I feel like it's only possible to get excited about software anymore if it's open source and not in the control of some vendor. Not because I care a lot about the ideology of free software, it's just because the way corporations take over and ruin/sell out everything has been so demoralizing.
There's been quite some time that have the same feeling. You can always find exceptions of course, but in this case it is typically the sort that proves the rule.
I personally blame the "growth at all costs" that is pervasive to tech industry, where "simply" being an established, moderately profitable, healthy company is seen as negative. It brings along all sorts of perverse incentives.
I just don't see myself needing to do much differently than I did 10 years ago...heck 20 years ago. Sure some frameworks make things nicer but we had the ability to drag and drop labels on photos and create photo/video montages with audio in our startup back in 2005.
Maybe it could be done with better abstractions today but I just don't think it's worth all the complexity that it seems to come with nowadays.
Open-source is rarely sustainable, I use many open-source projects, and I support/sponsor them when possible, but many simply don't survive long and the builder loses interested.
With Coolify it's different, because many companies are willing to sponsor the project, so it's already sustainable.
What are you talking about? Corporations ruining open source is the norm in 2024, indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is the new free software.
>indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is the new free software.
High power level take.
The Stallman ethos of Free Software simply hasn't played out the way idealists thought it would. Instead, libraries are standardized by megacorps to farm employees inculcated into their design patterns and get GitHub clout chasers to fix bugs for free.
Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND* license. Code is open but you can't profit from it. Unmodified redistribution requires credit. You can modify the code for personal use but you can't redistribute it without permission.
This model at least eliminates the potential maliciousness of a lot of closed-source software while leaving room for indie devs to profit from their work.
>However, Coolify’s explosive growth in 2024 suggests we’re witnessing a different level of adoption and impact on the wider software community.
This worries me about the state of Github more than anything else. For the past couple years now we've been seeing these "viral" repos that catch on for one reason or another, get tens of thousands of stars in a few months (in part due to posts like this), and then languish. Time was that a few thousand Github stars really meant something; that a project had steadily gained support over years and was at a place that was production ready for the masses. Not so anymore.
Most recent Github stars are came from big tech youtuber's videos.
That's kind of my point. It's becoming impossible now to tell the difference between long running stable repos vs something someone with social media followers just started pushing by stars alone anymore.
Has anyone tried out Tau [1]? It's similar to Coolify but supports multiple nodes which is appealing to me as I have spotty internet and distributing an app across several pi's in different locations sounds ideal.
I’m guessing they’re referring to Vercel’s business strategy and general influence on open source lately? I know it’s a thing on the twitter, but maybe I’m missing something more overt and obvious.
I was using https://caprover.com but I'm slowly migrating all services to Coolify.
CapRover still has a few things that it does better (better custom-domain support, more 1-click apps, integrated NetData monitoring, etc.), but overall Coolify is a lot more beginner-friendly and simpler to use.
I liked coolify when I was hosting my wordpress, bitwarden, and a couple of personal projects via github on a VPS, it made the annoying step of getting certs for all the https domains into a one click operation.
Once I forgot my password to the admin panel and it just wasn't that big of deal to blow away the VPS and set it all up from scratch. Feels good to not be anxious about that.
Shameless plug but I built https://flexstack.com for similar reasons. I wanted a Render/Vercel alternative on my own AWS account and all of the other options either didn't go far enough or were way too expensive for someone bootstrapping.
Marketing developer tools is commonly much harder than developing them.
The hard thing about adopting a product like yours is that as a potential customer you never know whether the thing you want to do is actually going to be easy or hard or impossible or time consuming.
The home page preaches all the right things, but it's very busy and information dense and yet nothing on the home page gives me enough detail for me to know if it will actually work for me for real.
Figuring out whether a product like this will actually work for me is the real cost I'm looking at, not the $10/month cost. At present, the figuring out if it will work for me cost looks arbitrarily high, because I have no information to go on on the home page without trying to work through an actual deployment on my own.
