Piku vs Vercel
Piku and Vercel are both paas and app hosting software. Piku is open source under MIT, with 6.6k GitHub stars. Vercel is a commercial product from Vercel Inc.
Which to pick
- 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.
- 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 tiny PaaS that enables git push deployments of Python, Node, Go and other apps to your own server, using a Procfile, without Docker.
Hosts frontend and full-stack web apps with git-based deploys, preview URLs, serverless and edge functions, built by the makers of Next.js.
Minimal feature set and a small maintainer team; no container isolation between apps.
Bandwidth and function usage costs can spike on popular sites, and some Next.js features work best only here.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server
Cloud service
Python, uWSGI and nginx
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.
6.6k GitHub stars
5.5k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 10 years ago, latest release v1.0.0.
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.