Coolifyvs
Render
Render: Fully managed with published prices if you would rather not own or patch a server
Coolify
Open source self-hosted platform that deploys applications and databases to servers you already own
As of 31 August 2026, Coolify has a free plan and paid plans start at $5/month. Coolify is an Apache-2. Softwr lists it under Cloud. Coolify is made by coolLabs Solutions Kft, available on Web, Linux, Docker, Self-hosted.
Overview
What Coolify does
Coolify is built by coolLabs Solutions Kft, a Hungarian private limited company, and was started by Andras Bacsai in January 2021. It installs on a virtual private server, an EC2 instance, a Hetzner box or a spare machine, and gives you deployments from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or Gitea, automatic HTTPS certificates, database provisioning and a large catalogue of one-click services. It has not repositioned since launch and describes itself directly as a self-hostable alternative to the managed platforms. The distinction that matters commercially is the shape of the paid tier. Coolify Cloud costs five US dollars a month for two connected servers and three dollars a month for each additional one, and what that money buys is the hosting, updating, backing up and high availability of the Coolify control panel. It buys no application features at all, and the project publishes an explicit commitment that nothing is locked behind a paywall. So the question a buyer answers is not what the paid version unlocks, it is whether they want to be responsible for keeping the dashboard alive, because in self-hosted mode that single machine holds every SSH key and secret and has no documented high availability story. Buyers are solo developers, small product teams and agencies swapping a managed platform bill for a cheap virtual private server, plus teams that need deployments inside a jurisdiction where no managed platform has a region. The trade-off is concentration risk. Commit history since June 2026 shows one maintainer at 73 commits and a second at 15, with nobody else above one, and that same pair also ships four other coolLabs products. Multi-server support is documented as experimental, and scheduled backups cover databases only.
What people use it for
- Replacing a managed platform bill with a single Hetzner or DigitalOcean instance running a dozen small applications
- An agency hosting many low-traffic client sites on shared servers with certificates handled automatically
- Self-hosting analytics, databases and internal tools from the one-click catalogue without writing Compose files
- Deploying inside a country or jurisdiction where no managed platform operates a region
Related searches
The honest half
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 Coolify.
- Commit history since June 2026 shows one maintainer at 73 commits and a second at 15 with nobody else above one, and the same two people also ship four other coolLabs products, so the project depends on a very small number of individuals.
- Multi-server support is documented as experimental, load balancer configuration is manual, every server must share the same CPU architecture, and moving images between hosts requires you to run your own Docker registry.
- In self-hosted mode the Coolify machine holds every SSH key and secret with no documented high availability, so the dashboard host is a single point of failure that the paid Cloud tier fixes and self-hosting does not.
- Scheduled S3 backups cover PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB and MongoDB only, so application persistent volumes are your responsibility and a restore is untested unless you test it yourself.
- Release cadence is fast enough that six patch versions shipped inside ten days in August 2026 against several hundred open issues, and because instances can update themselves a regression can reach a production host before you have read the changelog.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Coolify
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.
- CoolifyvsRailway
Railway: Managed and usage priced, better when the operational burden matters more than the monthly bill
- CoolifyvsHeroku
Heroku: Still the reference for buildpack deployments when you want a vendor with a support contract
Pricing
What Coolify costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Self-hosted
Free
- Apache-2.0, no features held back
- Unlimited servers, applications and users
- You run, update and back up the dashboard yourself
- Community support
Cloud
$5 /mo
- Connects 2 servers, then 3 US dollars a month per extra server
- Managed and updated Coolify dashboard with high availability
- Managed backups of the Coolify instance itself
- Email alerts without your own SMTP provider
- Priority email support
- 20 per cent discount on annual billing
Capabilities
Features
Git push deployments
Builds and deploys from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or Gitea, hosted or self-hosted
One-click services
Around 280 templates covering databases, analytics, monitoring and self-hosted applications
Automatic certificates
Provisions and renews HTTPS certificates without configuration
Managed databases
Provisions PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis and others with scheduled S3 backups
Docker Compose support
Deploys existing Compose files rather than requiring a proprietary manifest
Notifications
Deployment and failure alerts to email, Discord and Telegram
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.
Is anything held back for the paid tier?
No. Coolify Cloud hosts, updates and backs up the dashboard and gives it high availability. Every feature that touches your applications is in the Apache-2.0 build you can run yourself.
What does Coolify Cloud cost?
Five US dollars a month connects two servers, and each additional server is three dollars a month, with 20 per cent off for annual billing. You still supply and pay for the servers themselves.
Does it back up my application data?
It backs up PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB and MongoDB to S3 on a schedule. Application persistent volumes are not covered, so anything stored outside a managed database needs your own backup plan.
Can I run it across several servers?
Yes, but the documentation calls multi-server experimental. Load balancing is not configured for you, all nodes must share a CPU architecture, and you need to run your own Docker registry.
Keep looking
Where to go from Coolify
- Coolify alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Coolify pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Coolify badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Cloud softwareThe full category
- Best Cloud softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Cloud software for
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Coolify, 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.
More on Coolify
Coolify alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Coolify pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Coolify
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Coolify badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
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