Open Source Alternative to Vercel, Netlify and Heroku | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Alternative to Vercel, Netlify and Heroku

dokploy.com

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

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.

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

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.

Does someone have a legal authority over the term “open source”?

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

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

> 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.

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.

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?

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

And Coolify seems to be actually open source.

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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

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.

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

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

Wait till you see Docker!

just because it's a whale, doesn't mean it looks similar

it looks a lot more like deepseek when you also consider the movement/form

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com