I don't really understand the pricing. Why is there a "cloud" version where you still have to bring your own server? What are you paying the $5/server for if not...a server?
I follow the guy on Twitter. He basically released the whole thing FOSS and it was donation based. Then as far as I understand he decided to offer something instead for your 'donation', and you basically just pay for it to be installed on your server for you. It's an alternative to donation, rather than anything else.
The deployment methods are somewhat different too. With dokku, you need to add a new origin to your local repo and push to that origin whenever you want to deploy, Heroku a-like. For Coolify, you have an option to deploy on push via a webhook like Vercel or Fly.io
As the Dokku maintainer said in another comment it is possible to deploy directly from an image instead of from a repo.
For one of my project I build and store the image on GitHub and deploy it on Dokku.
Our UI is admittedly a paid product (Dokku itself and it's large ecosystem is already free, I gotta justify my time _somehow_), but:
- We otherwise largely adopted the heroku CLI, so if you use heroku on the CLI, you can probably use Dokku just fine.
- Dokku is 100% more flexible than almost everything else out there. You can extend it with custom plugins in your own language, targeting hundreds of plugin triggers[1]. Thats how the bulk of Dokku works, and how we support various types of builders, schedulers, and proxy implementations.
- We deploy "docker containers", same as Coolify. If you mean "docker images", we support that via `git:from-image`, in addition to deploying tarballs, remote git repositories, or even something else (I was once sent a plugin that integrates with Mercurial). I'll get the docs updated on that since maybe its not apparent.
- We support a variety of builders too, such as Heroku v2a, Cloud Native Buildpacks, Nixpacks, and AWS Lambda-compatible functions.
I'd say the two things Coolify beats us out on is a native swarm integration and a free UI. For the former, we have official plugins for Kubernetes and Nomad (Swarm is coming), while Dokku Pro is paid (as I mentioned before).
All that said, Coolify is cool, and this space is large enough for lots of players to exist :)
So cool to see Coolify on hacker news' fp. I spoke a lot of times with the guy behind this platform (andras) on Twitter... I mean X & he's really nice.
It offers you a cheap way to host multiple apps with little effort. It can be compared to Heroku, which is a convenient way to host multiple apps, but which can get very costly.
