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Coolify and Dokploy are the two self-hosted PaaS tools currently fighting for attention in the "we're done with Vercel" market. Both run on a VPS, both let you deploy from a Git push, both handle SSL automatically through Traefik, both support Docker Compose and one-click services. They're more similar than different. The ways they differ tend to matter only for specific use cases, so picking one isn't a lifestyle choice, it's a fit-for-the-app decision.
I've run both. LumaDock ships pre-configured templates for both because customers ask for both, which means we don't really care which one wins this comparison, the dog in this fight is "self-hosting on a VPS" and both tools deliver that. What follows is the actual comparison, hands-on, with concrete recommendations at the end. If you want a wider survey beyond just these two, the Coolify alternatives roundup covers Dokku, CapRover, Easypanel and Portainer too.
If you don't have either running yet, the LumaDock Coolify VPS and the equivalent Dokploy template both ship with the platform pre-installed on a fresh Debian 12 box. You can spin one up, decide it's not for you, terminate the VPS and try the other in 30 minutes. The cost of evaluating both is genuinely tiny.
Origin stories and where they're going
Coolify
Started in 2021 by Andras Bacsai as a side project, became his full-time job a year later. Built in Laravel + Livewire + Alpine, which means the whole control plane is one PHP application running in a Docker container. The v3 to v4 transition (mostly through 2024) reworked the UI extensively and added multi-server support, build servers, granular notifications and a redesigned token permission model. v4.0.0 stable shipped in early 2026 after about a year of beta cycles. Active development, regular releases, an enthusiastic but small core team.
The community is on Discord (around 20,000 members), the GitHub repo is at coollabsio/coolify with about 40,000 stars at the time of writing and Coolify Cloud (the managed offering) provides paid hosting for people who don't want to self-host the control plane itself. The OSS version is licensed under Apache 2.0.
Dokploy
Started in 2024 by Mauricio Siu, written in TypeScript with Next.js + Drizzle for the control plane. Younger project, narrower scope at the start, has been catching up fast on features. Built around Docker Swarm rather than plain Docker, which gives it native multi-node support out of the box and makes the architecture more scale-oriented from the beginning.
The community is on Discord (around 4,000 members), GitHub repo at Dokploy/dokploy with around 15,000 stars, also offers a managed cloud version. License is Apache 2.0.
Architecture differences that matter to me
Coolify uses Docker, Dokploy uses Docker Swarm
This is the biggest under-the-hood difference and it has practical consequences. Coolify runs your applications as plain Docker containers on a single host (or coordinates them across multiple hosts via SSH for multi-server setups). Dokploy runs everything as Docker Swarm services, which is Docker's built-in clustering layer.
For a single-VPS deployment the difference is barely visible. Both look the same from the dashboard.
For multi-node setups, Dokploy is structurally cleaner. Adding a worker node to Dokploy is a single Swarm join command. Adding a node to Coolify involves SSH key setup, Coolify's own multi-server orchestration logic and registry configuration. Dokploy wins on multi-node ergonomics.
For service health management, Swarm has built-in rolling deploys, automatic rescheduling on node failure and load balancing across replicas. Coolify can do all of this but the integration is less transparent, you're more aware of the moving parts.
Coolify is one big Laravel app, Dokploy is one big Next.js app
This matters for a few reasons. Coolify's source is PHP, easier to read and modify if you know Laravel, harder if you don't. Dokploy's source is TypeScript, easier for the average developer in 2026 to understand. Both are open source so you can dig in.
Memory footprints are similar (~600 MB for the control plane in both cases) but the failure modes differ. Coolify occasionally has Livewire-related quirks where the dashboard goes laggy if you have a lot of resources open in browser tabs. Dokploy's frontend is sturdier in this respect but has its own occasional state synchronization issues with Swarm where the UI shows stale service status.
Build pack support
Coolify supports Nixpacks (default), Dockerfile and Docker Compose, plus Static (Caddy-served). Dokploy supports the same set plus Heroku Buildpacks (legacy v2 buildpacks).
