Platform.sh Alternative and Platform.sh Alternatives Priced for PHP Teams

Platform.sh now operates as Upsun. The domain redirects to upsun.com, the old fixed plans live on as Upsun Fixed, and new projects are steered to Upsun Flex, which bills per project, per user and per hour of CPU and memory. Most teams searching for a Platform.sh alternative are not unhappy with the platform itself. They are looking at a bill that grew with developers and client projects rather than with traffic, or they were moved to new pricing and want to compare before the next renewal.

This page prices the realistic alternatives against Upsun for the three shapes we see most often: one app with one developer, a product team of five, and an agency with eight client apps. Prices are each vendor's published monthly price in USD, read in October 2026. Server prices use DigitalOcean Droplets at $12 (2 GB), $24 (4 GB) and $48 (8 GB).

What is the best alternative to Platform.sh?

For a PHP team running Drupal, Symfony, Laravel or Magento, the best Platform.sh alternative is usually cloud servers you own with a deployment panel on top, because one server fee replaces the per project fee, the per user licence and the per container charges. If you want to stay fully managed, Laravel Cloud now runs Symfony as well as Laravel and does not charge per user, and Pantheon is the established managed option for Drupal and WordPress agencies.

The right pick depends on what drives your bill. If it is people, a platform with unlimited users or a panel with seats wins. If it is projects, a server that holds several apps wins. If it is the need for per branch preview environments and zero operating system work, Upsun is still hard to replace and may simply need resizing.

Platform.sh alternatives compared

Upsun Fixed, the continuation of the classic Platform.sh plan sizes, is also an option if you want one monthly number and are happy with the plan limits. It is the same platform, so it does not change the per project economics.

How much does Platform.sh cost now?

Platform.sh is billed as Upsun Flex: $9 per project and $10 per user a month, about $25 per app vCPU and $10 per GB of app memory, about $37 per vCPU and $15 per GB for service containers such as MySQL and Redis, $0.50 per GB of disk, and a support tier that adds at least 10% to the total. A 15 day trial needs no card, and a monthly credit covers the first project fee and one user licence. Our Upsun pricing breakdown has the full line item table and how the preview environments are billed.

Platform.sh alternative costs for three real setups

The same three Symfony style setups, priced on Upsun Flex with shared CPU and the default Standard support tier, against owning the servers.

Forge is the cheapest way to leave in every row, and it deploys any PHP app, so it deserves a look first. DeployManage costs more than Forge and less than Upsun from the second setup on. The gap pays for itself when a team needs atomic releases across several servers without adding Envoyer, ten seats with an audit log of every deploy, and one flat plan across many client apps. Pantheon would bill the eight client apps at $440 a month on Basic before any workspace, and Basic has no Redis or Solr, which pushes most Drupal builds to Performance Small at $200 per site.

Agencies that rebill hosting should also look at the other side of the ledger. When the hosting cost per client drops from about $87 to about $28, the margin only shows up if every client's monthly hosting invoice actually gets paid, and it is worth putting automated invoice reminders on those small recurring charges so they do not sit unpaid for months.

Is Upsun the same as Platform.sh?

Yes. Upsun is the name Platform.sh operates under: the same company and the same git driven container platform, with platform.sh now redirecting to upsun.com. Existing Platform.sh projects continue on Upsun Fixed, which keeps the familiar plan sizes, while Upsun Flex is the usage based model for new projects. Configuration files, the CLI and the build and deploy hooks carry over, which matters if you are weighing a resize against a move.

Why do teams leave Platform.sh?

Teams leave Platform.sh for cost structure more than for features: every developer who needs console access is a paid licence, every client is a separate project with its own fee and database container, every preview environment copies the disk, and support is a percentage of the whole bill. An agency with eight clients and four developers pays about $697 a month before preview environments or an uptime SLA. The same apps on two or three servers cost a fraction of that, with the trade that someone has to own the servers.

The other reason is control. Some teams want SSH on a box that persists, a PHP extension the image does not ship, or long running workers sized independently of a container plan. Those are easy on a server you own and awkward on any platform.

What you give up when you leave Platform.sh

Be honest about the trade before you move. Upsun gives every branch a full preview environment with cloned data. A server panel gives you staging sites, but not one per branch out of the box. Upsun patches the operating system and the managed services. On your own servers the panel installs and configures them and the provider handles hardware, but you are responsible for upgrading MySQL or PHP when it is time. And Upsun's multi cloud regions and compliance paperwork are hard to match with a single VPS provider.

If none of those are central to how you work, owning the servers is cheaper. If one of them is, resizing on Upsun (fewer users with console access, smaller service containers, the Standard support tier) may close most of the gap without a migration.

How to move a Platform.sh project to your own servers

A Symfony or Drupal project moves in an afternoon once the server exists. Export the database with the CLI and take a copy of the mounts. Create a server in the same region on DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode or AWS. Translate the .upsun/config.yaml (or the older .platform.app.yaml) into a deploy script: the build hook becomes composer install and your asset build, the deploy hook becomes migrations and cache warmup, workers become Supervisor programs and crons become cron entries. Import the database, sync the files, test on the server IP, then switch DNS.

On DeployManage the deploy script, Supervisor programs and cron entries are created with the site, and every push is built in its own release directory so a failed build never replaces the live one. The Symfony deployment on your own servers page shows the shared folders and Messenger worker setup, and the Drupal deployment page covers drush deploy and the files directory.

Which Platform.sh alternative fits your team