Dokku vs Piku
Dokku and Piku are both paas and app hosting software. Dokku is open source under MIT, with 32k GitHub stars. Piku is open source under MIT, with 6.6k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Dokku when
- You want Heroku-like git push deployments on your own cheap VPS for small apps.
- Pick Piku when
- You deploy small apps to a low-powered machine such as a Raspberry Pi or small VPS where Docker is too heavy.
Side by side
A Heroku-style PaaS on a single server: git push an app and Dokku builds it with buildpacks or a Dockerfile and runs it in containers, with plugins for databases and TLS.
A tiny PaaS that enables git push deployments of Python, Node, Go and other apps to your own server, using a Procfile, without Docker.
Designed mainly for one host, so high availability and multi-server scaling need extra work.
Minimal feature set and a small maintainer team; no container isolation between apps.
Production-ready
Usable
Self-hosted server and command line
Self-hosted server
Shell, Go and Docker
Python, uWSGI and nginx
Open source, MIT (permissive) (both)
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice. (both)
32k GitHub stars
6.6k GitHub stars
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v0.38.34.
Established: started 10 years ago, latest release v1.0.0.
Other comparisons
More PaaS and app hosting platforms
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.