Heroku buildpack support is the kind of thing that doesn't matter if you've never used it and matters a lot if you've been on Heroku for years. If you have a working heroku deploy and want to lift-and-shift, Dokploy can run your existing buildpack without a code change. With Coolify you'd need to add a Dockerfile or rely on Nixpacks detecting the right setup.
Feature comparison - the things people ask about
One-click services catalog
Coolify advertises 280+ one-click services. Dokploy's catalog is smaller, around 80-100 templates last I checked. Both cover the headline self-hosting items (n8n, Strapi, Ghost, Wordpress, Plausible, Umami, Mautic, NocoDB, Supabase, etc.). Coolify has noticeably more obscure services available (some niche AI/vector DB services, less-mainstream productivity tools, etc.).
For mainstream use cases the difference is irrelevant. For "I want to host this specific obscure tool" the breadth matters and Coolify wins.
PR preview deployments
Both support per-PR preview deployments through GitHub App integration. Coolify's setup is documented in the official docs and works reliably. Dokploy's preview support landed in late 2025 and works similarly, though the configuration UI is slightly less mature.
For a head-to-head, the workflow is essentially identical. Coolify has a slight edge on the comment-on-PR experience (the formatting and reliability), Dokploy's UI is a bit cleaner. For a deeper dive on the Coolify side, see the Coolify GitHub PR previews guide.
Database backups
Coolify has built-in scheduled backups with S3-compatible storage support, retention policies and a UI for configuring all of it. Dokploy has the same in newer versions (added through 2025). Both work. The Coolify backups guide covers the Coolify side in detail. Dokploy's version is structurally similar.
Multi-server / multi-node
Dokploy wins this category cleanly. Adding a Swarm worker is one command. Coolify's multi-server feature works but requires more setup (SSH keys, registry, architecture matching).
For 90% of users this is irrelevant because they're running everything on one VPS. For agencies or SaaS at scale, Dokploy's multi-node story is more polished.
Build server feature
Coolify v4 has a dedicated Build Server feature where builds run on a separate machine and the resulting Docker image is pulled to the runtime server. Useful for keeping builds off your production VPS.
Dokploy has a similar pattern through Swarm placement constraints (build runs on the manager, app runs on workers). It works differently but achieves the same outcome.
For agencies running many client sites and worried about builds OOMing production, both tools support the pattern. The Coolify version is more explicit, the Dokploy version is more implicit.
Scheduled tasks (cron)
Both have built-in scheduled task support. You configure cron expressions in the UI, the platform runs the command at the right time. Both work. Dokploy's UI is slightly cleaner here, Coolify's has a few more options (per-task email notifications, retry behavior).
Notifications
Coolify supports email, Slack, Discord, Pushover and a few others, with granular per-event notification settings (deploy success, deploy failure, backup success, backup failure, scheduled task failure, disk usage, server reachability, etc.). The v4.0.0-beta.377 release reworked the entire notification system and the result is impressive.
Dokploy supports email, Slack, Discord and Telegram, with simpler per-event toggles. Less granular than Coolify but covers the common cases.
For mainstream use Dokploy is fine. For setups where you specifically want different alert channels for different events, Coolify is better.
UI and dashboard
Subjective. Coolify's UI is functional, sometimes feels dense, occasionally has Livewire-related lag in browsers with lots of open tabs. Dokploy's UI is cleaner-looking, better whitespace, more modern feeling. Both are fine to use day to day.
If you care about how the dashboard looks (you'll be staring at it a lot), spend 10 minutes in the demo of each before committing.
Deployment performance
For a typical Next.js or Laravel app on a 4 GB VPS, both platforms produce builds in similar time, 60-90 seconds for a warm cache, 2-3 minutes cold. The build pack itself (Nixpacks in both cases) does most of the work, the platform's overhead is negligible.
Container start time after a successful build is similar, 5-15 seconds depending on the image size and what's in your entrypoint. Both platforms wait for a health check before swapping traffic, which means zero-downtime deploys are achievable on both.
