Laravel Envoyer Pricing and When Forge Deploys Are Enough

Envoyer was Laravel's dedicated zero downtime deployment service: you pushed code, it built the new release in a fresh directory, ran your health checks and deploy hooks, then flipped a symlink so visitors never saw a half deployed app. It could also deploy a single project to many servers at once, which made it the tool of choice for load balanced fleets. In 2026 that landscape shifted, and a lot of teams are now searching for a Laravel Envoyer alternative. This guide explains exactly what changed, then compares the honest options so you can pick the right one.

Is Envoyer still available?

The zero downtime deployment capability that Envoyer pioneered is very much alive, and Envoyer is still sold on its own at envoyer.io with Basic, Plus and Premium tiers that still accept new registrations. What changed is that Laravel Forge gained zero downtime deployments as a native feature, which removed the need for Envoyer for anyone running one server per site. Laravel's own announcement says Envoyer subscriptions will keep working with Forge for the foreseeable future, because Envoyer is what deploys a single project across several servers.

Is Envoyer included in Forge?

Yes. As of 2026, zero downtime deployments are included in new Laravel Forge subscriptions, so the atomic release workflow Envoyer was known for now ships with Forge itself. There is one important limit: the bundled Forge version handles zero downtime deploys for a single server, while Envoyer, still sold separately, deploys one project across multiple servers at the same time. For a solo app on one box that difference does not matter. For a load balanced fleet, it matters a lot, because you want every server in the pool to flip to the new release together instead of scripting each one by hand.

So the honest answer depends on your setup. If you are already all in on Forge and run a single server, the bundled zero downtime deploys may be everything you need and there is no reason to add another tool. The reasons to look for an alternative are concrete: multi server or fleet deploys, wanting any cloud provisioning in the same product, wanting a free way to start, or simply not wanting to be locked to one vendor for both your servers and your releases.

What is zero downtime deployment?

Zero downtime deployment means shipping a new version of your app without ever serving a broken or offline page to visitors. Instead of overwriting your live code in place, the deployer builds the new release in a separate directory, installs dependencies, runs migrations and health checks, and only then atomically switches traffic to it. If a step fails, the old release stays live. We break the mechanics down further in our zero downtime deployment explained guide.

The atomic switch is usually a symlink change. Because flipping a symlink is instant, there is no window where half your files are old and half are new. Rollback is just as fast: point the symlink back at the previous release. That safety net is the whole reason Envoyer existed, and it is the feature you are really shopping for when you look for a replacement.

Does Laravel Forge do zero downtime deployment?

Yes, Forge does zero downtime deployment natively, so a new Forge site no longer needs an Envoyer integration to get an atomic release. Every new plan can build a fresh release, run your hooks, and switch traffic atomically on a single server. The catch, again, is the single server scope. If you push to a fleet behind a load balancer, Forge's bundled deploys were designed around one machine, so multi server orchestration is where alternatives earn their place.

Forge pricing is flat: Hobby is $12 per month, Growth is $19 per month, and Business is $39 per month, all on top of what you pay your own cloud host. There is no free plan, so you are paying from day one. That is fine for many teams, but it is a real factor if you want to try zero downtime deploys before committing budget.

How much does Envoyer cost?

Envoyer pricing, read off envoyer.io on 2026-08-16, is billed per month and meters projects rather than servers or team members.

If you are comparing replacements rather than tiers, the Laravel Envoyer alternative comparison prices Envoyer against Forge, Ploi and a panel that provisions the servers as well as deploying to them. Every plan includes unlimited team members, unlimited deployments and the full feature set, so the only thing you are buying as you move up is project count and a slightly longer deploy window. All plans offer a free trial. Note that this is on top of whatever you pay to run and manage the servers Envoyer deploys to, because Envoyer does not provision servers. Pairing it with Laravel Forge at $12 to $39 a month means two subscriptions before you have deployed anything. Our Laravel Forge vs Envoyer comparison prices that pairing for four common setups.

That stacking is the practical argument for a platform that provisions the server and handles the release in one place. It is also worth knowing your options across the whole release picture before you commit, which we lay out in deployment strategies.

What is a good alternative to Envoyer?

A good Envoyer alternative gives you atomic zero downtime releases plus the specific thing Forge's bundled version does not: deploying one project across multiple servers. The strongest options in 2026 are DeployManage, Ploi, the open source Deployer, and Forge's own bundled deploys if a single server is all you run. Here is how they line up.

Prices and plan details were checked against the vendors' own pages in 2026. Always confirm the current numbers before you subscribe, since tiers change.

