Comparison
Coolify vs Dokploy
| Coolify | Dokploy | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 62,498 | 37,618 |
| License | 📜 Apache-2.0 | 📜 Apache-2.0 |
| Status | Active | Active |
| Momentum |
|
|
| Category | paas, self-hosted, devops | paas, self-hosted, devops |
Coolify
Pros
- Active development, frequent releases
- Broad service catalog (databases, common self-hosted apps) beyond just app hosting
- Works on your own VPS or bare metal, not tied to one cloud
Cons
- You take on the operational burden a managed PaaS would otherwise absorb (updates, backups, uptime)
- Smaller ecosystem and less polish in places than a mature commercial PaaS
- Self-hosting it means you're also responsible for its own security posture
Dokploy
Pros
- Multi-server and Docker Swarm support is a first-class, built-in feature rather than an add-on
- Large, fast-growing template catalog for one-click self-hosted services
- Active development and a large community following its rapid growth
Cons
- Some enterprise features — SSO/SAML, audit logging, white-labeling, SCIM provisioning, and custom roles — require a separate paid license key from the Dokploy team; the core deployment platform itself stays Apache-2.0
- Multi-server support orchestrates workloads across machines you provision and join yourself — it doesn't provision servers, autoscale, or recover a dead node on its own, so it suits a small, hand-managed fleet more than a large dynamic one
- Self-hosting it means you're also responsible for its own security posture and uptime
How they differ
Both are self-hostable, Heroku/Vercel-style PaaS tools that wrap Docker behind a web UI and a Git-push deploy workflow, and each lists the other as its open-source alternative — the split is mainly in how each handles more than one server.
Dokploy builds multi-server deployment on Docker Swarm: it's a first-class, built-in feature, letting you join multiple machines into a Swarm cluster and deploy across them, alongside managed MySQL/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/MariaDB/Redis instances with built-in backups and Traefik-based routing/TLS out of the box.
Coolify deploys the same application image to multiple connected servers too, but without Swarm orchestration underneath: each server runs the deployed container standalone, and Coolify expects an external, provider-managed load balancer to direct traffic to the healthy instances. Per Coolify's own docs, its Docker Swarm support is already deprecated and slated for removal in Coolify v5, with native Docker Compose scaling and a Coolify-built scaling mechanism planned as the replacement. Coolify's own catalog of one-click templates for databases and other self-hosted services is broad, but that multi-server story currently leans more on external infrastructure than Dokploy's built-in Swarm clustering.
In short: reach for Dokploy if you want multi-server orchestration (Swarm) and database provisioning built into the platform itself; reach for Coolify if you're comfortable pairing its one-click template catalog with your own external load balancer for multi-server setups, or are running on a single server where this difference doesn't come up.