The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool. It needs to focus instead on explaining things. Adding words, either spoken or on title cards, would help significantly. Yes, I understand there are words in the video - they are words that talk about goals of your company, not words that tell me what is going on in the video. I see lots of things that I recognize or that make sense, but I don't know where it's going or what I'm watching when it starts, so I have no schema in my mind to organize what I'm watching. Getting rid of the "music," or replacing it with much less distracting audio, would help as well - it makes it much harder to concentrate on trying to understand what I'm seeing. Remember, I am watching the video with the goal of understanding "will this do the specific things I need it to do" not "do we agree on the high level goals of what would be great to have."
Coolify is winning today, not because its tech is better than competitors, but because it's tech is more understandable than competitors.
Thanks for the feedback! I appreciate your honesty and your willingness to share.
> The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool
I have been working on a Loom version. Before putting a lot of time into the demo, I wanted to validate that people were watching it (and they are). I quickly put something together in iMovie that would introduce the product in <1 minute, was not trying to be cool. It stings to hear, but I accept that was the vibe.
> it's very busy and information dense ... nothing on the home page gives me enough detail
It has ~the same number of words as Render/Coolify/Vercel, so I will take your point that I'm not yet telling the story as well.
Not at the moment unfortunately. I understand it's more friction, but you can just clone any of those repos and deploy them to FlexStack in 1-click by linking your GitHub account.
At Coherence (withcoherence.com - I'm a cofounder) we are delivering the open-source benefits of Coolify (less vendor lock-in, cheap hosting costs) via our open-source CNC framework (cncframework.com) while still keeping a hosted SaaS control plane that eliminates the "few hours of fiddling with setup" that the blog author minimizes here. Maintenance and configuration complexity over time (as you customize and use click-ops to configure) are endless, especially as you get more usage or host more projects.
Coolify is awesome software, and alongside similar tools like Caprover, Dokku, and Cloud66, it has its role. But for business use-cases I believe that giving up managed cloud services is too big a leap to make sense, and that a middle-ground approach will win in the long term.
How is this different from the Coolify hosted cloud, apart from the fact that you are the co-founder of Coherence and not Coolify.
I've used neither solution, but just at a glance, right now I'd bet on Coolify -- it has more permissive license, it has active community of third party contributors and it amassed a large amount of private and corporate sponsors that likely make it sustainable.
On the other hand, you've raised $3.9m more that a year ago. What happens if the money runs out?
Maybe you can clarify what your solution offers that Coolify doesn't.
Appreciate the POV, and agree that Coolify has a much better community around it! A lot we can learn from. Not sure we agree on the license front since we do allow commercial use.
Coolify and cnc are very different technical solutions. Coolify is a server you deploy to a VM that then can schedule workloads onto that VM, managing features like ingress and updates. cnc is a client-side CLI that schedules workloads into managed cloud services like lambda, cloud run, ECS, or Kubernetes. It orchestrates public cloud provided services instead of providing them itself (e.g. RDS vs. MySQL in a docker container on a VM). The trade-offs here are too big for a comment and both are a great fit for different use cases. We dive in a bit deeper with our POV here: https://www.withcoherence.com/post/the-2024-web-hosting-repo...
Coolify is awesome! We use it for lots of things at Svelte Society. From self-hosting marketing and analytics to running our own Nextcloud instance as well as a bunch of other stuff.
I've missed the Vercel/Coolify hype train, the last "seamless" deployment platform I touched was Heroku.
What makes Coolify so useful?
It's never taken me more than 30 minutes to deploy self-hosted tools, from Nextcloud to Prosody, even without Docker. These "serverless" platforms certainly aren't any cheaper than bare metal and are at best marginally quicker to deploy, so what makes Coolify so useful to you?
Is it easier to maintain, manage dependencies, or load balance over time? What am I missing?
It's not really hard to deploy these things in isolation but Coolify makes it very easy to do it all on the same server. From Git integration with CI/CD in just a few clicks to just random services that you might need for business purposes (Email marketing, Analytics, Nextcloud).
30 minutes honestly sounds like a long time compared to the time it takes to do this with a PaaS.
Some other stuff that's nice: multiple environments (staging, production, you name it), Multiple deploy targets if you're running many servers (via Docker Swarm), support for Teams (in case you need multiple people to handle something, update environment variables, etc). There's lots.
