CapRover

Free self-hosted platform built on Docker Swarm with a dashboard and automatic certificates

As of 31 August 2026, CapRover is free to use. CapRover gives you one-click applications, automatic certificates and a web dashboard on your own server with no paid tier of any kind. Softwr lists it under Cloud. CapRover is made by CapRover (community project, BigZee Ventures LLC), available on Web, Linux, Docker, CLI.

Visit siteVisit CapRover

Overview

What CapRover does

CapRover is a self-hosted platform built on Docker Swarm, nginx and Let's Encrypt. You install it on a server, point a wildcard domain at it, and deploy through a web dashboard, a CLI, a webhook or a git push. It has a catalogue of one-click applications covering databases, content management and monitoring, issues and renews certificates automatically, and lets you edit the underlying nginx configuration when the abstraction gets in the way. The repository was created in October 2017 and has passed 15,000 stars. Positioning has not changed since launch. The thing worth knowing before you commit is the governance, not the feature list. The site footer credits a pseudonym, the LICENSE file carries a copyright for BigZee Ventures LLC, and that file is Apache 2.0 with a superseding appendix stating that paid features of CapRover cannot be modified and that nobody may redistribute another paid version. GitHub classifies the repository licence as unrecognised as a result. There are no paid features today, so the appendix describes a commercial product that does not exist yet, which is a licence change already drafted rather than merely possible. Release cadence supports the concern: an eleven month gap between September 2023 and August 2024, two further gaps of about six months since, and then five releases in August 2026 alone. Buyers are hobbyists, homelab operators and very small teams who want a dashboard and free certificates on one machine and are not writing a risk register. The trade-offs are the ones you would expect from an unfunded single-maintainer project. Donations over the last twelve months came to 285 US dollars, there is no support to buy at any price, and the architecture is tied to Docker Swarm, an orchestrator with no meaningful autoscaling and a shrinking ecosystem, with no migration path off it. Most seriously, the backup feature is documented as experimental and covers the CapRover configuration directory only, explicitly excluding persistent volumes and container images.

What people use it for

Running a personal server or homelab with several applications behind automatic certificates
A two person team that wants a dashboard rather than a terminal for deployments on one box
Standing up one-click databases and internal tools without writing Compose files
Hosting client demos cheaply where downtime is inconvenient rather than expensive

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about CapRover.

Since June 2026 one pseudonymous account wrote 97 of roughly 100 commits and the next human contributor wrote one, so there is no identifiable person or company to contract with, escalate to or hold responsible.
Donations over the last twelve months totalled 285 US dollars and there is no commercial tier, so no paid support exists at any price and no maintenance commitment is funded.
The LICENSE file is Apache 2.0 with a superseding appendix that bans redistributing a paid version and refers to paid features that do not yet exist, and GitHub cannot classify it, so the terms already anticipate a commercial change of direction.
Releases arrive in bursts with an eleven month gap between September 2023 and August 2024 and two further gaps of about six months since, so there is no basis for assuming a security fix will land promptly.
The backup feature is documented as experimental, covers only the CapRover configuration directory and explicitly excludes persistent volumes and container images, so every database has to be dumped separately with its container stopped.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of CapRover

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

CapRovervs
K3s
K3s: Go straight to Kubernetes if you expect to outgrow what Docker Swarm can schedule
CapRovervs
Render
Render: Managed with published prices when a single unfunded maintainer is not an acceptable dependency
CapRovervs
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean: Same class of workload with a vendor that has a support contract and an uptime commitment

Pricing

What CapRover costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

CapRover

Free

No paid tier and no hosted offering
Unlimited applications, servers and users
Community support through Slack and GitHub
Apache 2.0 with a superseding appendix on paid features and redistribution

Capabilities

Features

One-click applications
Catalogue of preconfigured databases, content systems and monitoring tools
Automatic certificates
Let's Encrypt issuance and renewal with HTTP to HTTPS redirection
Web dashboard
Deploy, scale and configure applications without touching the command line
Multiple deploy paths
Dashboard upload, CLI, webhook or git push, all against a Dockerfile
Docker Swarm clustering
Add nodes to the swarm to spread applications across machines
Custom nginx configuration
Edit the generated reverse proxy configuration per application

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Does CapRover cost anything?

No. There is no paid tier and no hosted version. The only income is donations, which came to 285 US dollars over the last twelve months.

Is the licence really Apache 2.0?

Not quite. The LICENSE file is Apache 2.0 plus an appendix that supersedes it in case of conflict, forbidding modification of paid features and redistribution of a paid version. GitHub does not recognise the result as a standard licence.

Does the backup feature protect my databases?

No. It backs up the CapRover configuration directory only and explicitly excludes persistent directories and container images. You have to dump each database yourself with the container stopped.

Can I move off Docker Swarm later?

Not without rebuilding. CapRover is architecturally tied to Swarm, so outgrowing it means migrating applications to a different platform rather than switching a scheduler.

Keep looking

Where to go from CapRover

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for CapRover, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.