Dokploy vs Coolify in 2026: Footprint, Features, Cloud Plans and Which One to Self-Host

Dokploy and Coolify are the two self-hosted platform-as-a-service tools most teams end up choosing between in 2026: both replace Heroku, Vercel or Railway with a dashboard on a server you own, both are free and open source, and both are growing fast. They are not the same product, though, and most comparisons stop at "Coolify has more features, Dokploy is lighter". This one goes through the architecture, the build pipeline, multi-server support, backups, monitoring, the paid Cloud tiers and the licences, with figures from the projects' own documentation and repositories on 31 October 2026, and ends with the server either one needs.

Quick verdict

Pick Dokploy if you want the lighter platform, Docker Compose as a first-class citizen, Docker Swarm clustering and a build server, and you are happy with a smaller but fast-growing community. Pick Coolify if you want the biggest catalogue of one-click services, built-in server monitoring, the larger community, and a management model where you deploy specific apps to specific servers over SSH. Both are free and open source, both install with one command, both put Traefik and Let's Encrypt in front of your containers, and both sell an optional hosted dashboard. Neither is a wrong choice; the differences below decide which is the better one for your team.

What they have in common

Connect a Git repository (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or Gitea), push, and a container is built, started and given a domain with an automatic certificate. Both deploy Docker Compose stacks and prebuilt images, manage databases as services with scheduled backups to S3-compatible storage, offer preview deployments for pull requests, rollbacks, environment variables, a web terminal, notifications, an API, team members with permissions, and a large catalogue of one-click open-source apps. Both run on a single Linux server with 2 GB of RAM as the documented minimum and both get uncomfortable there once real workloads arrive. Our Dokploy requirements guide explains the sizing arithmetic, and it applies to Coolify with slightly larger numbers.

Architecture and footprint

Dokploy is a Next.js application with its own PostgreSQL database and Traefik, installed as Docker Swarm services (the installer initialises Swarm on the server; Redis was dropped from self-hosted installs in v0.29.9). Coolify is a Laravel application with PostgreSQL, Redis and a realtime service, plus a proxy (Traefik by default, Caddy as an option), running as plain Docker containers. Our earlier measurements on idle installs put Dokploy at roughly 350 to 450 MB of RAM and Coolify at 500 to 700 MB, with Coolify running more containers; on a 4 GB server that is the difference between about 3.6 GB and 3.3 GB left for your applications, which matters on the smallest servers and stops mattering at 8 GB.

Builds, Compose and templates

In practice the build experience is close. Dokploy's extra build types (Heroku and Paketo buildpacks, Static) help teams migrating from Heroku or deploying static sites; Coolify's larger service catalogue helps teams who self-host a lot of third-party software.

Multi-server, clusters and monitoring

This is the real architectural difference. Coolify manages many servers from one dashboard over SSH: you decide which application runs on which server, Coolify installs the proxy there and deploys to it. It is multi-server management, not clustering. Dokploy does the same with Remote Servers (deployment and build servers over SSH) and additionally offers a Docker Swarm cluster: worker nodes join the manager, images go through a container registry, and Swarm schedules replicas across nodes with rolling updates. If you want a scheduler to place and restart containers for you, only Dokploy offers it; if you want to pin apps to servers explicitly, both do.

Monitoring runs the other way. Coolify ships Sentinel, its own metrics agent, with server and container graphs in the dashboard. Dokploy's full monitoring dashboard is a Dokploy Cloud feature; the self-hosted edition shows container metrics and logs, remote servers are not monitored, and the project's hardening guide tells self-hosters to ship logs to an external system. Teams that want graphs without extra tooling will prefer Coolify here.

Databases, backups and recovery

Both provision PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB and Redis as services with scheduled dumps to S3-compatible storage (Dokploy also lists libsql). Dokploy adds Volume Backups for named volumes and an instance backup of its own database and configuration that restores onto a new server, which is the supported migration path; Coolify backs up its own instance database as well. Neither encrypts archives client-side, so both projects' guidance is to enable server-side encryption on the bucket and scope the credentials. Our Dokploy backup guide and the Coolify backup strategy post cover each.

Community, licensing and the paid tiers

Prices and star counts from docs.dokploy.com, coolify.io and GitHub on 31 October 2026. Both hosted dashboards leave your applications on servers you rent; see our Dokploy Cloud cost comparison and the Coolify Cloud comparison.

Where Coolify is better

• The largest one-click catalogue and the largest community, which means more answers already written when something breaks.
• Built-in monitoring with Sentinel in the free self-hosted edition.
• Broader operating system and architecture support, including arm64 and Raspberry Pi.
• Caddy as an alternative proxy for teams that prefer it.
• Coolify Cloud's $5 covers two servers, cheaper than Dokploy Cloud for exactly two.

Where Dokploy is better

• The lighter footprint, which is real money on 2 to 4 GB servers.
• Docker Swarm clustering with a scheduler, in addition to SSH-managed remote servers.
• More build types (Heroku and Paketo buildpacks, Static) and configurable build concurrency per server.
• Volume backups and the instance backup and restore workflow for moving servers.
• Enterprise features (SSO, SCIM, audit logs) for organisations that need them, and passkeys for everyone.
• Dokploy Cloud is cheaper from three servers up ($15 for three against $8 for two plus $3 each, so parity at three and cheaper beyond).

A footnote on CapRover

CapRover (15,200 stars) predates both, uses Nginx rather than Traefik and Docker Swarm for clustering, and has a large one-click app library. It is stable and well understood, but its Docker Compose support is limited and development is slower, which is why most 2026 shortlists have become Dokploy versus Coolify. If you want all four options weighed by team profile, including Coolify Cloud, read our four-way decision guide.

The server underneath either one

Whichever you choose, the infrastructure decides most of the user-visible reliability: builds pin every core, databases want memory, a full disk takes the dashboard down, and a single-host VPS takes everything with it when the hardware fails. MassiveGRID has a preset configurator for each platform, Dokploy hosting and Coolify hosting, with the same four sizes: Starter (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 64 GB NVMe) at $9.58 a month on shared cores or $19.80 dedicated, Growth (4 vCPU, 8 GB) at $19.16 or $39.60, on a Proxmox HA cluster with Ceph storage, a 100% uptime SLA and a 15-day money-back guarantee. Installation of either platform is free on request after ordering. Give Coolify the Growth preset a little sooner than Dokploy; everything else about the hosting decision is identical.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Dokploy or Coolify easier to install?

They are equal: one command on a fresh Ubuntu or Debian server, a dashboard a few minutes later. Dokploy needs ports 80, 443 and 3000 free and initialises Docker Swarm; Coolify serves its dashboard on port 8000. MassiveGRID installs either for you on request after you order a server.

Which uses less RAM, Dokploy or Coolify?

Dokploy. Our idle measurements put Dokploy at roughly 350 to 450 MB and Coolify at 500 to 700 MB, because Coolify runs more platform containers (Laravel app, PostgreSQL, Redis, realtime service, proxy). The gap matters on a 2 to 4 GB server and is negligible at 8 GB and above.

Can I migrate from Coolify to Dokploy, or the other way?

Yes, but not automatically. Both deploy standard Docker containers from Git repositories, Compose files or images, so you recreate each service in the other dashboard, point it at the same repository, move database dumps and volumes with the backup tools, and switch DNS. Keep both servers running until the new one has served real traffic.