Coolify: Open-source and self-hostable Heroku / Netlify / Vercel alternative
49 comments
·April 2, 2025pier25
Tried it for a bit. Paid one month of the subscription.
The dashboard is incredibly clunky and at the time they didn't have SSL for db connections (not sure about now). A lot of stuff you need to know what you're doing like configuring tags for Traefik etc.
The deal breaker was it didn't have zero downtime deploys. Any pending request when you update an app is simply killed.
I was expecting something like Heroku or Vercel but this ain't it.
Ended up concluding that if I wanted to run/deploy apps on my own VPS I'd just use Kamal or Dokku. Both have zero downtime deploys, certbot, proxy, etc.
amanzi
I've been using Coolify for about a year now and have been very happy with it. It'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/upgrade, and that's about it.
crudbug
I was also looking at alternatives -
K8S-based -
https://github.com/cozystack/cozystack
https://github.com/kubero-dev/kubero
https://github.com/pluralsh/plural
DCR-based -
https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify
https://github.com/dokku/dokku/
https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy
https://github.com/swiftwave-org/swiftwave
Most of these projects are maintained by a single maintainer; for business critical apps look elsewhere.
password4321
The most recent significant discussion of this topic (271 comments 7 months ago) with anecdotal recommendations of several of these:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41358020 Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform
Which was nearly immediately preceded by a smaller (62 comments) Coolify discussion also on the front page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41356239 Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal
frainfreeze
There is also piku, sort of a tiny dokku; https://github.com/piku/piku
networked
Thanks for the links. I didn't know about SwiftWave.
I have a page with a comparison table of self-hosted PaaS on my site: https://dbohdan.com/self-hosted-paas. It only covers options that don't use Kubernetes. I have just added SwiftWave.
whydid
Because businesses always support their software better than individuals?
cchance
The amount of random 1 man opensource projects holding up industries is shocking XD
sublinear
It's worse for corporate private source projects. Often the docs are lacking and it's essentially a 0-man project.
edoceo
Bus factor maybe? Which is mitigated by good community/contributors
huksley
Remember all those horror stories about ridiculous bills from public cloud providers? I also got $4.5k bill once for simple mistake on AWS.
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't have self hosted or open source but cloud version starts from $1/mo
frainfreeze
I m curious, how do you deploy Next.js apps w/o docker? Self hosted nodejs? Also how much do you lag behind vercel releases?
nine_k
What may be mysterious here? You can have multiple versions of Node installed if needed, and every app brings in the entire dependency tree, isolated from everything else.
If you trust your apps enough, you don't even need chroot.
52-6F-62
Now is a good time to sell licenses around the world.
Edit: just noticed you are in Finland. You might be exactly what I’ve been looking for lately
hk1337
I don't mean it as discouragement but, at least for me, I would choose Heroku or Netlify because I don't want to self host it. I want someone else to manage all those bits for me.
It's good experience building the app though and good to have alternatives available.
TheTaytay
I use (and love) Heroku in my day job, but when experimenting with Hetzner servers (and the like), it’s nice to have a GUI/framework like Coolify to manage the servers in a similar manner.
colesantiago
I’m glad that the age of platform decay and VC backed companies that these OSS alternatives exist to counter this destructive trend of extraction based vendor lock in.
Vercel, Netlify and Heroku will inevitably not exist in 10-20 years but Coolify will, humming along on a regular VPS.
jbaber
As long as you "own" the domain name yourself, so can point anywhere, what's the problem with using a platform and expecting to have to move someday?
nine_k
Money, I suppose? Heroku is notoriously trivial to use, and notoriously expensive for the amount of storage and compute you get.
A semi-successful but not heavily monetized side project on Heroku could cost you an arm and a leg, while running the same thing on some Hetzner box under Dokku, along with a couple of others, may be not that much noticeable.
glenngillen
Heroku has been around for ~17 years at this point. Why do you think it disappears in the next 10?
anamexis
Because Salesforce decides it’s not profitable enough to be worth it, or they want to close Heroku off to Salesforce customers, or any number of other reasons
benatkin
Right, it should say that Heroku has already disappeared.
It's still there but feels like something different from what it once was.
matt-p
I mean obviously we're not really privy to market share but I'd say they've had a pretty massive decline in say the past 5 years or so.
hk1337
That's great. I didn't mean any discouragement as much as to say, I would probably not promote its self hosting ability as much. Promote that it's open source and keep working on it because I am sure you'll learn a lot about the field space. If it comes down to it that Heroku, Netlify, Vercel, and all other PaaS companies are gone, I will most likely just do a VPS or server just for my app than launch my own PaaS.
tl;dr if I am looking for a PaaS, I don't care that it's self hostable. I don't want to host it, that's why I am looking.
benatkin
A good way to promote that it's open source is to describe it as being self hostable and have a get starting page that quickly says how to self host it.
As for user experience, Vercel has a lot of UX talent but it hasn't been a great user experience for me. I had a glitch on their end that prevented the dashboard from loading for me and it took over a week to resolve, and transferring a domain out turned out to be a manual process. Meanwhile I have had great user experiences with spartan open source projects.
bofadeez
The point is the UX is identical with Coolify on a cheap VPS compared to overpriced Heroku/Netlify/Vercel.
Just comparing exact performance and price and features.
A blank linux VPS has a different UI/UX.
Why does it seem like you're deliberately misunderstanding? Do you work for a platform?
W6zVktFA
Coolify unfortunately didn't click with me, and I had a bad experience with a Redis database, so I stopped using it.
I would recommend Elestio (eles[dot]io) as an alternative which isn't open source, or self-hostable, but met my primary goal of drastically reducing cloud costs. And you can bring your own cloud/server, though I'm choosing to also rent from Hetzner through Elestio.
I'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).
maelito
Also checkout Dokploy. Incredible to leave Vercel.
icelancer
Had a bunch of problems trying to host / run this on an internal-only network.
aaomidi
I'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.
It's honestly a shocker to me. There's so much knowledge about the stack that gets lost with these services.
dan_can_code
Very cool options here. I'm always looking for options to throw something on a spare raspberry pi and this looks like a great tool to self-host.
ezekg
Does this project make its money via the cloud offering, or via sponsors? It's kind of unclear.
kikki
Both - but primary the cloud offering. The main author (https://x.com/heyandras) is pretty open about the project revenue its sources. If I remember correctly they're at about 10k MRR mostly from Coolify Cloud.
Edit: Latest "post" (xeet?) https://mobile.x.com/heyandras/status/1901894087604916396 I could find about revenue
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.
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.
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.
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.