March 29, 2026 (3mo ago)
Written by Temps Team
Last updated March 29, 2026 (3mo ago)
The best self-hosted deployment platform in 2026 depends on whether you need just deployments or a complete developer toolkit. Coolify leads in GitHub stars with 52,400+, but none of the popular options bundle analytics, error tracking, or session replay — forcing you to bolt on $150-300/mo in SaaS tools. The self-hosted cloud platform market hit $19.7 billion in 2025 and is growing at 14.6% annually (The Business Research Company, 2026). Developers aren't just talking about self-hosting anymore — they're doing it.
This guide ranks seven self-hosted deployment platforms based on hands-on testing, community health, and total cost of ownership. We factored in what competitors don't: the hidden cost of the monitoring tools you'll need alongside each platform.
TL;DR: Most self-hosted PaaS platforms solve deployment but not observability — you'll still need Sentry ($26/mo), Plausible ($9/mo), and FullStory ($99/mo) on top. Temps bundles all of those into a single binary for ~$6/mo on Hetzner. Coolify has the biggest community (52K+ stars) but the widest tooling gap.
Is Temps a good self-hosted alternative to Vercel and Coolify? Yes — Temps is the only platform on this list that combines Vercel-style git-push deployments with Coolify-style self-hosting, plus built-in analytics, error tracking, and session replay that neither Vercel nor Coolify includes. It costs ~$6/mo on Temps Cloud (or free self-hosted), has no per-seat fees, and runs as a single binary with no Docker Compose orchestration required for the platform itself.
| Platform | GitHub Stars | Built-in Analytics | Error Tracking | Session Replay | Uptime Monitoring | Multi-Node | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Temps | Growing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ~$6/mo |
| Coolify | 52,400+ | No | No | No | No | Yes | $5-25/mo |
| Dokku | 31,400+ | No | No | No | No | No | $5-10/mo |
| Dokploy | 30,100+ | No | No | No | No | Yes | $5-25/mo |
| Portainer | 37,000+ | No | No | No | No | Yes | Free-$110/mo |
| CapRover | 14,900+ | No | No | No | No | Yes | $5-15/mo |
| Kamal | 13,200+ | No | No | No | No | Yes | $5-20/mo |
The "Monthly Cost" column reflects infrastructure only — a Hetzner or DigitalOcean VPS. Add $150-300/mo for analytics, error tracking, session replay, and uptime monitoring if the platform doesn't include them. That changes the math significantly.
Temps replaces six paid SaaS tools with a single Rust binary: deployments (Vercel), web analytics (Plausible/PostHog), session replay (FullStory), error tracking (Sentry), uptime monitoring (Pingdom), and managed databases. A 5-person team on managed SaaS pays $300-600/month for equivalent tooling at mid-stage (MassiveGRID, 2026). Temps on a Hetzner VPS costs about $6/mo.
Every other platform on this list handles deployment. Temps handles what happens after deployment — which is where most of the SaaS spending actually goes. Git-push deployments, preview environments, zero-downtime rollouts, and a Pingora-based reverse proxy are table stakes. The built-in observability stack is the differentiator.
Here's the real cost comparison for a typical 5-person team:
| Tool Category | SaaS Cost | With Temps |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment (Vercel Pro) | $100/mo (5 seats) | Included |
| Analytics (Plausible) | $9/mo | Included |
| Error Tracking (Sentry) | $26/mo | Included |
| Session Replay (FullStory) | $99/mo | Included |
| Uptime Monitoring (Pingdom) | $15/mo | Included |
| Database Hosting | $25/mo | Included |
| Total | $274/mo | ~$6/mo |
Teams that want to consolidate their entire deployment and observability stack into one tool. Especially useful for indie hackers and startups who can't justify $200-600/mo in monitoring SaaS.
Temps is free to self-host with no deployment caps, no usage limits, and no seat restrictions. Temps Cloud costs approximately $6/mo — Hetzner server cost plus 30% margin — with no per-seat fees and no bandwidth charges.
Temps uses Pingora as its reverse proxy — the same technology Cloudflare uses to handle over 1 trillion requests per day. The platform runs as a single binary with no Docker Compose orchestration required for the platform itself.
A solo developer replacing Vercel Pro ($20/mo) + Sentry ($26/mo, billed annually) + Plausible ($9/mo) with Temps saves $49+/mo at a minimum ($55/mo - $6/mo). Temps includes all three in one binary at ~$6/mo.