DeployManage, any cloud, zero downtime, fleet wide

DeployManage is built for the gap that Forge's single server zero downtime leaves. It provisions servers on any cloud provider and, on its Growth ($129 a month, 10 servers) and Business ($299, unlimited) plans, runs zero downtime Git deploys with rollback, and it does that across a fleet rather than a single box, so a load balanced app can flip every server to the new release together. Provisioning and deploys live in one tool, so you are not stitching a server panel to a separate deploy service. It is the more expensive route: Envoyer is $10 to $50 a month, and even Envoyer plus Forge comes to $22 to $89, so the Growth price only makes sense for a team that wants provisioning, fleet deploys and seats for up to 10 people in one tool. It starts with a one-time demo, so you can test provisioning and a deploy before paying. If your reason for leaving Envoyer is multi server deploys, any cloud provisioning, or vendor neutrality, this is the closest one to one match. For a fuller feature breakdown, see our Laravel Forge alternative comparison, and our Laravel deployment overview walks through the release workflow end to end.

Ploi, broad provider support, cheapest paid tiers

Ploi is an independent server panel that also runs zero downtime deploys and supports a wide list of cloud providers, including some that Forge skips. It has a genuinely free plan for a single server and paid tiers around $10, $16, and $36 per month. Ploi's zero downtime deploys are on the Pro and Unlimited plans, and its synchronized deployments push linked sites on several load balanced servers from one button. For a single app or a small setup on a provider Ploi supports, it is an easy, affordable landing spot.

Deployer, open source and self managed

Deployer is a free, open source PHP deployment tool. You describe your servers and tasks in a recipe file, and it performs atomic releases with symlink switching and rollback, exactly the pattern Envoyer used. It happily deploys one project to many hosts, so it covers the fleet case. The trade off is that it does not provision or monitor your servers; you bring your own infrastructure and maintain the config yourself. For teams that want full control, no monthly fee, and code they can version alongside the app, Deployer is a strong DIY choice. GitHub Actions plus a deploy script is a similar do it yourself route if you already live in that pipeline.

Do not skip verifying the deploy

Whatever tool you land on, an atomic release only protects you from a broken page mid deploy. It does not tell you whether the new version is actually healthy in production. After each release you should confirm the site is genuinely up and get paged the moment something regresses, so it helps to pair your deploys with uptime monitoring that checks the site every 30 seconds and alerts you the instant a release starts returning errors. Deploy hooks and health checks catch a lot, but an external check watching from outside your network is what catches the failures your own server cannot report on.

Which Envoyer alternative should you choose?

Start with your server count. If you run a single server and you are already paying for Forge, its bundled zero downtime deploys are probably enough and adding another tool is overkill. If you deploy to a load balanced fleet, you want a tool that pushes one project to every server together: DeployManage or Deployer both do this, with DeployManage adding any cloud provisioning at a higher price (from $129 a month for zero downtime deploys), and Deployer giving you full control with no subscription. If you want a cheap, hosted panel with broad provider support for a single app, Ploi fits. The 2026 change did not kill zero downtime deploys; it just moved them, and the alternatives above cover every setup Envoyer used to serve.

What about the self hosted deployment platforms?

Envoyer alternatives are not only the Laravel specific tools. A whole category of self hosted platform as a service projects covers the same ground from a different direction, and they come up constantly in this search because they are free. Coolify, Dokploy, CapRover, Dokku and Kamal all take a commit and put it on a server you own, all do zero downtime releases, and all are open source.

The catch for a Laravel team is that every one of them is Docker native without exception. Your application stops being a directory on a server and becomes an image, which means a build step, a registry, a networking layer between the container and Nginx, and a second place for environment variables to be wrong. If you already run containers, that is no cost at all and these tools are excellent. If your application is a normal Laravel install with a queue worker and a scheduler, you are taking on a container platform to replace a deployment tool, which is a much larger change than it looks.

The second catch is that self hosting means running the platform itself as a production service, with its own upgrades, patches and backups, and Coolify alone asks for 2 CPU cores and 2 GB of RAM before it deploys anything of yours. Free in licence terms is not free in operational terms. We compared the options and their real monthly costs in our guide to self hosted PaaS platforms and the managed alternatives.

When Forge's native zero downtime deploys cannot replace Envoyer

Two limits in Forge decide this, and both are in Laravel's own documentation. Forge cannot enable zero downtime deployments retroactively on a site that already exists, so the feature is effectively for new sites. And a site already deployed to several servers cannot be migrated to the native feature at all. Put together: a new single server site can drop Envoyer, an older single server site has to be recreated or keep it, and a load balanced site keeps Envoyer either way.

The Forge and Envoyer integration itself needs active subscriptions to both products plus an Envoyer API token carrying the projects, deployments and servers scopes, which is worth knowing before you budget one line item and get two. A team that would rather buy the servers and the fleet wide releases together can compare that pairing against a single panel on the Envoyer alternative page, and the zero downtime deployment page explains the release and symlink model both approaches use.