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Open Source Alternative to Vercel, Netlify and Heroku

46 points

by thushanfernando

13 hours ago

| past

| 9 comments

| dokploy.com

| HN

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maxloh

12 hours ago

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There is one caveat, though: it is not open source as advertised.

> In the event of a conflict, these provisions shall take precedence over those in the Apache License:

> Restriction on Resale: The multi-node support, Docker Compose file support, Preview Deployments and Multi Server features cannot be sold or offered as a service by any party other than the copyright holder without prior written consent.

> Modification Distribution: Any modifications to the multi-node support, Docker Compose file support, Preview Deployments and Multi Server features must be distributed freely and cannot be sold or offered as a service.

https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy/blob/canary/LICENSE.MD

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milliams

11 hours ago

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The author has seemed oblivious to the difference in past discussions - to the point of deleting issues asking for the description to be changed (https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy/issues/82 - unfortunately not archived on Wayback).

The fact they're still advertising it as "Open source", even now is astonishing and are clearly just using it as a marketing point and are not interested in it in reality.

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therealpygon

11 hours ago

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As with many companies that claim to be “open source” while having excessively restrictive licenses and sometimes not even sharing source.

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diggan

6 hours ago

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I think once we let Facebook/Meta get away with calling Llama "Open Source" and seemingly no one bats an eye, we kind of lost the battle about what "Open Source" means. It's not talking about something being available for you without signing an agreement, nor is it actually about source code, but it seems to basically be synonymous with "Freeware" these days.

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diggan

12 hours ago

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> Managed Hosting: No need to manage your own servers

> 1 Servers (You bring the servers)

Hmm, am I out of touch, or wouldn't "managed hosting" imply I don't bring the servers?

Then the "Free plan" says "Manager your own infrastructure installing dokploy ui in your own server", which sounds the same as the paid plan, except without support I guess?

I think if it was a bit more clear what "Managed hosting" means in this case, the pricing would make somewhat more sense. Right now I wouldn't even understand what I was paying for, if "Bring your own servers" is already free.

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d1sxeyes

12 hours ago

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So this is a similar model to Coolify, which seems to be a direct competitor. In fact, it looks VERY similar to Coolify, even down to the menus and menu structure.

I'd be interested to see a side by side comparison of the two platforms.

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franga2000

12 hours ago

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They have one, although probably somewhat biased: https://docs.dokploy.com/docs/core/comparison

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d1sxeyes

12 hours ago

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Ah thanks, I was looking in the FAQs, not the docs.

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diggan

12 hours ago

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Shucks, I don't know about either so I'm guess I'm out of luck :)

> Coolify is an open-source & self-hostable alternative to Heroku / Netlify / Vercel / etc. [...] on your own hardware; you only need an SSH connection

So Coolify seems strictly non-managed, you manage the hosting itself. While the project in this submission seem to hint at being managed?

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d1sxeyes

12 hours ago

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Both offer a monetised version where (basically) someone installs it on your server for you and takes care of updates etc. for you.

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actionfromafar

11 hours ago

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And Coolify seems to be actually open source.

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slowwriter

11 hours ago

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As I understand it, Dokploy Cloud [https://docs.dokploy.com/docs/core/cloud] makes the hosting "managed" by removing the need for Dokploy UI to be installed on your own VPS. With the free/open source version you need to host the UI yourself.

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9rx

12 hours ago

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“Managed hosting” implies that someone else will manage the servers for you, but that doesn’t preclude you owning the servers.

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diggan

12 hours ago

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Right. So if I go for the paid plan, I give them root access to a server I own, and they'll manage everything from there? What exactly are they managing in that case? Wouldn't that count as self-hosted, as I'm the one who is actually providing the server, from my infrastructure?

Alternatively, the free plan says "Install Dokploy UI on your own infrastructure" + "Self-hosted Infrastructure", implying the paid plan isn't Dokploy on my own infrastructure or self-hosted, how does that fit in with that I bring my own server?

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zakki

12 hours ago

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Depend on the contract but maybe they are the one updating the OS, database, etc.

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Havoc

11 hours ago

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Docker swarm underneath. Id rather not build on top of anything that is swarm.

Nothing against it per se but just not confident in its longevity. I know people still have it deployed and seem happy but swarm subreddit has a post every two weeks

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taylodl

9 hours ago

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Maybe because swarm is simple and just works? What's there to really talk about?

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pjmlp

12 hours ago

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The first thing I checked was serverless support, and was pleasently surprised by having containers support instead of the constrained set of options of Vercel and Nelify, not exposing the underlying AWS Lambda capabilities.

Already there some plus points.

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DaveMcMartin

12 hours ago

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Although this solution is as cool as Coolify and will probably improve in the future, I still prefer to Dockerize my applications because, after that, switching between cloud providers becomes easy.

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ewalk153

12 hours ago

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For personal projects, I’ve fallen for the simplicity of Kamal. Created to host Ruby in Rails apps from DHH and the team who run Hey and Basecamp, Kamal is web framework agnostic. The demo is hosting a go app. Works great on a Pi.

https://kamal-deploy.org/

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drchiu

11 hours ago

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I enjoy using Kamal as well. It's simple enough for small teams to understand quickly and flexible enough to tinker down at the server level.

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shaiguitar

12 hours ago

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How does it relate to https://github.com/localstack/localstack

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ctm92

12 hours ago

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From my understanding, localstack is for emulating actual AWS resources locally, so you can develop without relying on their cloud services. It's not intended to be used in production.

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higeorge13

12 hours ago

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Nice one, I am going to check it out. Just curious, is there anything with a forever (until further notice) free tier for toy projects?

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surrTurr

12 hours ago

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Cool project, but the icon looks like DeepSeek [^1]

[1]: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1

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