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Coolify Cloud vs Dokploy Cloud in 2026: pricing, what they manage, and fully managed alternatives

By the Pethost team · 29 September 2026 · Updated 5 October 2026 · 10 min read

You like what Coolify or Dokploy does and would rather not maintain a server, so you ask whether Coolify Cloud or Dokploy Cloud is the managed version. Neither is: “Cloud” there is the panel, hosted for you, at $5 a month on Coolify Cloud and $4.50 a server on Dokploy Cloud. The server is still yours to rent, update, secure and back up. On Pethost the machine is looked after too: 2 vCPU, 3 GB and 30 GB with the panel, backups and logs for €9.99 a month.

Coolify Cloud and Dokploy Cloud: what is managed, and do I still need my own server?

Yes, with both. Coolify's documentation: “Coolify Cloud manages the control plane, not the servers and workloads you connect to it.” Dokploy's: “Your applications still run on your own servers, but the management dashboard is maintained by us.”

What you stop doing is running the panel. Self-hosted, you install, maintain and restore it, and it takes its share of the server: Coolify “needs 2 CPU cores, 2 GB RAM, and 10 GB disk space to run”. On Cloud that is the vendor's work: Coolify keeps its panel “hosted, updated, maintained, and backed up”. That changes one column of five:

A cloud panel is made for someone who already runs servers and wants the panel kept up.

Coolify Cloud pricing and Dokploy Cloud pricing in 2026: per server, bring your own server

Coolify Cloud: $5 a month with two servers

Coolify Cloud is “$5 /month base price (connect 2 servers)” and “+ $3 /month per additional server”, 20% off when paid annually. It includes email alerts and “Community + limited email support”.

Dokploy Cloud: $4.50 a server for a managed control plane

Dokploy Cloud's Hobby plan is “$ 4.50 /mo per server”, with one user, one volume backup per application and one backup per database. Startup is from $15 a month with three servers, unlimited users and backups, and $4.50 for each further server. Yearly billing is 20% off, and a 7-day trial asks for no card.

Between the two panels, Coolify Cloud's bill is the smaller from the second server on, and Dokploy's Hobby limits end at Startup's $15. Self-hosted, both are free of charge, and the panel is then yours to run as well as the server.

What if I just rent a VPS? The server a cloud panel leaves to you

With a cloud panel you have to. Coolify's pricing page: “You need to bring your own servers from any cloud provider (such as Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS, etc.)”. Two things first.

A server is not sure to cost what the guides say. Hetzner is the server guides and assistants name first, at prices it no longer has. It raised them on 1 April and again on 15 June 2026. Its cheap Cost-Optimized range has long been out of stock. Those servers are hardware it bought at good prices, before the RAM shortage, and on 5 October 2026 every plan of the range is marked “not available” on Hetzner's own page, which says “the number of available servers is limited”. The 2 vCPU, 4 GB server without that mark, CPX22, is €19.49 a month: it was €7.99 before 15 June.

The panel's own backups want an S3-compatible bucket as well, and the hours are yours. Pethost Starter is €9.99 a month with all of it done.

An agent meets the server as root. Both panels have an official MCP server: Coolify's has 45 tools by our count, three of which change anything, and Dokploy's mirrors its API in “508 tools across 49 categories”. For the server itself, its operating system and its firewall, an agent has what you have: SSH as root. Nothing tells it what runs there, and a wrong command takes down the proxy, a database or the firewall. On Pethost an agent works through 13 tools that each do one clear thing, and its shell is inside a project's containers, never on the machine.

Coolify Cloud vs Dokploy Cloud: Docker Compose, managed volume backups and logs

Each cloud panel is its self-hosted edition, run by the vendor. For a Compose project with a volume:

Coolify lists “a tested backup and restore strategy” among what you manage on Cloud too. On Pethost a restore is a tool your agent has:

Fully managed Coolify alternatives in 2026: Railway, Render, Fly.io, Northflank, Sevalla, or a machine of your own

“Something like Coolify, but fully managed” can mean two things; Coolify alternatives and Dokploy alternatives go through both.

