Dokploy vs Coolify Pricing: What Each Really Costs to Run

The pricing pages for these two projects look almost identical at a glance: both are open source, both are free to self host, and both sell a cloud tier for a few dollars a month. The difference only appears once you count the server the control plane runs on and the point at which each vendor's per server metering kicks in. That is where the two diverge, and at ten servers the gap is large enough to decide the question.

Every figure below was read off coolify.io and dokploy.com on 24 August 2026, and the DigitalOcean rates were read the same day. Where a vendor does not publish a number, this article says so rather than estimating one.

Is Coolify or Dokploy cheaper?

Dokploy Cloud is cheaper for a single server at $4.50 a month against Coolify Cloud's $5, and Coolify Cloud is cheaper at every count above two servers because it charges $3 for each additional server while Dokploy charges $4.50. Both are free if you self host, and in that case the only bill is the machine the control plane sits on, which is usually the biggest number in this whole comparison.

The crossover happens quickly. Coolify Cloud includes two servers in its $5 base, so at two servers it is $5 against Dokploy's $9. From there Coolify adds $3 a server and Dokploy's Startup tier adds $4.50, so the gap widens with every machine you add.

Coolify vs Dokploy cloud pricing at 1, 3, 5 and 10 servers

Two things about that table are worth reading carefully, because they are the reason the single server row flips. Coolify Cloud is $5 a month for up to two servers, then $3 a month for each additional server, with about 20 percent off if you pay yearly. Dokploy's Hobby tier is $4.50 a month per server but caps you at one server, one organisation, one user and two environments, which means a second machine or a second teammate pushes you onto Startup at $15 a month for three servers, with further servers at $4.50 each.

So Dokploy wins the solo developer with one box, and loses the moment a colleague needs a login. That single user cap is the most expensive line in Dokploy's pricing and it is easy to miss when you are comparing headline numbers.

Is Coolify free?

Yes. Coolify self hosted is free forever, and the project states plainly that there is no limitation or restrictions on the free edition. Dokploy is the same: its documentation describes it as free and open source software available for anyone to use. Neither vendor holds features back from the self hosted build, so the cloud tiers are selling managed hosting of the panel rather than unlocking functionality.

The licence being free is not the same as the setup being free, and this is where most comparisons stop too early. Coolify's installation documentation asks for a minimum of 2 CPU cores, 2 GB of RAM and 30 GB of free disk space before you deploy anything of your own, on a 64 bit AMD64 or ARM64 machine. That control plane has to live somewhere.

What does it actually cost to self host Coolify?

On DigitalOcean, the cheapest Basic droplet that meets Coolify's published minimum of 2 cores and 2 GB of RAM is $18.00 a month (2 GiB, 2 vCPU, 60 GiB SSD, 3,000 GiB transfer), read off digitalocean.com on 24 August 2026. That is the real price of the free option on that provider, and it is three and a half times what Coolify Cloud charges to run the same control plane for you.

You can go cheaper on a provider with better price to memory ratios, and plenty of people run Coolify happily on a small Hetzner box for a few euros. The point is not that $18 is universal, it is that the control plane is never actually free, and on most US oriented clouds it costs more than the managed tier. Third party testing puts an idle Coolify instance at roughly 500 to 700 MB of RAM, so the 2 GB floor is a real floor rather than a conservative suggestion.

Dokploy's own documentation does not publish a minimum specification, so this article will not invent one. In practice it is reported to run lighter at idle than Coolify, which is one of the main reasons people switch between the two.

What do you get for the money on each tier?

Dokploy also sells an Enterprise tier at custom pricing, available cloud hosted or self hosted, which adds fine grained role based access control, SSO and SAML against providers such as Azure and Okta, SCIM user provisioning, audit logs, a master service agreement with an SLA and white labelling. If you need SSO or an SLA, that is the tier to ask about, and the price is only available by contacting their sales team.

The line item both pricing pages leave out

Neither vendor charges you for the servers your applications run on, and both are explicit that you bring your own. Coolify's pricing page tells you to bring your own servers from any cloud provider such as Hetzner, DigitalOcean or AWS, and your applications deploy onto those while the panel runs elsewhere. So every figure in this article sits on top of your existing infrastructure bill, not instead of it.

That matters when you are budgeting, because the panel is the small number and the fleet is the large one. A team paying $29 a month for Coolify Cloud at ten servers is probably paying several hundred dollars a month for the ten servers themselves. Per server metering also has a habit of drifting upward quietly, since nobody reviews a $3 increment, and thirty of them is a different conversation. If your cloud spend tends to creep between invoices, a budget alert that pings you when the monthly total crosses a threshold catches it sooner than the statement does.

The other omitted cost is time. Self hosting means you own the panel's uptime, its upgrades, its security patches and its backups. That is not a line on any pricing page and it is usually the largest number of all, particularly the first time the control plane is unavailable during an incident and you cannot deploy the fix.

Which should you pick?

Pick Dokploy Cloud if you are one person with one server and you want the cheapest managed control plane, or if you specifically want Docker Compose as the single source of truth for your deployments. Its $4.50 entry price is the lowest here and its lighter footprint is real.

Pick Coolify Cloud if you have two or more servers, or more than one person who needs to log in. The two included servers and the $3 increment make it cheaper at every count above one, and the one click services catalogue is significantly larger.

Pick self hosting either one if you have genuine data residency requirements, if you already have spare capacity that is paid for regardless, or if you simply want no third party in the deployment path. Just budget the control plane server honestly and put its upgrades on a calendar.

Pick neither if the actual problem is that nobody wants to own the servers. Both of these tools assume a provisioned, hardened, certificate holding machine already exists and that somebody keeps it that way. If that assumption is the thing failing, a Coolify alternative that also provisions and manages the server solves a different and larger part of the job, and it does it without a container layer if your stack does not need one.

How the two compare beyond price

Price is rarely the deciding factor between these two, so it is worth naming the real differences. Coolify has the larger community, the bigger catalogue of one click services and more years of development behind it. Dokploy uses native Docker Compose rather than its own abstraction, runs lighter at idle, and handles multiple servers without asking you to configure Docker Swarm by hand.

Both require Docker and run every application as a container. Both give you a web UI, Git based deploys and zero downtime releases. Both are open source and both can be self hosted at no licence cost. If you are choosing between them on architecture rather than money, the honest summary is that Coolify is the more featureful platform and Dokploy is the leaner one, and teams who have moved usually cite either the idle footprint or the Compose first model as the reason.

If containers themselves are the friction, neither is the answer. Every serious self hosted platform as a service in this category is Docker native, including CapRover and Kamal, so escaping Docker means moving to a server management panel that configures nginx and a language runtime on the host directly. That is a bigger architectural decision than picking between these two, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by accident.