Maybe you should give it a whirl? I don't know your exact use-cases
Solutions like Coolify help to save more than 30 minutes.
I have recorded a sample of my own herokulikeinspiredbycoolifysuccesssaas where I deploy a WordPress instance (with MySQL and ability to enable backups with 1 click) in less than 3 minutes, including introduction, explanations and afterword.
We've been using Coolify to power all our products. It's a great tool for quickly starting new projects. We're very happy with it. We got our servers from Hetzner and we're not looking back.
I'm starting to feel like the old man yelling at people to get off my lawn, but I don't understand why tools like this are desirable for something as critical as your infrastructure.
> Before that, I had only known pain. From renting a server, dockerizing, setting up a proxy, SSL certificates, monitoring—you name it!
Is this really so difficult? Especially in the age of docker I've never felt like deploying a new project was more straightforward. I have a handful of docker-compose files that I can copy-paste for any new project that get me spun up with a Node/Python server with LetsEncrypt SSL, optionally behind a reverse proxy. It takes me no more than 20 minutes to setup a new project which involves SSH'ing to the server, copying the files, and updating configs.
Why would I ever want to give up that level of control and reliability to saddle myself to a third party who does _magic_ to make my deployments happen? They can change their offering or their pricing at any time, and if I don't like it I now have to rip out all of their _proprietary magic_ in order to move to something more sensible.
I do think Coolify is an interesting exception as it's _self-hosted magic_, but that still leaves me with a single point of failure where I'm relying on someone else to make sure my backend keeps working. If your Coolify instance ever has a critical failure or your requirements are no longer compatible then you're right back to the same problem.
Am I out of touch? Are you really spinning up servers so frequently that this type of hard dependency is justified? Or are developers these days the ones who are out of touch (with their backend)?
In my experience the actual time is usually vastly underestimated. You might take 20 minutes if you've just setup an equivalent project, but otherwise you're gonna take a lot longer to get everything wired up, including https certs.
And you're likely only thinking of deploying already existing images right now, so you'll have to add another hour or so to configure a ci/CD pipeline, a container registry, permissions etc. unless you're fine doing deploys/builds manually.
Unless you configure a cronjob to poll for changes via git, but now you're still gonna have to ssh in to check if everything worked with the build/deploy.
Tools like Coolify streamline this process and give you a preconfigured template to get everything wired up from a git repository push event to a deployment on a docker-swarm cluster, with a shiny UI to configure env variables and check the terminal output of the container etc
I'm not sure what you'd consider magic here though, it's mostly just quality of life templates and a coherent UI so you don't have to execute various commands via ssh
Coolify is good, I haven't found anything comparable. But it is so dumb silly in case of UX.
You switched to static container name for your release? (this turns off rolling updates) - try to find how to switch it back. I've not found.
It's complicated to understand what happened with your dockerfile build and find an error, because coolify wraps it with docker-compose dockerfile builders.
You want to move your deploy to another env? Oh, for some reason you can manage it inside deploy in Resource Operations inside deploy. You want to migrate 10 deploys? Haha, good luck.
Also I've met some problems while integrating private gitea with deploy sources for other deploys.
So, it's complicated and not just works, but there is nothing better
I feel like it's only possible to get excited about software anymore if it's open source and not in the control of some vendor. Not because I care a lot about the ideology of free software, it's just because the way corporations take over and ruin/sell out everything has been so demoralizing.
There's been quite some time that have the same feeling. You can always find exceptions of course, but in this case it is typically the sort that proves the rule.
I personally blame the "growth at all costs" that is pervasive to tech industry, where "simply" being an established, moderately profitable, healthy company is seen as negative. It brings along all sorts of perverse incentives.
I just don't see myself needing to do much differently than I did 10 years ago...heck 20 years ago. Sure some frameworks make things nicer but we had the ability to drag and drop labels on photos and create photo/video montages with audio in our startup back in 2005.
Maybe it could be done with better abstractions today but I just don't think it's worth all the complexity that it seems to come with nowadays.
Make Web Pages Reload Again.
Open-source is rarely sustainable, I use many open-source projects, and I support/sponsor them when possible, but many simply don't survive long and the builder loses interested.