A platform that hides the machine

On Railway, Render, Fly.io, Northflank and Sevalla there is no server to see. Each service you deploy has its own price: $7 a month for 512 MB on Render, $10 a GB of memory and $20 a vCPU on Railway (Railway vs Render vs Fly.io pricing has every plan). They are built for an application that outgrows one machine: more copies of a service, several regions, a managed database with replicas.

A machine of your own that someone else looks after

This keeps Coolify's model: one price for the machine, as many containers as fit. Elestio runs your pipelines on a VM it keeps patched: 2 vCPU and 4 GB are $16.06 a month at Netcup, $19.71 at Hetzner. Sliplane charges a flat price per server: €28.80 for 3 vCPU and 4 GB. Pethost Starter is 2 vCPU, 3 GB and 30 GB for €9.99, and runs a Compose project as written.

Railway's figure is memory alone, before CPU, disk and traffic. Fly.io's is three 1 GB Machines in Ashburn ($23.19 in Frankfurt), before volumes. Sliplane's and Elestio's are 4 GB servers, their first that hold 3 GB. Pethost's has the disk, the traffic, the backups and the logs inside.

Three small apps, a bot and a Postgres, about 2.5 GB, are €9.99 a month on Pethost, $19.71 on Elestio, $23.15 on Railway counting memory only, $25.05 to $27.75 on Northflank, €28.80 on Sliplane, $34.75 on Render, $46.00 on Sevalla, and on Fly.io $17.30 with a Postgres you run yourself or $53.24 with its managed one. Postgres on Pethost is a container in your project, in the nightly backup: not a managed database with replicas or point-in-time recovery.

What €9.99 a month buys: the server, the panel and the upkeep

With a cloud panel the bill is a server at €19.99 a month, the panel at $4.50 or $5 and a bucket for backups, and the operating system updates, the firewall and a tested restore are your evenings. On Starter, for €9.99 a month without VAT:

• 2 vCPU, 3 GB, 30 GB a machine of your own, all of it your projects'
• 14 nights of encrypted backups, off the machine
• 30 days of request logs
• 13 MCP tools for your agent

Also in the price: the panel, an HTTPS address for every project, a deploy on every push to GitHub, SSH into any container, and security updates that install themselves. Nothing is metered or billed on top.

That is the best value we found for someone who likes what Coolify does and not the server under it: 3 GB of always-on memory for €9.99, where the seven other hosts in the chart ask from $16.06 to $39.00, with the upkeep a cloud panel leaves to you done. Grow, a machine twice the size, is €17.99. There is no free tier: €9.99 rents a real machine.

Who Pethost is for

Read from each vendor's own pricing page and documentation on 5 October 2026. Prices are in each vendor's currency, ours without VAT; sums over several servers or instances are ours.

1. Coolify: pricing
2. Coolify: self-hosted and Cloud
3. Coolify: server patching
4. Coolify: installation
5. Coolify: Docker Compose
6. Coolify: volume backups
7. Coolify: database backups
8. Coolify: MCP capabilities
9. Coolify: changelog
10. Coolify: documentation index
11. Dokploy: pricing
12. Dokploy: Cloud
13. Dokploy: Cloud and self-hosted
14. Dokploy: Compose domains
15. Dokploy: volume backups
16. Dokploy: backups
17. Dokploy: documentation
18. Dokploy: MCP server
19. Hetzner: Cost-Optimized plans
20. Hetzner: Regular Performance plans
21. Hetzner: price adjustment of 1 April
22. Hetzner: price adjustment of 15 June
23. DigitalOcean: Droplets
24. Railway: pricing
25. Render: pricing
26. Fly.io: pricing
27. Northflank: pricing
28. Sevalla: pricing
29. Elestio: pricing
30. Sliplane: pricing