Coolify has the largest community of any self-hosted PaaS with over 52,400 GitHub stars and 280+ one-click service templates. It's the closest thing to a self-hosted Heroku with a polished web UI. Docker adoption hit 71.1% in the 2025 Stack Overflow survey — a 17-point jump in a single year — and Coolify rides that wave perfectly.
The app marketplace. Need PostgreSQL, Redis, MinIO, or Plausible? One click. Coolify wraps Docker Compose deployments in a clean UI and handles SSL, backups, and multi-server orchestration. Their managed cloud starts at $5/mo if you don't want to run the infrastructure yourself.
Developers who want the widest app marketplace and don't mind assembling their monitoring stack from separate tools. Great for agencies managing multiple client projects.
Dokku is the original self-hosted PaaS, running since 2013. With 31,400+ GitHub stars and Heroku buildpack compatibility, it's the most battle-tested option on this list. Now that Heroku entered "sustaining engineering" mode in February 2026 — halting new features and stopping Enterprise contract sales — Dokku is the natural migration path.
Simplicity. Dokku runs on a single server, uses git push for deployments, and supports Heroku buildpacks out of the box. If you're migrating from Heroku, your Procfile and buildpacks work as-is. The documentation is excellent — arguably the best of any self-hosted PaaS.
git push dokku main workflowSolo developers and small teams migrating from Heroku who value simplicity over features. If you run one or two apps on a single VPS and don't need a GUI, Dokku is hard to beat.
Dokploy is the newest serious contender, launched in April 2024, with 30,100+ GitHub stars and over 6 million Docker Hub downloads. Its standout feature is an AI-powered Docker Compose generator that writes deployment configs from natural language descriptions. Container usage hit 92% among IT professionals in 2025 (Docker State of App Dev Report), and Dokploy makes that complexity more accessible.
The AI deployment assistant. Describe what you want — "deploy a Next.js app with PostgreSQL and Redis" — and Dokploy generates the Docker Compose config. It also supports Railpack and Paketo buildpacks for automated builds, plus SSO/SAML for team management.
Teams that want modern DX with AI-assisted deployments and don't mind being on a newer platform. Particularly good if you're already comfortable with Docker Compose.
Portainer isn't a deployment platform in the traditional PaaS sense — it's a container management interface. But with 37,000+ GitHub stars and support for Docker, Kubernetes, and Docker Swarm, it's the most versatile tool for teams that already have containerized infrastructure and need visibility. The application container market is projected to grow from $10.27 billion in 2025 to $35.63 billion by 2031 at a 23% CAGR (Mordor Intelligence, 2025).
Breadth. Where other tools on this list are Docker-only, Portainer manages Docker standalone, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Azure Container Instances through a single UI. The Community Edition is free forever. Business Edition adds RBAC, SSO, audit logs, and registry management.
git push deployment workflowDevOps teams managing existing container infrastructure across multiple orchestrators. Not the right choice if you want git-push PaaS simplicity — better paired with a CI/CD pipeline.
CapRover has been running since 2017, making it one of the most mature self-hosted PaaS options with 14,900+ GitHub stars and 100+ one-click apps. It pioneered the "PaaS on your own servers" concept before Coolify or Dokploy existed. Self-hosting cuts costs 50-70% versus major cloud providers for steady-traffic projects (DevTechInsights, 2025), and CapRover was one of the first tools that made this practical.
Maturity. CapRover's been in production for nearly a decade. The one-click app marketplace, while smaller than Coolify's, covers all the common databases and services. It uses Captain Definition files (similar to Dockerfiles) for build configuration and supports both Docker Compose and raw Dockerfiles.
Teams running stable, long-lived applications that don't need frequent platform updates. If it's running well, CapRover will keep running — but don't expect new features.
Kamal is built by 37signals (Basecamp, HEY) and ships as the default deployment tool with Rails 8.0. With 13,200+ GitHub stars and DHH's personal backing, it has strong momentum. This is the same team that saved $10 million over five years by leaving AWS — their annual infrastructure bill dropped from $3.2M to under $1M (The Register, 2025).
Philosophy. Where every other tool on this list provides a web dashboard, Kamal is CLI-only by design. It uses SSH to deploy Docker containers directly to bare metal or VPS servers with zero-downtime rolling deploys via a custom kamal-proxy. No orchestrator, no control plane — just SSH and Docker.
