Coolify vs Deployer

Coolify is an open-source, self-hostable deployment platform for websites, databases, web applications, and more than 280 one-click services. It builds each commit and deploys over SSH to a connected server. Projects can use Nixpacks, Railpack, Dockerfile, Docker Compose, static serving, or a prebuilt registry image. Push-to-deploy connections include GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Gitea, including self-hosted instances. One-click databases include PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, KeyDB, Dragonfly, and ClickHouse. Operations include pull-request deployments, scheduled tasks, shared environment variables, monitoring, S3-compatible database backups, and rollbacks. An API and MCP server let AI clients such as Claude and Cursor manage resources, deployments, logs, and restarts. Coolify runs only on Linux; the documented minimum is 2 CPU cores, 2 GB RAM, and 10 GB disk. Self-hosted use is free forever. Cloud costs $5 a month plus $3 server.

Deployer is a PHP deployment tool for sending applications to servers. It switches releases through atomic symlinks, so a deployment does not expose an incomplete state, and a failed release can be reverted with one command. The command line can list releases and return to the latest good release. Tasks run concurrently across selected hosts by default, with an option to limit concurrency. Projects describe hosts and tasks in deploy.php or deploy.yaml files and may add custom build tasks. Recipes cover Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, Drupal, Magento, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Yii, Contao, Shopware, TYPO3, and Sulu. Deployer connects over SSH, can open an interactive SSH session, and includes a recipe for provisioning Ubuntu with firewall, PHP, database, and HTTPS configuration. Installation is available through Composer, Phive, a PHAR bundle, or Docker. CI/CD guidance covers GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and Bitbucket Pipelines. It is free and open source, with Linux, macOS, API, and self-hosted options.