Coolify vs Heroku
Coolify and Heroku are both paas and app hosting software. Coolify is open source under Apache-2.0, with 66k GitHub stars. Heroku is a commercial product from Salesforce, Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Coolify when
- You want push-to-deploy convenience on your own VPS fleet without Kubernetes.
- Pick Heroku when
- You want the simplest managed hosting for a standard web app and value stability over price.
Side by side
A self-hosted platform for deploying apps, databases and over 360 one-click services to your own servers, like a self-run Heroku or Vercel.
A platform-as-a-service that builds and runs apps from a git push, with managed Postgres, Redis and add-ons.
Your servers and the Coolify instance become your responsibility, including security updates.
Expensive for the resources you get, there is no free tier any more, and it has seen little new development under Salesforce.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service
PHP, Laravel, Docker, PostgreSQL and Redis
Not published
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Salesforce, Inc.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
66k GitHub stars
603 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 5 years ago, latest release v4.6.0.
Not known
Other comparisons
More PaaS and app hosting platforms
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.