Tool profile
Self-hosted platform for deploying apps, databases, and services on your own infrastructure.
Agencies hosting client apps on owned infrastructure
Self-hosted PaaS UI on your servers: deploy Docker apps, databases, and SSL with a dashboard that echoes Heroku/Netlify ergonomics.
Coolify is open source under Apache License 2.0. There is no Coolify seat charge—you fund bare metal or VMs, block storage, off-site backups, and your time for patching the control plane. Optional Coolify Cloud or support offerings, if listed, are separate from self-hosted installs.
Treat Coolify like production infrastructure: RBAC, upgrades, and TLS renewal are your operational contract.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Coolify now has a real public cloud pricing page, so this entry should not read like purely self-hosted OSS anymore. The key distinction is free self-hosted software versus a managed Coolify control plane that still requires you to bring your own servers.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Apache Kafka
Free planEvent streaming and event-driven architectures
Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput pipelines, pub/sub, and stream-processing ecosystems.
Choose Kafka when replayable event streams and ecosystem breadth matter more than the lightest possible operational footprint.
Pricing snapshot
Coolify's pricing page shows Self-hosted as free forever with no feature restrictions. Coolify Cloud starts at $5 per month for 2 connected servers, plus $3 per month for each additional server. The cloud offer manages the Coolify control plane, but you still bring your own servers from providers like Hetzner, DigitalOcean, or AWS.
Arcjet
Free planApplication runtime security
Runtime security toolkit for modern applications and AI systems that helps teams enforce quotas, block bots, prevent prompt abuse, and ship app-level protections in code.
Closer to application-runtime security and abuse-prevention tooling than to classic perimeter appliances.
