Self-hosted PaaS compared 2026: Coolify, Dokploy, CapRover, Dokku and Kamal

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Since February 2026 the question of running your own deployment platform has changed shape. Heroku no longer develops new features, and the search for a replacement regularly leads to a handful of self-hosted platforms that all promise the same thing: push applications to your own servers via Git, with databases, certificates and a reverse proxy included.

The comparisons you find are mostly written by vendors of competing platforms. That is not an accusation, but it shifts the focus: what gets compared are feature lists. What decides the choice in practice are licence terms, upgrade paths and how much operational work remains after setup.

This article assesses five platforms against verifiable criteria. All figures on licences, versions and adoption come from the respective repositories, as of 23 August 2026.

Table of contents

• What changed in February 2026
• The five platforms at a glance
• Licences: where open source ends
• Coolify: the largest feature set
• Dokploy: modern, with a licence boundary
• CapRover: Swarm clustering and a long track record
• Dokku: the command line as the interface
• Kamal: not a PaaS but a deployment tool
• Which platform for which situation
• What a feature comparison does not answer
• How we approach this at WZ-IT
• Further guides

What changed in February 2026

On 6 February 2026 Heroku announced a move to a sustaining engineering model. The wording is unambiguous: the platform focuses on "stability, security, reliability, and support" and emphasises "maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features".

For existing customers nothing changes for now. The announcement states explicitly that "There is no change for customers using Heroku today", and core functionality including applications, pipelines, teams and add-ons is unaffected. This is not an end-of-life notice.

There is one restriction: "Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers." Existing agreements continue to be honoured.

Anyone choosing a platform today for the coming years expects it to keep developing. That expectation is precisely what Heroku no longer meets, and it is the reason for the current move toward self-hosted alternatives.

The five platforms at a glance

All figures from the public repositories, as of 23 August 2026.

Two things stand out. First, four of the five projects shipped a release in August 2026, and all five are active. The common assumption that CapRover has gone quiet does not hold.

Second, Dokploy is considerably larger at nearly 37,000 stars than its framing as a newcomer suggests. It does, however, remain pre-1.0, which matters for the stability of interfaces and behaviour.

Licences: where open source ends

This point decides more often than the feature set, and comparisons almost universally skip it.

Dokploy splits its source. The licence file states that everything in the /proprietary directory falls under the Dokploy Source Available License. Its condition is explicit: the software may be used in production only if a valid commercial agreement with Dokploy is in place. Development and testing are exempt.

This does not make Dokploy a poor choice. It does mean that "open source" describes only part of the platform, and that checking which features live in the proprietary portion belongs before the decision rather than after it.

The other four platforms raise no such question.

Coolify: the largest feature set

Coolify is the best-known of the five and offers the largest catalogue of ready-made services, with more than 280 one-click applications according to the project description. Alongside that come a web interface, Git integration, database management with automated backups and per-branch preview environments.

The flip side of a broad feature set is a fast development pace. Anyone running Coolify in production should not apply updates unchecked but keep a test instance in front.

For an introduction and the comparison against Heroku and Vercel, we covered Coolify in more detail in a separate article on version 4.

Dokploy: modern, with a licence boundary

Dokploy targets the same audience as Coolify, with a leaner interface and Docker Swarm underneath. Development is active and adoption is now substantial.

Two points belong in the assessment. One is the licence split above. The other is the version state: at v0.30.2 the project remains pre-1.0, and pre-release versions customarily reserve the right to change interfaces and behaviour. For a platform carrying production applications, that is a question of upgrade discipline.

CapRover: Swarm clustering and a long track record

CapRover has existed since 2017, making it considerably older than Coolify and Dokploy. It builds on Docker Swarm and therefore brings clustering across multiple servers without requiring Kubernetes. The catalogue covers more than 100 preconfigured applications.

The feature set is smaller than Coolify's and Docker Compose support is limited, because Swarm uses its own format. In exchange, its behaviour has been documented over years, and the number of edge cases you hit without warning is correspondingly lower.

Dokku: the command line as the interface

Dokku is the oldest idea in this list: a lean PaaS on Docker, operated from the command line, extensible through plugins. There is no dashboard.

That is a decision rather than a shortcoming. Teams that script deployments anyway and need no interface for others get the smallest resource footprint and the fewest moving parts. Teams expecting a user interface are in the wrong place.

Kamal: not a PaaS but a deployment tool

Strictly speaking Kamal does not belong in a PaaS list, but it appears in comparisons regularly because it solves the same task from another direction. It rolls containers out to any server over SSH, configured through a YAML file in the project. It is developed by 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Ruby on Rails.

What is missing is missing deliberately: no dashboard, no user management, no service catalogue, no database management. What remains is a reproducible path from container image to server, versioned in the project rather than in a platform database.

For teams treating infrastructure as code, that is an advantage. For teams that need an interface to click, it is not an alternative.

Which platform for which situation

What a feature comparison does not answer

The criteria above are verifiable. The questions that sink projects in production appear in no comparison table:

Who updates the platform? All five projects release regularly. A deployment platform left unpatched for six months eventually becomes the risk that every application runs through. For Coolify we compiled the security advisories of recent years, which shows the order of magnitude.

What happens when the server fails? The platform holds configuration, certificates and environment variables. Without a backup that includes those states and whose restore has been tested, rebuilding is manual work under time pressure.

Who answers at three in the morning? Self-hosted means there is no vendor support. Somebody has to fill that role, internally or by contract.

How do you get out again? The common denominator across all five is the container, so applications can be moved. What does not transfer is reverse proxy configuration, certificate handling, environment variables, database services and backups. Knowing that in advance turns a switch into a project rather than an afternoon.

How we approach this at WZ-IT

We operate Coolify for clients and use it for our own applications. We do not pick a platform by feature count but by three questions: how many applications will run on it, who operates the interface, and who is accountable for updates and restores.

For a single application, a full PaaS is often more effort than benefit. From a handful of applications with databases and several environments onward, that reverses.

We take on operations in full where wanted: platform updates, backups with tested restores, monitoring and incident response. The infrastructure can sit with us or with the client. How this fits with the rest of the infrastructure is described in our services overview.

Further guides

• Coolify v4.0.0: a sovereign deployment platform instead of Heroku and Vercel - the platform in detail
• Coolify CVE overview 2025/2026 - why updates are part of operations
• Deploying AI-generated apps securely - when the application appears faster than the infrastructure beneath it
• Managed open source and managed operations - the operations behind the platform

Unclear which platform fits your stack? We review applications, databases and team, recommend a platform and can take on setup and operations. Book a call

Sources

• Heroku: An Update on Heroku (6 February 2026)
• Coolify on GitHub
• Dokploy on GitHub
• Dokploy: licence file
• CapRover on GitHub
• Dokku on GitHub
• Kamal on GitHub