Dokku vs Vercel
Dokku and Vercel are both paas and app hosting software. Dokku is open source under MIT, with 32k GitHub stars. Vercel is a commercial product from Vercel Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Dokku when
- You want Heroku-like git push deployments on your own cheap VPS for small apps.
- Pick Vercel when
- You build with Next.js or another modern frontend framework and want preview deploys and a global edge with no ops work.
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.
Hosts frontend and full-stack web apps with git-based deploys, preview URLs, serverless and edge functions, built by the makers of Next.js.
Designed mainly for one host, so high availability and multi-server scaling need extra work.
Bandwidth and function usage costs can spike on popular sites, and some Next.js features work best only here.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and command line
Cloud service
Shell, Go and Docker
Next.js
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Vercel 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.
32k GitHub stars
5.5k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v0.38.34.
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.