Temps vs Kamal

It depends on how much platform you want. Kamal is better if you want the smallest possible deployment tool: SSH plus Docker, no control plane, nothing running on your servers that you did not put there. Temps is better if you want a dashboard, git-push deploys, managed databases, and analytics, error tracking, session replay and uptime monitoring included rather than assembled from separate tools. Kamal deploys apps; Temps runs a platform.

Kamal is a command-line tool from 37signals that builds a Docker image and pushes it to servers you specify over SSH. It has no web dashboard, no persistent control plane, no built-in database management and no monitoring. Temps is a self-hosted PaaS: a control plane with a web UI, git-push deploys with preview environments, automatic SSL, managed PostgreSQL/MariaDB/MongoDB/Redis, and built-in observability. Both deploy Docker containers to servers you own.

Yes. The Temps import wizard reads your config/deploy.yml (Kamal has no server-side API to query) and recreates the service as a Temps project with its image, environment variables and a live deployment. Move accessories such as Postgres or Redis into Temps-managed services with a dump and restore, then connect your Git repository so deploys trigger on push. Your images and code need no changes.

For most teams, yes. Temps covers everything Kamal does — building images, deploying containers to your own servers, zero-downtime rollouts, environment variables and secrets — and adds the dashboard, databases and observability Kamal deliberately leaves out. The exception is if you specifically want no control plane on your infrastructure. Kamal's design goal is to leave nothing behind except Docker, and Temps does run an agent.

Both are free and open source, so the licence cost is zero either way and you pay only for servers. The cost difference appears in what you have to run alongside them: with Kamal you self-host or subscribe to separate analytics, error tracking, session replay and uptime monitoring — several tools to maintain, or paid SaaS from around $26/month. Temps includes those in the same binary at no extra cost.

Kamal has the edge on affinity: it comes from 37signals, ships as the default deployment path in modern Rails, and its documentation and conventions assume a Rails app. Temps deploys Rails through a Dockerfile or its Ruby preset and gives you managed Postgres and Redis alongside it, but you will find more Rails-specific tutorials for Kamal. If you want first-party Rails tooling, use Kamal; if you want the database and monitoring in the same place, use Temps.

No. Kamal is intentionally CLI-only — there is no web interface for viewing deploys, reading logs, managing environment variables, or inspecting running containers. You do all of it through the kamal command and SSH. Temps provides a web dashboard for deployments, logs, metrics, databases, domains and the full observability stack, plus a CLI for scripting and automation.

Simplicity and footprint. Kamal has no server-side control plane, so there is nothing on your machines to keep updated, secure or debug beyond Docker itself. It is a smaller tool with a smaller surface area, it is backed by 37signals and used in production at scale by them, and it does not ask you to adopt a platform to deploy a container. Temps is pre-1.0 (v0.1.0 prereleases), with far more moving parts, because it also stores and serves your telemetry.