Coolify

Coolify — Open-source self-hosted PaaS: git push to your own server, with previews and cron. Coolify turns a plain Linux box into something that behaves like Heroku: git-connected builds, automatic TLS through Traefik, preview deployments per pull request, scheduled tasks and one-click databases. You supply the server and the on-call rotation, and pay nothing for the software. A hosted control plane exists for a few dollars a month, but the servers are still yours and so is the pager. Built by coolLabs. Founded 2021. Sponsorship-funded open source. Open source under Apache-2.0.

We track it in 1 comparison — Vercel alternatives — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 12 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it wins.

• Overage behaviour — throttle, tied for best across 2 of 13 tools.
• Exit friction — 1, tied for best across 3 of 13 tools.
• Self-hostable — Yes, which only 3 of 13 tools here manage.
• Pricing clarity — 5, tied for best across 3 of 13 tools.
• Free tier — 5, tied for best across 3 of 13 tools.

Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.

Where it gives ground.

• WAF & DDoS — No. Vercel records Yes.
• CLI quality — 2, 9th of 13. Vercel records 5.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 21 of 26 tracked fields carry a value for Coolify, and 2 of those cite a document you can open. Last verified 2026-06-15. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is AWS Amplify Hosting. Coolify is ahead on Self-hostable (Yes against No) and Pricing clarity (5 against 2). AWS Amplify Hosting takes Funding (public against oss-community) and WAF & DDoS (Partial against No). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Coolify alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Company

coolLabs

Founded

2021

Funding

Sponsorship-funded open source

Licence

Apache-2.0 (open source)

Fields we track

21 of 26

Last verified

2026-06-15

Astonishingly complete for free software — previews, cron, TLS and databases all work — and one of only two rows where a traffic spike degrades instead of billing. What you take on is the pager, the disk-space alerts and the fact that nobody is coming to help at 3am.

Overage behaviour

throttle1st of 13

Inferred

Exit friction

11st of 13

Inferred

Self-hostable

●Yes1st of 13

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-06-15source

Pricing clarity

51st of 13

Inferred

WAF & DDoS

○No12th of 13

Inferred

Free tier

51st of 13

Inferred

CLI quality

29th of 13

Inferred

Preview deploys

●Yes1st of 13

Inferred

Coolify is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• Teams that already run servers and resent the Vercel invoice.
• Internal tools and staging fleets where downtime is survivable.
• Workloads that must stay in a specific country or jurisdiction.
• Overage behaviour is your binding constraint. Coolify records throttle, the best figure in the Vercel alternatives roster. We define that field as what happens when you get on Hacker News and blow through the included quota on the lowest paid tier.
• Exit friction is your binding constraint. Coolify records 1, the best figure in the Vercel alternatives roster. We define that field as 1–5, lower is better.
• Self-hostable is your binding constraint. Coolify records Yes, which only 3 of the 13 tools in the Vercel alternatives roster do.
• Pricing clarity is your binding constraint. Coolify records 5, the best figure in the Vercel alternatives roster.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• WAF & DDoS. Coolify records No on the Vercel alternatives table. Vercel records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• CLI quality. Coolify records 2, 9th of 13 in the Vercel alternatives roster. Vercel records 5 on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 5 of the 26 fields we track for Coolify are still blank: Fn timeout, Bandwidth price, Price @ 1 TB, Build minutes incl. and Analytics cost. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.