives to works the same way, yet.

Hey, the dev behind Coolify here.<p>We are working on a new UI, and to be even more mature, and a lot of other things, because now I am not doing this alone as I used to for years.

No idea why there&#x27;s almost no PaaS solution for Kubernetes. It would be a great platform with some add-ons. I know there&#x27;s Porter but only on AWS and Azure if I understand correctly. Which is fine for many use cases I guess. Still I want to self-host for dev without huge cost.<p>There&#x27;s also Korifi which implements the Cloud Foundry API on Kubernetes but it&#x27;s still in progress and its future might be uncertain.

I&#x27;m sorry for being a bit off-topic, but I&#x27;m a founder of a PaaS company myself, and I think that what we offer is a great alternative to Coolify for companies that need a more &quot;managed&quot; and reliable infra.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stacktape.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stacktape.com</a> is a Heroku&#x2F;Vercel-like PaaS platform that deploys directly to your own AWS account.<p>It supports both serverless (lambda functions), and serverful (AWS ECS Fargate or EC2) deployments. Besides that, it supports other AWS infrastructure resources, such as RDS MySQL&#x2F;Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch, etc..<p>You can deploy from console, using git-push-to-deploy, or even use preview deployments (ephemeral environments for every PR).<p>Compared to alternatives, it&#x27;s both very easy to use, and flexible&#x2F;extensible at the same time. You can use it to quickly deploy anything in a few minutes, yet it will be sufficient to cover even complex infrastructure needs you might run into in the future.

Also checkout Dokploy. Incredible to leave Vercel.

Having built similar things in the past, raising a bit of an eyebrow at the business model: it seems likely that with three parties involved (Coolify people, customer, hosting provider) there will end up being too much finger pointing as to the source of issues. Certainly way too much to cover a few dollars a month revenue. I think most customers would conclude they are better off just deploying the bare OSS version and paying whoever they are already paying (internal or external) for engineering services, to make sure it stays up.

Coolify unfortunately didn&#x27;t click with me, and I had a bad experience with a Redis database, so I stopped using it.<p>I would recommend Elestio (eles[dot]io) as an alternative which isn&#x27;t open source, or self-hostable, but met my primary goal of drastically reducing cloud costs. And you can bring your own cloud&#x2F;server, though I&#x27;m choosing to also rent from Hetzner through Elestio.<p>I&#x27;m running two redis databases on machines with 3 cpus, 4gb ram, and 80gb storage for about $80 total (the machines are billed hourly, but you get the max monthly bill up front).

Started using Coolify (self hosted) for ~6months now and I love it ! Works great with most of the stuff I deploy (react SPAs, python&#x2F;fastapi stuff, hugo). Sure, I can do my proper setup, but tbh I just want to go fast sometimes and Coolify is great for that. For DBs and cache, didn&#x27;t test it though, but willing to next time I have a personal project !<p>Great stuff, thanks for your efforts and keep up the good work !

Perhaps a bit tangential on the subject, but in the same spirit - does anyone know of an open source self-hostable alternative to runpod&#x2F;vast for managing your GPUs? Our small team has some bare metal servers and I&#x27;d like to try something light to manage &#x2F; reserve instances w&#x2F; the convenience of a webui and a place where the team can see at a glance who is using what, and eventually some notes on how long each deployment is likely to take (self filled ofc).

I have been super happy using Coolify to self host automatic preview branches from pull requests. I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s necessarily mature enough for me to trust it with production loads, but it&#x27;s extremely easy to get started with the Github integration and wildcard subdomains

We did a video on Coolify vs Dokploy <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=1POdazLoiRE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=1POdazLoiRE</a>

Tried this but ended up building our own competitor: Hypership.dev<p>We&#x27;re solving slightly more than what Coolify are by providing Auth, analytics, event tracking, an admin dashboard and more.

What&#x27;s the actual point of the paid product if I still have to host my own stuff?<p>Does it just manage things?<p>Is it actually open source with usable instructions, or is it magic like Superbase that requires digging through GitHub issues to find the secret truck to getting things to work.<p>How does it compare to Captain Rover ( which was awesome until it just stopped working one day, luckily my backup script captured my blog before this happened).<p>At this point I&#x27;ll just give Render 7$ a month.<p>When it&#x27;s 3am I don&#x27;t want to figure this out by myself. In a Corp environment I&#x27;ll let the dev ops team sort it out.

Anyone use easypanel?<p>I’ve been using them and it’s been the easiest. They have a bunch of templates for open source projects, so u can click and deploy them easily

Very cool options here. I&#x27;m always looking for options to throw something on a spare raspberry pi and this looks like a great tool to self-host.

Plus points for any language, I dislike how Vercel and Nelify build up on AWS and then we only get JS&#x2F;TS&#x2F;Go, or WebAssembly gimmicks.

This project is amazing! I been messing with it all day today, I&#x27;m in love.<p>Thank you to the developers, you really have a keen eye for detail.

Coolify is cool, pun intended, but a bit clunky (maybe due to the PHP nature of it), I recommend Dokploy these days.

Does this project make its money via the cloud offering, or via sponsors? It&#x27;s kind of unclear.

Had a bunch of problems trying to host &#x2F; run this on an internal-only network.

I would love to move away from railway to Coolify or dokploy. Someday.

Love my Coolify Setup!

Anyone know how this compares to caprover?

If I&#x27;m in the market for Heroku, why would I want to self-host anything?