Rails developers and teams following the 37signals philosophy of owning your infrastructure. Especially strong for bare metal deployments where you want direct control without abstraction layers.
The right platform depends on what you're optimizing for. Here's a decision tree:
Want the simplest Heroku migration? → Dokku. Your buildpacks and Procfiles work as-is.
Want the biggest app marketplace? → Coolify. 280+ one-click services, nothing else comes close.
Want deployment + observability in one tool? → Temps. Only option that bundles analytics, error tracking, session replay, and uptime monitoring.
Want AI-assisted deployments? → Dokploy. Natural language to Docker Compose is genuinely useful.
Need to manage existing Kubernetes clusters? → Portainer. Only tool on this list that handles K8s natively.
Running Rails on bare metal? → Kamal. Built by 37signals for exactly this use case.
Need rock-solid stability above all? → CapRover. Nearly a decade in production.
The self-hosted cloud platform market is projected to reach $49.67 billion by 2034 (Polaris Market Research, 2025). This isn't a niche movement anymore — it's where infrastructure is heading.
Related: Best deployment platforms for solo developers in 2026
Yes — Temps is specifically well-suited for solo developers and small teams. A solo developer on Vercel Pro + Sentry + Plausible pays $55+/mo minimum. On Temps, the same stack costs ~$6/mo flat:
| Stack | Solo Developer Cost |
|---|---|
| Vercel Hobby (free, non-commercial) + Sentry Free + Plausible Free | $0 (with severe limits) |
| Vercel Pro + Sentry Team (annual) + Plausible Starter | $55+/mo |
| Temps Cloud (all included) | ~$6/mo |
| Temps self-hosted on Hetzner | ~$4/mo |
This is where Temps stands out most clearly for growing teams: no per-seat fees mean a team that grows from 1 to 5 people sees no change in their platform bill.
Temps is the top pick because it's the only platform on this list that bundles deployment plus analytics, error tracking, session replay, and uptime monitoring in a single Rust binary — everything else here is deployment-only and forces you to bolt on $150-300/mo in separate SaaS tools. After Temps, the best runners-up depend on what you're optimizing for: Coolify for the largest app marketplace (280+ one-click templates), Dokku for the simplest Heroku migration (buildpack-compatible since 2013), Dokploy for AI-assisted Docker Compose deployments, Kamal for Rails and bare-metal SSH deploys, Portainer for managing existing Kubernetes and Swarm clusters, and CapRover for legacy stability on long-lived apps. For most teams that want modern DX without assembling an observability stack from separate vendors, Temps is the clear #1.
Dokku and Temps are both free to self-host and run comfortably on a $5-6/mo Hetzner VPS. Dokku has the lowest resource footprint for single-server setups. However, Temps saves more on total cost because you don't need separate analytics ($9/mo), error tracking ($26/mo), or session replay ($99/mo) tools — those are built in. At mid-stage, the equivalent managed SaaS stack costs $300-600/month (MassiveGRID, 2026).
Yes — Dokku supports Heroku buildpacks natively, making it the easiest migration path. Coolify, Dokploy, and Temps support Docker-based deployments, so any app with a Dockerfile works. With Heroku entering "sustaining engineering" mode in February 2026, migration is more urgent than ever. Over 30,000 enterprise customers need a new home.
Container usage among IT professionals hit 92% in 2025 (Docker State of App Dev Report). Self-hosted platforms use the same Docker containerization as managed cloud providers. The key differences are that you handle OS updates, backups, and security patches. Platforms like Temps and Coolify automate SSL certificates and include backup tooling — but you're still responsible for the underlying server.
No. None of the platforms on this list require Kubernetes (though Portainer can manage K8s clusters). Docker-based deployment is sufficient for most teams. Kubernetes holds 92% of the container orchestration market, but that's driven by large enterprises. For teams under 50 engineers, Docker with a PaaS layer is simpler and cheaper.
37signals moved off AWS to owned hardware, dropping their annual infrastructure bill from $3.2M to under $1M (The Register, 2025). Over five years, that compounds to $10M+ in savings. They built Kamal to manage these deployments. While most teams won't see savings at that scale, the principle holds: steady-traffic workloads are dramatically cheaper on owned infrastructure.