Vercel, Netlify, and Railway are convenient. But the bill at the end of the month makes you wonder: what if I just want to deploy my projects without giving away half my budget? The answer is Coolify.
Coolify is a self-hosted Platform as a Service. It runs on your own server and provides an interface suspiciously similar to Vercel: connect a Git repository, hit Deploy — and it just works.
What It Can Do
Coolify supports static sites, Node.js, Python, PHP, Go, Rust, Docker images, and docker-compose stacks. Databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis — can be spun up directly from the interface.
Automatic deployments via GitHub/GitLab integration: push to a branch — the build starts automatically. SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt are set up automatically.
A special feature is one-click services: WordPress, Ghost, n8n, Nextcloud, and two dozen other popular tools can be deployed with a single button.
Performance
Coolify itself is lightweight — written in Node.js, it consumes about 150–200 MB of RAM at idle. The main load comes from your applications. On a VPS with 4 GB RAM and 2 vCPU, you can comfortably run 5–10 small projects.
Limitations and Pain Points
There is no autoscaling — if a project grows to tens of thousands of users, Coolify won’t replace Kubernetes. Monitoring is basic: container logs and CPU/RAM, without advanced alerts. The Community version is free, but some features — team collaboration, auditing — are in the paid tier.
Who It’s For
Ideal for solo developers and small teams that want the UX of Vercel but on their own hardware. Especially relevant for European projects where compliance requires keeping data on their own servers.