Laravel Forge vs Envoyer Pricing and Whether You Need Envoyer With Forge

Laravel Forge and Laravel Envoyer are both made by the Laravel team, both deploy PHP from git, and for years the standard answer was that you needed both: Forge to build and run the server, Envoyer to deploy to it without downtime. That answer changed when Forge shipped native zero downtime deployments, but Envoyer is still sold and Forge still tells some customers to keep it. The prices and quotes below come from laravel.com/forge/pricing and envoyer.io, read in October 2026, in US dollars.

Laravel Forge vs Envoyer pricing side by side

Laravel Forge costs $12 (Hobby), $19 (Growth) or $39 (Business) a month, and Envoyer costs $10 (Basic), $20 (Plus) or $50 (Premium) a month. Forge is priced by servers and support level, Envoyer by the number of projects. Neither price includes the servers themselves, which your cloud provider bills separately; our Laravel Forge pricing breakdown adds the server cost at 1, 5 and 10 servers.

Every Envoyer tier includes unlimited team members and unlimited deployments, and each tier has a free trial. Every Forge tier lists zero downtime deployments, server monitoring and database backups. So the two price lists are not competing for the same job: Forge is a server management panel that also deploys, and Envoyer is a deployment tool that never creates or patches a server.

Do I need Envoyer if I have Forge?

For most teams, no. Laravel's own pricing FAQ says: "All new Laravel Forge subscriptions include zero-downtime deployments for a single server. Envoyer will be maintained for the foreseeable future but an additional subscription is not necessary with Forge." If each of your sites runs on one server, Forge alone gives you atomic releases and Envoyer is a second bill for something you already have.

The exception is in the next answer of the same FAQ: "Forge only supports deployments with zero downtime on one server, unlike Envoyer which can deploy one project to multiple servers." Laravel adds that if you use Envoyer to deploy to several servers, "you'll want to keep your subscription for the time being." So the decision comes down to a single question: does any one of your applications run on more than one server at the same time, for example two web servers behind a load balancer, or a web server plus a separate queue server that needs the same code?

Two smaller limits also matter. Laravel's announcement post says native zero downtime is set up on new sites and cannot simply be switched on for an existing site, and a site already deployed to several servers cannot be moved onto it. If you have older Forge sites on the classic in place deploy, getting atomic releases means recreating the site or keeping Envoyer.

What you actually pay in four common setups

The cheapest correct answer is Forge alone for single server sites, and Forge Growth plus the smallest Envoyer tier that covers your project count for anything load balanced. Software cost only, servers excluded:

Forge Hobby only covers one external server, so the moment a load balanced app needs a second server on DigitalOcean, Hetzner or AWS you are on Growth at $19, which is why the third row is $29 rather than $22. In the fourth row the project count, not the server count, decides the Envoyer tier: an agency with 21 projects pays the same $50 as one with 200.

Where Envoyer still earns its $10 to $50

Envoyer is worth paying for when one project has to be released to several servers in a single atomic step, and when you want its health checks and cron heartbeat monitoring next to the deploy history. It clones the release on every server, runs your hooks, and only activates the new release when all of them succeed, so two web servers never serve different versions of the same app for longer than the switch takes.

It also deploys any PHP project, not just Laravel, and the unlimited seats on every tier make it cheap to give a whole agency team deploy access. What it does not do is anything on the server itself: PHP versions, Nginx, certificates, firewall rules, queue workers and security updates stay with Forge or with you. Envoyer's health checks tell you when a URL stops answering; if you want a check every 30 seconds from several regions with alerts to the on call person, a dedicated uptime monitoring service covers that better than a deploy tool.

When one subscription is simpler than two

Paying for both Forge and Envoyer means two dashboards, two sets of team members, two places where a deploy can be configured, and a hand off every time a new server is added to a load balanced app. That is fine for a small team with one big application. It gets messy for an agency where clients come and go every month.

DeployManage does both jobs in one product: it provisions the server in your DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS, Vultr or Linode account, installs Nginx, PHP 8.1 to 8.4, the database, Redis and Supervisor, and on Growth and Business deploys every site as an atomic release with the last five builds kept on disk. It is not the cheaper option, and you should know that before you click anything:

If one of your apps must release to several load balanced servers in one step, Forge plus Envoyer is the proven pairing and at $29 to $89 it is good value; keep it. DeployManage makes sense when your sites each run on one server and you would rather have one vendor own the server and the release, when you need seat limits and a team activity log that shows every deploy and server change, or when you are moving off Envoyer anyway. Our Laravel Envoyer alternative page compares the two head to head, and the Laravel Forge alternative page covers the server side.

Should I cancel my Envoyer subscription?

Cancel Envoyer if every project it deploys runs on a single server and you can recreate those sites on Forge with zero downtime turned on; keep it if any project deploys to more than one server. Forge has a "Migrate to Forge" button on sites connected to Envoyer, and Laravel says the migration tool "is still limited to a single server", so it will tell you when a site does not qualify.

Before cancelling, check three things: that each site was created with zero downtime enabled on Forge (it is not retroactive), that your deploy hooks from Envoyer have been moved into the Forge deploy script, and that whatever you used Envoyer's heartbeats for (scheduled tasks, backups) is monitored somewhere else. Saving $10 a month is not worth discovering a silent cron failure three weeks later. If you are weighing the wider choice of hosting model, our Laravel Cloud vs Forge comparison covers the managed side.