Where they diverge slightly is on horizontal scaling. Dokploy's Swarm-based service scaling is one click in the UI, "set replicas to 3" and you have three containers. Coolify can scale (using Docker Compose's deploy.replicas) but it's more manual.
Community and tutorial coverage
Coolify has the bigger community by GitHub stars, Discord membership and overall activity. The community is more international (large EU and Asian presence) and has been around longer. Tutorial content, third-party blog posts and YouTube videos are more abundant.
Dokploy is younger but very active. The Discord is more focused (smaller community, but less noise per member). The community feels closer to the maintainer, you'll see Mauricio responding to questions directly.
Both have responsive maintainers and active GitHub issue triage. Both fix critical bugs quickly. The community responsiveness on either side is a non-issue.
Pricing of the managed cloud versions
Both projects offer a managed cloud version of their control plane, which is the way the maintainers fund development. Self-hosted is free in both cases (Apache 2.0 license).
Coolify Cloud starts around $5/month base for the control plane, plus around $3/month per additional managed server. Dokploy Cloud's pricing is similar, around $4-6/month base plus per-server.
For LumaDock customers running Coolify or Dokploy on a self-hosted VPS, you pay only for the VPS, the control plane is free. The managed cloud is for people who specifically don't want to maintain the control plane themselves, which is a small minority of self-hosted PaaS users.
When to pick Coolify
You're running a single VPS with a few apps, you want a mature community, you care about the breadth of one-click services, you appreciate granular notification settings, you don't need multi-node clustering. The 4 GB and 8 GB LumaDock Coolify VPS plans are sized for exactly this profile.
You're migrating from Heroku and want broad framework support across Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby and Go without thinking about it. The Heroku migration guide covers this case.
You're running an agency with many client sites and want them isolated cleanly via Docker without the operational complexity of Swarm. Coolify's per-app container model fits this well.
You like the Laravel-flavored UI vibe and don't mind the occasional Livewire quirk.
When to pick Dokploy
You're going to need multi-node clustering soon, either for high availability or for cost reasons (running build workers separately from runtime or splitting across multiple smaller VPS instances). Dokploy's Swarm-native architecture is meaningfully cleaner for this.
You have legacy Heroku v2 buildpacks you want to keep using. Dokploy supports them directly, Coolify doesn't.
You want a slightly cleaner-looking UI and you'll be staring at it a lot.
You're early-adopter-ish and want to be on a project that's growing fast and where the maintainer is more accessible.
Lower-priority comparison points
Star count
Coolify has more stars on GitHub. This doesn't actually predict tool quality, only project age and marketing. Both are well-maintained.
The "big company adopter" question
Neither has Vercel-tier enterprise customers. Both are predominantly used by indie developers, small teams and small-to-medium agencies. If you're picking a tool for a Fortune 500 use case, neither of these is the right answer, you're looking at AWS App Runner, Google Cloud Run or building on Kubernetes directly.
Performance benchmarks
Internet "Coolify vs Dokploy benchmark" articles tend to compare deploy times on contrived test setups. The performance difference between them on real apps is in the noise. Pick based on UX, community fit and architecture, not on if deploys take 70 seconds vs 75 seconds.
The honest verdict
For most users the answer is: pick Coolify. It has the broader community, more one-click services, more tutorials and a more mature feature set. Run it on a 4 GB or 8 GB VPS, deploy your apps, you'll be happy.
Switch to Dokploy if you're explicitly going to need multi-node clustering, if you have Heroku v2 buildpacks you want to keep or if the UI aesthetic matters more to you than community breadth. None of these are bad reasons.
The deeper truth is that this comparison stops mattering 30 days into using whichever you picked. Both let you ship apps from Git pushes, both have automatic SSL, both manage databases, both support previews. The day-to-day experience is similar enough that switching costs aren't trivial but aren't catastrophic either.
Try one. If it doesn't fit, try the other. The LumaDock Coolify VPS and Dokploy template both ship with the platform pre-installed, so you can compare both with a 30-day refund window. The only loss is an evening of poking at dashboards. The win is committing to the right tool with first-hand context instead of based on which comparison article ranked highest in Google.