With Coolify it's different, because many companies are willing to sponsor the project, so it's already sustainable.
What are you talking about? Corporations ruining open source is the norm in 2024, indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is the new free software.
>indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is the new free software.
High power level take.
The Stallman ethos of Free Software simply hasn't played out the way idealists thought it would. Instead, libraries are standardized by megacorps to farm employees inculcated into their design patterns and get GitHub clout chasers to fix bugs for free.
Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND* license. Code is open but you can't profit from it. Unmodified redistribution requires credit. You can modify the code for personal use but you can't redistribute it without permission.
This model at least eliminates the potential maliciousness of a lot of closed-source software while leaving room for indie devs to profit from their work.
*[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/]
13 replies →
>However, Coolify’s explosive growth in 2024 suggests we’re witnessing a different level of adoption and impact on the wider software community.
This worries me about the state of Github more than anything else. For the past couple years now we've been seeing these "viral" repos that catch on for one reason or another, get tens of thousands of stars in a few months (in part due to posts like this), and then languish. Time was that a few thousand Github stars really meant something; that a project had steadily gained support over years and was at a place that was production ready for the masses. Not so anymore.
Most recent Github stars are came from big tech youtuber's videos.
GH stars of Coolify built over 4 years.
> GH stars of Coolify built over 4 years
That is not how I understood the chart in the article (vs Dokku), 2024 hockey stick!
Most recent Github stars are came from big tech youtuber's videos.
That's kind of my point. It's becoming impossible now to tell the difference between long running stable repos vs something someone with social media followers just started pushing by stars alone anymore.
3 replies →
Has anyone tried out Tau [1]? It's similar to Coolify but supports multiple nodes which is appealing to me as I have spotty internet and distributing an app across several pi's in different locations sounds ideal.
[1]: https://github.com/taubyte/tau
Coolify also supports multiple nodes
As an outsider to Vercel, Next.js and server side JS in general, I feel like I'm missing a lot.
> What happened next with Next.js and Vercel is far less magical...
What happened - could someone elaborate or share a link?
I’m guessing they’re referring to Vercel’s business strategy and general influence on open source lately? I know it’s a thing on the twitter, but maybe I’m missing something more overt and obvious.
What is Vercel’s business strategy or recent influence on open source?
Found this discussion - perhaps related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40682711 “Vercel ends open-source sponsorship program giving projects 24hr notice”
I was using https://caprover.com but I'm slowly migrating all services to Coolify.
CapRover still has a few things that it does better (better custom-domain support, more 1-click apps, integrated NetData monitoring, etc.), but overall Coolify is a lot more beginner-friendly and simpler to use.
I liked coolify when I was hosting my wordpress, bitwarden, and a couple of personal projects via github on a VPS, it made the annoying step of getting certs for all the https domains into a one click operation.
Once I forgot my password to the admin panel and it just wasn't that big of deal to blow away the VPS and set it all up from scratch. Feels good to not be anxious about that.
Shameless plug but I built https://flexstack.com for similar reasons. I wanted a Render/Vercel alternative on my own AWS account and all of the other options either didn't go far enough or were way too expensive for someone bootstrapping.
Marketing developer tools is commonly much harder than developing them.
The hard thing about adopting a product like yours is that as a potential customer you never know whether the thing you want to do is actually going to be easy or hard or impossible or time consuming.
The home page preaches all the right things, but it's very busy and information dense and yet nothing on the home page gives me enough detail for me to know if it will actually work for me for real.
Figuring out whether a product like this will actually work for me is the real cost I'm looking at, not the $10/month cost. At present, the figuring out if it will work for me cost looks arbitrarily high, because I have no information to go on on the home page without trying to work through an actual deployment on my own.
The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool. It needs to focus instead on explaining things. Adding words, either spoken or on title cards, would help significantly. Yes, I understand there are words in the video - they are words that talk about goals of your company, not words that tell me what is going on in the video. I see lots of things that I recognize or that make sense, but I don't know where it's going or what I'm watching when it starts, so I have no schema in my mind to organize what I'm watching. Getting rid of the "music," or replacing it with much less distracting audio, would help as well - it makes it much harder to concentrate on trying to understand what I'm seeing. Remember, I am watching the video with the goal of understanding "will this do the specific things I need it to do" not "do we agree on the high level goals of what would be great to have."
