Cloudways vs Laravel Forge: Pricing and Real Monthly Cost

Almost every comparison of these two starts by calling Cloudways "managed" and Forge "a control panel" and then stops, which is true and useless. They are priced on completely different models, and the model is what decides your bill. Cloudways sells you a server with the management folded into one monthly price. Forge sells you a flat subscription and you buy the server yourself at whatever your cloud provider charges.

That difference means there is no universal answer about which is cheaper. There is a crossover point, and it arrives earlier than most people expect. Every figure below was read off cloudways.com and laravel.com/forge/pricing on 5 September 2026, with DigitalOcean's published rates as the reference for what a raw server actually costs.

Cloudways vs Laravel Forge pricing, side by side

Forge publishes three flat plans: Hobby at $12 a month, Growth at $19 and Business at $39. Growth and Business both include unlimited servers and unlimited sites; Hobby covers unlimited Laravel VPS servers plus one external server. All three include zero-downtime deployments, managed databases, server monitoring and database backups. The tiers separate on support level (community, standard, advanced) and on a discount against Laravel VPS, not on capability.

Cloudways prices per server. The Flexible range starts at $11 a month for a 2 GB, 1 vCPU DigitalOcean instance with 50 GB of storage and 2 TB of bandwidth, and runs up through $88 for 8 GB with 4 vCPUs and 160 GB of storage to $342 for a 128 GB, 24 vCPU machine. You can place those servers on DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud. There is a separate Cloudways Autonomous product for managed WordPress at $99, $199 and $399 a month, which is not really competing with Forge and is easy to confuse with the Flexible plans when you are skimming.

Which is cheaper, Cloudways or Laravel Forge?

Cloudways is cheaper for exactly one small server. Forge is cheaper from the second server, or from the first large one. That is the whole answer, and the arithmetic behind it is short enough to check yourself.

One small site: Cloudways is $11 a month all in. The Forge equivalent is a $12 DigitalOcean 2 GB droplet plus the $12 Hobby plan, so $24. Cloudways wins, and it is not close in percentage terms. People who insist Forge is always cheaper have not priced the bottom of the range.

One production application on 8 GB: Cloudways is $88. DigitalOcean's 4 vCPU, 8 GB droplet is $48, plus $12 for Forge Hobby, so $60. Forge is $28 a month cheaper, because the management premium on a bigger box is charged against a bigger server price while Forge's fee stays flat.

An agency with five 8 GB servers: Cloudways is five times $88, so $440 a month. On Forge it is five DigitalOcean droplets at $48, so $240, plus a single $19 Growth subscription covering all of them. That is $259 against $440, a difference of $181 a month or roughly $2,172 a year. The flat fee is the entire story, and it is why agencies and dev shops drift toward Forge as they add clients.

Two caveats keep this honest. Cloudways runs frequent promotions, and at the time of writing there is a 40 percent discount for four months running to 15 September 2026, which changes the short-term maths but not the steady-state comparison. And the Cloudways price includes backups and support that you would otherwise arrange yourself, which on DigitalOcean adds roughly 20 percent to the droplet for backups. Add that and the 8 GB comparison becomes $88 against about $70, still in Forge's favour but by less than the headline suggests.

What is the real difference between Cloudways and Laravel Forge?

Cloudways rents you a managed server; Forge automates a server you own. With Cloudways the machine is provisioned inside their account structure, they hold the operating system, and SSH access is restricted. With Forge the droplet is in your own DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS or Vultr account, you have full root, and Forge is writing configuration onto a box that belongs to you.

The consequence shows up on the day you leave. Cancel Cloudways and the server is gone, because it was never yours. Cancel Forge and everything keeps running exactly as it was; you have simply stopped paying for the automation that sets it up. For some teams that is a compliance requirement rather than a preference, and it decides the question before price is even discussed.

It also shows up when something unusual is needed. Installing a custom PHP extension, tuning nginx beyond the provided options, or running a non-standard service alongside the app is routine on Forge and often a support ticket on Cloudways.

Is Cloudways good for Laravel?

Yes, Cloudways runs Laravel well, and it is a reasonable choice when nobody on the team wants to own server administration. It supports the stack, handles PHP versions, and includes staging and backups without configuration. The reservation is not technical competence, it is fit: Cloudways is built provider-agnostic and WordPress-first, while Forge was designed around the Laravel deployment cycle by the people who maintain the framework.

In practice that difference is smaller than the marketing on either side implies. Both deploy from Git, both do zero-downtime releases, both handle queues and scheduled tasks. Where Forge pulls ahead for Laravel specifically is in the defaults matching what a Laravel app expects, and in Envoyer-style deployment being included rather than assembled.

Does Laravel Forge include hosting?

No. Forge is server management software, not a host, so the subscription never includes the server itself. You either connect an existing cloud account (DigitalOcean, AWS, Hetzner, Vultr and others) and pay that provider directly, or you use Laravel VPS, Forge's own one-click provisioning option, which is billed separately and discounted 5 percent on Growth and 15 percent on Business.

This trips people up when they compare the $12 Hobby price against the $11 Cloudways price and conclude Forge is cheaper. It is not a like-for-like number. Forge's $12 buys the panel; the server is on top.

Which should an agency choose?

Almost always Forge, and the reason is structural rather than technical. Cloudways charges per server, so a client roster is a linearly growing bill. Forge charges once, so the eleventh client server costs exactly what the second one did, which is nothing. At ten 8 GB servers that is a difference of roughly $4,500 a year, which for a small agency is a hire's worth of margin.

The exception is an agency whose contracts promise a support SLA on infrastructure. If a client contract says somebody is watching the server, Cloudways is selling that and Forge is not. You can buy the same outcome around Forge, but you are then assembling monitoring, backups and an on-call arrangement yourself, and that only saves money if you genuinely do it.

There is a third option agencies overlook, which is that neither product includes a person. If nobody in the studio is comfortable at a terminal when a queue worker dies at 6pm, the honest budget line is either a managed plan or a few hours a month of someone who does this for a living. Small teams often bring in a freelance systems administrator on a retainer for far less than the annual difference between the two platforms, which makes the cheaper platform genuinely cheaper rather than nominally cheaper.

Can you move from Cloudways to Laravel Forge?

Yes, and the migration is a standard application move rather than anything platform-specific. You provision a new server on your own cloud account, deploy the application from the same Git repository, move the database with a dump and restore, copy user-uploaded files, then cut DNS over once the new instance is verified. Nothing is locked into a proprietary format.

The parts that need attention are the ones Cloudways was quietly handling: scheduled tasks, queue workers, Redis or Memcached configuration, cron entries, and TLS certificates. Those exist in the Cloudways panel rather than in your repository, so they have to be recreated deliberately. Write them down before you cancel anything, because that list is the actual migration.

Plan a period where both run in parallel. The cost of a month of overlap is trivial next to discovering after the cutover that a nightly job nobody documented was running on the old box.

Which one should you actually buy?

If you are running one small site and do not want to think about servers, Cloudways at $11 is the sensible purchase and Forge would cost you double for no benefit you would notice.

If you are running a real production application on a decent-sized box, or more than one server of any size, Forge is cheaper and gets cheaper with every server you add. The flat $19 Growth plan covering unlimited servers is the single strongest thing in either product's pricing.

If the deciding factor is that nobody wants to own the operating system, be honest about that and price it, because it is a real cost either way. The teams that get burned are the ones who choose the cheaper unmanaged option to save $30 a month and then absorb an unplanned day of downtime that costs far more.