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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Self-hosting vs Managed PaaS

  • Some commenters love running Coolify on personal hardware (Raspberry Pi, home servers, Hetzner, colo boxes) and value full control.
  • Others explicitly do not want to self-host: if they’re looking for “a Heroku,” the whole point is to avoid running infrastructure.
  • A middle camp uses Coolify as a nice GUI on top of their own VPS while still preferring managed PaaS for business‑critical apps.

Motivations: Cost, Lock-in, Longevity

  • Hosted PaaS (Heroku, Netlify, Vercel, AWS) is seen as easy but potentially very expensive for modest side projects.
  • Some see OSS PaaS like Coolify as a hedge against vendor lock-in and “platform decay,” expecting big PaaS vendors to change or disappear.
  • Counterpoint: if you control your domain and can migrate, platform churn is manageable.

Coolify: Strengths and Use Cases

  • Widely praised as an easy, low‑maintenance GUI over Docker: one‑click apps, auto‑deploy from Git, wildcard domains, simple DB provisioning, preview environments.
  • Reported to run reliably for many users across dozens to 100+ services, especially for side projects, previews, internal tools, and small production loads.
  • Appreciated that it’s fully open source, self-hostable, with a cloud offering that’s functionally identical but managed.
  • Multi‑maintainer team noted, with active Discord/support and ongoing work on scaling, orchestration, new UI, and backups.

Coolify: Pain Points and Limitations

  • Some describe the UI/UX and dashboard as clunky or confusing, especially around Traefik/Caddy, networking, and “magic variables.”
  • Mixed and conflicting reports on zero‑downtime deploys: some say it was missing or killed in-flight requests; maintainers say rolling updates now exist but docs lag and Docker Compose has limits.
  • Redis issues (intermittent connection failures) and internal‑network hosting problems are mentioned but not fully resolved in the thread.
  • Backups (especially non-DB data) and restore flows are seen as weak; several users bolt on custom backup solutions and want this prioritized.

Alternatives and Ecosystem

  • Frequent comparisons to Dokku, Kamal, CapRover, Dokploy, Easypanel, DollarDeploy, Elestio, and various K8s- or Swarm-based projects.
  • Opinions differ on maturity: some feel Coolify is ahead of other self-hosted PaaS; others prefer Dokku/Kamal plus traditional config tools.
  • Licensing concerns are raised for some competitors (e.g., “open core” with modified or unclear licenses).