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.
Kamal has a lot of rough edges (still can’t support custom certs for example) but is still a far more mature solution. It does less but better.
Kamal proxy is good enough to sit behind a load balancer. I would not let it be what a client sees. There are some major features missing and it just hasn’t been battle tested enough to be subjected to DDoS type traffic, etc.
Overall, I do like the Kamal approach which basically boils down to the fact that instead of a complicated cluster orchestration system the developers decide which machines code runs on.
Once it has real support for doing DB migrations as a part of its deploys, a proxy that is less magical and more feature rich, and its CLI fixes some poorly documented and frankly somewhat annoying issues it will be a real workhorse.
I am also curious about Dokku + k3s. I have used Dokku for a long time but only on a single host.
Thanks for sharing this. I was thinking of giving it a try, but hearing that zero downtime deployments don't work is a deal breaker for me, which is sad because Coolify looks amazing otherwise.
I do wonder though, why do we even need an alternative to Dokku when it seems to provide everything we need?
Had the exact same experience. Incredibly clunky UI/UX.
For docker-compose, I had to create a specific one for Coolify because it goes and does its own magic.
Tried Dokploy(similar service), better UI but lacking in docs.
In the right hands, these products could be so much better.
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.
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
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.
There is also piku, sort of a tiny dokku; https://github.com/piku/piku
Because businesses always support their software better than individuals?
He did not say "companies vs individuals", he said "single maintainer", which is obviously a high risk factor to consider IMHO.
I wonder why they all start their own projects instead of putting their heads together. They could achieve so much more and make a bit more money on the side, while each of them would have to spend less time on it. It would also attract risk-averse companies.
The amount of random 1 man opensource projects holding up industries is shocking XD
It's worse for corporate private source projects. Often the docs are lacking and it's essentially a 0-man project.
Second this! I just got hired for a short-term project to extend a payment solution I once wrote when I was employed by that company.
I was amazed to find that a) nobody maintained the project after I left, there were only two minor fixes because their house was on fire, and b) I really took the time to write almost complete documentation on all the important topics, which helped me get back on track faster.
You are absolutely right, and I have experienced this most of the time. The problem is that it is an uphill battle to explain to most stakeholders why you are "wasting" so much time on non-customer facing documentation.
It is hard enough to convince even technical stakeholders (e.g. product owners) to write automated tests.
While at the time I mostly think it's bad, later on it forces them to pay me twice as much, so I guess it's not as bad as I always think in those moments :D
0 man + one accounts dept
Bus factor maybe? Which is mitigated by good community/contributors
What is DCR?
I’m wondering the same thing. Docker Container Registry maybe?
Makes sense.
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.
I have (re)installed it recently and I can't find the apps backup. The only backup that seems to run in settings is the coolify instance backup.
Moreover I don't see a way to restore a coolify hosted app from the gui (couldn't find one in the doc too). The documentation around traefik and caddy is lackink a bit. It seems they want you to expose the coolify server directly on the internet. I prefer to host my services behind a cloudflare tunnel and it was a bit janky to setup.
It's low maintenance and stable and certainly has come a long way since I tried it about 2 years ago but there is still many improvements to make.
Btw, did you know about unattended upgrades?
Just curious as the stated reason for the stated reason would become almost unnecessary with that
I maybe the only person on here that had no idea this is a thing, but thank you this is incredible
Same here! Been self hosting on hetzner for about a year now, and support the OSS project for $10/month. Love how it can auto-deploy new git commits, deploy Postgres or any database to the same or separate servers, and you can cram as many apps or docker containers onto a single VPS or move them to a separate server when you need to.
Finally, little utilities like snapdrop or mosquitto are a button click away. Strongly recommended - it’s liberating! I don’t need to re-learn every PaaS vendor’s system - my PaaS comes with me. And a junior can be onboarded to this UI way easier than dokku or kamal IMO.
Another commenter mentioned that zero downtime deployments are not possible, isn't this a loss in your opinion, or did you find a way to do it using Coolify?
They were mistaken or maybe referring to an older version, because I definitively use rolling zero downtime updates from commits
For true zero downtime, the connections have to be slowly drained, i.e. two all instances may exist at the same time. Does coolify support that?
"Move them to a separate server" - is that easy to do using Coolify?
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
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?
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.
I have much more peace of mind when it's not in chroot but even better inside systemd unit and all that ReadonlyPath and capabilities applied. In the ideal case network access beyond localhost and may be db is denied for greater safety
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
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'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't get any of the alternatives to works the same way, yet.
One alternative that works is an nginx reverese proxy and 10 minutes of configuration :P
Replacement: I wrote something here and then deleted it. You may also want to rethink about your comment.
[deleted]
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.
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.
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.
Heroku has been around for ~17 years at this point. Why do you think it disappears in the next 10?
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
Because it was acquired by Salesforce.
Right, it should say that Heroku has already disappeared.
It's still there but feels like something different from what it once was.
