Price terms as published
Each line is the vendor’s own wording, split from the price capture checked on 2026-10-09. Nothing here is rounded, converted or re-worded — the full sentences stay in the review below. Lines that carry only a price continue the plan named on the line above, in the vendor’s own order.
| # | Plan / term | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Coolify Self-hosted $0 forever | 2026-10-09 |
| 2 | Cloud $5/mo (2 servers) + $3/mo per extra server | 2026-10-09 |
| 3 | Dokploy Self-hosted $0 | 2026-10-09 |
| 4 | Cloud Hobby $4.50/server/mo, Startup $15/mo (3 servers), Enterprise/Agency custom, annual -20% | 2026-10-09 |
One-liner: Coolify and Dokploy solve the same problem — deploy containers from a dashboard onto servers you own — and both sell the same two-track deal: the software is free to self-host, and a managed control plane costs money. The pricing shapes are mirror images: Coolify Cloud is $5/month for two servers and $3/month for each server after that; Dokploy Cloud is $4.50/month per server (Hobby) or $15/month for three servers (Startup), with annual billing saving 20%. Prices read from both official pricing pages, both GitHub LICENSE files, and the Dokploy docs on 2026-10-09. No account was created; this is an official-terms comparison, not a hands-on benchmark.
Side by side (official sources read 2026-10-09)
| Coolify | Dokploy | |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted | Free forever, “no limitation or restrictions”, all features, community support (20k+ members), automated or self-managed updates | Free, install with one curl command; control plane, PostgreSQL, Redis, Traefik and your apps run on your own server |
| License | Apache-2.0 (GitHub license API) | Apache-2.0 outside /proprietary directories, which carry a proprietary license (LICENSE file) |
| GitHub (2026-10-09) | 62,727 stars, last push 2026-10-08 | 37,716 stars, last push 2026-10-08 |
| Managed plan | $5/month base — connect 2 servers; +$3/month per additional server; unlimited servers and unlimited deployments per server; free email alerts; community + limited email support | Hobby $4.50/month per server (1 included, extra servers $4.50 each); Startup $15/month for 3 servers (extra servers $4.50 each); Enterprise and Agency custom; unlimited deployments, databases and applications per server; annual billing saves 20% |
| Trial | Not stated on the pricing page | 7-day free trial, no credit card required (dokploy.com homepage) |
| What runs where (managed) | Your apps run on the servers you connect; Coolify itself runs on their managed infrastructure (app.coolify.io) | Control plane (dashboard, users, orchestration, monitoring, notifications) hosted by Dokploy; data plane (apps, databases, Traefik, monitoring agent) stays on your servers — “your code and data never leave your servers” |
| Teams | Cloud tier: teams unlimited but “requires an additional subscription per team” (price not printed) | Team management inside Startup/Enterprise plans; no per-team add-on printed |
| Support | Community + limited email (Cloud); community (self-hosted) | Email/chat on Startup, priority SLA on Enterprise |
The pricing fork: flat versus per-server
Coolify prices the managed control plane as one flat subscription: $5/month covers two connected servers, each server beyond that adds $3/month. Two servers cost $5/month; four cost $11; ten cost $29. Coolify is explicit that you still bring your own servers from any provider (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS, a Raspberry Pi) and that only Coolify’s control plane runs on their side — deployments land on your boxes either way.
Dokploy prices the same arrangement per server: $4.50/month per server on Hobby, or $15/month for three servers on Startup (annual billing saves 20%, so the effective Hobby rate on a yearly contract is $3.60/server/month). One server is the only count where Dokploy’s floor undercuts Coolify — $4.50 versus $5, fifty cents — and from two servers onward the flat plan is cheaper: $5 versus $9 at two, $8 versus $13.50 at three (Dokploy’s Startup bundle there is $15), $11 versus $18 at four, $29 versus $45 at ten. There is no three-server crossover in Dokploy’s favor: the $11 figure is Coolify’s four-server bill, not its three-server bill ($8), and $15 is more than either. Both pages print unlimited servers/deployments at every tier, so the caps are budget, not features.
| Servers | Coolify | Dokploy Hobby | Dokploy Startup |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $5 | $4.50 | (3-server bundle minimum) |
| 2 | $5 | $9 | (3-server bundle minimum) |
| 3 | $8 | $13.50 | $15 |
| 4 | $11 | $18 | $19.50 |
| 10 | $29 | $45 | $46.50 |
Monthly list prices, both vendors’ own pages read 2026-10-09; bold marks the cheaper control plane. Price is not feature parity — see the support and topology rows above before deciding.
One structural difference the docs spell out: self-hosted Dokploy runs everything on a single server — UI, PostgreSQL, Redis, Traefik and apps — “as you scale, your management layer competes for resources with your actual workloads.” Dokploy Cloud exists specifically to split that apart. Coolify’s self-hosted edition doesn’t draw the same distinction on its pricing page; it just promises the full feature set with no restrictions.
What’s actually free
Both projects are free to self-host forever, but the licenses differ in one way worth knowing
before you vendor either: Coolify’s GitHub repository carries a plain Apache-2.0 license,
while Dokploy’s LICENSE file reads “content outside of the above mentioned directories…
available under the Apache License 2.0” — with /proprietary directories held back under a
separate proprietary license. For most operators this changes nothing (you run the software; you
don’t fork and resell it), but if your organization audits license files, Coolify’s is the
simpler of the two to sign off on.
On the managed side, both vendors charge only for the control plane and both tell you to bring servers from any provider. The add-ons hide in the fine print: Coolify Cloud charges an extra subscription per team without printing a price, and Dokploy’s trial converts after seven days unless you pick a plan.
Who should pick which
- Pick Coolify if you run two servers or more and want one line item at the lower price: $5/month covers the first two, and the flat plan stays under Dokploy’s bill at every count from there up — and every future feature is included, with the pricing page saying the self-hosted build and the Cloud tier both receive “all upcoming features.”
- Pick Dokploy if you want the control plane out of your own resources: its docs’ explicit control-plane/data-plane split means none of your server CPU goes to dashboards and orchestration, and Hobby is fifty cents cheaper if you genuinely run a single server. At three or more servers it costs more than Coolify — $15 vs $8 at three — so buy it for that topology and the per-server isolation, not for savings.
- Self-host either one if the servers are already yours and the extra $5–15 a month is the part you’d rather not pay: both self-hosted editions are free forever with the full feature set on the pages read today.
Correction (2026-10-11): an earlier version of this page placed the price crossover at three servers and said Dokploy’s $15 bundle beat Coolify’s $11 there. That mixed up Coolify’s four-server bill ($11) with its three-server bill ($8), and $15 beats neither. Coolify’s Cloud plan is cheaper at every server count from two up; Dokploy’s only price advantage is a single server on Hobby. The comparison figures and the recommendation above were recomputed from both official pricing pages.
Coolify pricing read at coolify.io/pricing, Dokploy plans at docs.dokploy.com/docs/core/cloud and dokploy.com, license files via each project’s GitHub repository — all 2026-10-09, USD list prices. No account, no card, no deployment was created; dollar figures come from the vendors’ own pages, and star counts from the GitHub API the same day.