Coolify

What is Coolify?

Coolify is an open-source, self-hostable platform as a service. It deploys applications, databases and services to your own servers with a web UI, giving you a Heroku or Vercel style workflow without paying per-project hosting fees.

Best for

Developers who want Vercel-style deploys on their own servers

Why choose Coolify

Coolify is for the developer who has grown out of `docker compose up` on a bare VPS but does not want to hand their deployment to a managed platform with per-seat pricing. It brings the Vercel-style experience — connect a Git repo, pick a branch, get an automatic build, a domain and a certificate — and runs it on servers you rent. Because the servers are yours, the cost of a side project stays at the price of a small VPS no matter how many of them you deploy.

Replaces

• Vercel
• Heroku
• Netlify

Key features

• One-click app and database deploys
• Automatic SSL certificates
• Git-based deployments
• Manages multiple servers

What to watch out for

You are now the platform operator. When a deploy fails at two in the morning, there is no status page to check and no support ticket to file — you read the build log and fix it. Coolify itself is a fairly young project, and rapid development means occasional rough edges and breaking changes between versions; pinning a version and reading release notes is not optional. Configuration that managed platforms handle invisibly — networking, volumes, resource limits — becomes yours to get right.

How to deploy

• Install script
• Docker

Getting started

Install on a fresh VPS with nothing else on it, because Coolify wants to manage Docker and the system's networking directly. Immediately configure the destination server connection and understand which server the control plane runs on versus where apps deploy, since mixing those up is confusing later. Connect a Git provider and deploy something trivial — a static page — before your real application, so you learn the build interface without a deadline. Enable automated backups of the Coolify database early; it holds every application definition and credential you will create.

Typical setup

The standard setup is two servers: one small instance running Coolify itself, and one or more larger ones where applications actually deploy. That separation matters because it means a problem with the control plane does not take your applications down with it. Most users point it at a Git provider, deploy a handful of small applications and a managed database, and end up replacing a monthly platform bill with a couple of inexpensive servers.

Who should look elsewhere

Anyone expecting to stop thinking about infrastructure should look at a managed platform. This replaces a bill, not a responsibility — you still get paged by your own uptime monitor, and a broken deployment is yours to fix. It is also a mismatch for teams with no sysadmin capability whatsoever, and for workloads with strict compliance requirements that need vendor certifications rather than a self-managed server.

Project health

• GitHub stars: 62,450
• Last code push: 2026-09-30
• Open issues: 738
• Status: actively developed

Figures pulled from the GitHub API and refreshed periodically.