Migration to fly.io is simple enough ... it is much closer to the original Heroku both technically and as company (if you ever need to contact them)
I work there. We are still around. Maybe not making waves as much as we used to but still hacking on stuff.
Right now I’m in the progress of rolling out a new platform powered by Cloud Native Buildpacks that allow you to build an OCI image locally. Here’s some language specific getting started (local) tutorials https://github.com/heroku/buildpacks#heroku-cloud-native-bui...
Sweet. I know. I even have the $5/mo plan just to keep https://anigram.herokuapp.com/ online :)
Nice to hear about the buildpacks. I use Containerfiles but since switching to Podman and Fedora/RockyLinux I've seen stuff about OpenShift which supports buildpacks. https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-base-container/
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
I feel like you got lost in my example/rambling that I probably shouldn't have said like that.
If I am a user looking for some place to host my application, I do not care that one service can be self hosted. I have already made my decision that I am going to host it somewhere else, so I am not going self host the PaaS just to host my application myself.
It can still be self hostable, just put it in the developer documentation and not necessarily promoting it so much on the main page.
I have a big issue with any self hosted alternative to name your paas here. 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’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.
Perhaps a bit tangential on the subject, but in the same spirit - does anyone know of an open source self-hostable alternative to runpod/vast for managing your GPUs? Our small team has some bare metal servers and I'd like to try something light to manage / reserve instances w/ 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).
we are using claudie(.io) together with ray. but we put a lot time into the infrastructure but we managed to cut our cost for a factor of 20x by doing this.
No idea why there's almost no PaaS solution for Kubernetes. It would be a great platform with some add-ons. I know there'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.
There's also Korifi which implements the Cloud Foundry API on Kubernetes but it's still in progress and its future might be uncertain.
What about https://syself.com/ ? Haven't used it yet, but I read about in on HN and bookmarked it for future reference..
I hadn't heard about it but it seems just like management for Kubernetes not a layer on top to enable PaaS, although it has managed databases. Also it doesn't seem to be open source. Thanks for the pointer, though.
Also checkout Dokploy. Incredible to leave Vercel.
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).
Interesting, what was bad about your Redis experience on Coolify? I was just about to do the same for a personal project.
I'm sorry for being a bit off-topic, but I'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 "managed" and reliable infra.
https://stacktape.com is a Heroku/Vercel-like PaaS platform that deploys directly to your own AWS account.
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/Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch, etc..
You can deploy from console, using git-push-to-deploy, or even use preview deployments (ephemeral environments for every PR).
Compared to alternatives, it's both very easy to use, and flexible/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.
It’s very much on-topic. You’re just shilling your own product under the thread of a similar product, nothing to be ashamed off chief. Shill away.
It's completely true, and I AM ashamed for doing it. But it's a terrible time to be a PaaS founder, since there are very few new projects being started at the moment. Without exaggeration, I think there are somewhere between 10% and 20% of new projects being started (which is the only point people will actually choose to use our platform) compared to 2022. Hard times, lower standards. Sorry. We've got ~40 website visitors from that comment so far, and I can't pass on that.
Well, what did you see that gave you that impression? About less new projects being started. This got me super curious.
3 things:
- Situation on the SWE hiring market. It's way harder to find a job.
- I personally know people from SW dev agencies that are all saying its very hard to find an opportunity (project) to work on.
- In fact, I'm 99% convinced that we're in a recession, even though its not official. Companies are cutting costs left and right. And think about it this way. When a company invests in a software, it's an investment for them, which will eventually pay for itself in a few years. But if the company is struggling to just stay alive, investments are the first thing they cut.
Plus points for any language, I dislike how Vercel and Nelify build up on AWS and then we only get JS/TS/Go, or WebAssembly gimmicks.
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.
Coolify is cool, pun intended, but a bit clunky (maybe due to the PHP nature of it), I recommend Dokploy these days.
I would love to move away from railway to Coolify or dokploy. Someday.
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.
Had a bunch of problems trying to host / run this on an internal-only network.
Does this project make its money via the cloud offering, or via sponsors? It's kind of unclear.
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
Anyone know how this compares to caprover?
Love my Coolify Setup!
[flagged]
I appreciate the caution - and although they're close in spelling, I'd wager coolify is recognized by the majority as adding the suffix 'ify' to 'cool' rather than the term you've highlighted.
[dead]
Well then, luckily the name is "Coolify" and not "Coolie."
Wow, a nearly two decade old account, pretty cool, and still recently used too. I find a lot of old accounts simply are not used anymore, for whatever reason. I don't think pg even posts here anymore.
[flagged]
Firstly I think it's a little impolite to frame a opensource project trying to find a sustainable funding model as "weird", whatever your concerns this is still much better than closed source.
I don't think the number of people who want to FTP stuff is very high anymore, we are all storing our code in git and therefore want to deploy on a commit or tag. We probably care about SSL, maybe we need to build our code before it can be deployed and so on.
This is true for any self-host OSS project. You are pointing at the grass and warning people that it is green.
I believe that Opalstack is what you're looking for. I've used their service for a while.