Coolify vs Dokploy: Which Self-Hosted PaaS Should You Choose? (2026)
Coolify and Dokploy both turn a VPS into a Heroku-style platform: push code, get a URL, forget about Nginx configs and SSL certificates. Both are Apache-2.0 licensed, both install with a single command, and both support Docker Compose deployments, Let's Encrypt TLS, Git webhooks, and database provisioning. The difference is scale, maturity, and complexity tolerance.
TL;DR comparison
| Dimension | Coolify | Dokploy |
|---|---|---|
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| GitHub stars | ~52.2k | ~31k |
| Idle RAM | ~800 MB | ~600 MB |
| Multi-server support | Yes (built-in) | Yes (v0.14+) |
| Docker Swarm | Yes | Partial |
| Preview environments | Yes | No |
| One-click templates | 280+ | ~50 |
| UI style | Feature-rich | Cleaner, simpler |
| Community size | Larger | Growing |
| Minimum Liquid Web VPS | 4 GB | 4 GB |
| Winner | Features, community | Lighter footprint, simpler UI |
Setup complexity
Coolify installs with one curl command that drops a Docker Compose stack and a management daemon. Initial setup — connecting your first Git provider, provisioning SSL, deploying a test app — takes about 20–30 minutes. The dashboard is information-dense: servers, networks, volumes, scheduled backups, and team roles are all surfaced at once. That richness becomes helpful once you have a dozen services; it can feel overwhelming at first.
Dokploy follows the same one-command install pattern. The interface is deliberately minimal — fewer panels, fewer options per screen. A developer familiar with Railway or Render will feel at home faster in Dokploy than in Coolify. First deployment typically takes under 15 minutes.
Winner: Dokploy on first-time experience. Coolify's density is a feature for power users.
RAM footprint
Measured idle on a fresh install with no deployed applications:
| Platform | Idle RAM |
|---|---|
| Coolify | ~800 MB |
| Dokploy | ~600 MB |
Both figures are before your applications. On a 4 GB VPS with two or three small apps deployed, Coolify leaves about 2.5–3 GB for workloads; Dokploy leaves slightly more. The difference is not significant enough to influence hardware decisions — both fit on a 4 GB VPS.
Winner: Dokploy marginally. Not a deciding factor for most teams.
Features
Coolify is the feature leader by a wide margin:
- Preview environments: Deploy a live preview URL for every Git branch or pull request. Invaluable for teams doing code review.
- Docker Swarm mode: Deploy across multiple nodes in a Swarm cluster for high availability.
- 280+ one-click service templates: Databases, monitoring tools, CMS platforms, analytics, and more — all pre-configured with one click.
- Scheduled backups: Built-in backup scheduling to S3-compatible storage for databases and volumes.
- Wildcard SSL: Automatically provision wildcard certificates for
*.yourdomain.comvia DNS challenge. - Team management: Fine-grained roles (owner, admin, developer) per team.
Dokploy covers the core PaaS features reliably:
- Application deployments (Nixpacks, Dockerfile, Docker Compose)
- Multi-server support (added in v0.14, stable as of 2026)
- Database provisioning (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, MariaDB)
- Let's Encrypt TLS, Git webhooks, rollback
- Basic monitoring and log streaming
What Dokploy lacks: preview environments, Docker Swarm mode, the template library breadth, and built-in backup scheduling.
Winner: Coolify on raw features. If preview environments or Swarm clustering are on your requirements list, Coolify is the only option here.
Community and ecosystem
Coolify has ~52.2k GitHub stars, a Discord with tens of thousands of members, a maintained documentation site, and a growing library of user-contributed templates. Bug reports get faster responses due to the larger contributor pool.
Dokploy has ~31k stars and a smaller but active Discord. The project is maintained by a focused core team and has matured quickly since its 2024 launch — multi-server support went from experimental to stable within one year.
Winner: Coolify on community size and template ecosystem.
Which should you choose?
Choose Coolify if:
- You want preview environments for pull requests
- You need Docker Swarm for multi-node high availability
- You want a large template library for one-click app deployments
- You plan to manage 10+ services across multiple servers
- Community size and long-term ecosystem matter
Choose Dokploy if:
- You want the cleanest, most approachable UI
- You are running a small team (under 5 developers, under 10 services)
- Lighter RAM footprint at idle is a meaningful constraint
- You do not need preview environments or Swarm mode
Both platforms have setup guides on this site:
There is no automated migration path. Both platforms manage Docker Compose stacks, so your application definitions are portable — you would recreate services in Coolify and update DNS. Stateful services (databases with persistent volumes) require a dump-and-restore migration. Plan for 2–4 hours of downtime per stateful service if you migrate.
Coolify supports GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Gitea, and Forgejo — plus any self-hosted Git instance via generic webhooks. Dokploy supports GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Gitea. Both cover the major providers for most teams.
Dokploy is the better fit for solo developers. The simpler UI, lighter resource footprint, and faster first-deployment experience make it easier to get productive. Coolify's added complexity (Swarm, preview envs, team roles) solves problems that solo developers rarely have. That said, Coolify's template library is genuinely useful even alone — it is the faster path to spinning up a self-hosted Plausible, Outline, or Twenty CRM.