Coolify is winning today, not because its tech is better than competitors, but because it's tech is more understandable than competitors.
Thanks for the feedback! I appreciate your honesty and your willingness to share.
> The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool
I have been working on a Loom version. Before putting a lot of time into the demo, I wanted to validate that people were watching it (and they are). I quickly put something together in iMovie that would introduce the product in <1 minute, was not trying to be cool. It stings to hear, but I accept that was the vibe.
> it's very busy and information dense ... nothing on the home page gives me enough detail
It has ~the same number of words as Render/Coolify/Vercel, so I will take your point that I'm not yet telling the story as well.
Does your platforms support 1-Click (premade) apps?
Something like this? https://vercel.com/templates
Not at the moment unfortunately. I understand it's more friction, but you can just clone any of those repos and deploy them to FlexStack in 1-click by linking your GitHub account.
2 replies →
At Coherence (withcoherence.com - I'm a cofounder) we are delivering the open-source benefits of Coolify (less vendor lock-in, cheap hosting costs) via our open-source CNC framework (cncframework.com) while still keeping a hosted SaaS control plane that eliminates the "few hours of fiddling with setup" that the blog author minimizes here. Maintenance and configuration complexity over time (as you customize and use click-ops to configure) are endless, especially as you get more usage or host more projects.
Coolify is awesome software, and alongside similar tools like Caprover, Dokku, and Cloud66, it has its role. But for business use-cases I believe that giving up managed cloud services is too big a leap to make sense, and that a middle-ground approach will win in the long term.
How is this different from the Coolify hosted cloud, apart from the fact that you are the co-founder of Coherence and not Coolify.
I've used neither solution, but just at a glance, right now I'd bet on Coolify -- it has more permissive license, it has active community of third party contributors and it amassed a large amount of private and corporate sponsors that likely make it sustainable.
On the other hand, you've raised $3.9m more that a year ago. What happens if the money runs out?
Maybe you can clarify what your solution offers that Coolify doesn't.
Appreciate the POV, and agree that Coolify has a much better community around it! A lot we can learn from. Not sure we agree on the license front since we do allow commercial use.
Coolify and cnc are very different technical solutions. Coolify is a server you deploy to a VM that then can schedule workloads onto that VM, managing features like ingress and updates. cnc is a client-side CLI that schedules workloads into managed cloud services like lambda, cloud run, ECS, or Kubernetes. It orchestrates public cloud provided services instead of providing them itself (e.g. RDS vs. MySQL in a docker container on a VM). The trade-offs here are too big for a comment and both are a great fit for different use cases. We dive in a bit deeper with our POV here: https://www.withcoherence.com/post/the-2024-web-hosting-repo...
That's quite a confusing name, it took me quite a while to realise you aren't talking about computer numerical control.
Question for folks who use Coolify in prod, where do you host your stuff and how much is your monthly bill?
Coolify is awesome! We use it for lots of things at Svelte Society. From self-hosting marketing and analytics to running our own Nextcloud instance as well as a bunch of other stuff.
I've missed the Vercel/Coolify hype train, the last "seamless" deployment platform I touched was Heroku.
What makes Coolify so useful?
It's never taken me more than 30 minutes to deploy self-hosted tools, from Nextcloud to Prosody, even without Docker. These "serverless" platforms certainly aren't any cheaper than bare metal and are at best marginally quicker to deploy, so what makes Coolify so useful to you?
Is it easier to maintain, manage dependencies, or load balance over time? What am I missing?
It's not really hard to deploy these things in isolation but Coolify makes it very easy to do it all on the same server. From Git integration with CI/CD in just a few clicks to just random services that you might need for business purposes (Email marketing, Analytics, Nextcloud).
30 minutes honestly sounds like a long time compared to the time it takes to do this with a PaaS.
Some other stuff that's nice: multiple environments (staging, production, you name it), Multiple deploy targets if you're running many servers (via Docker Swarm), support for Teams (in case you need multiple people to handle something, update environment variables, etc). There's lots.
Maybe you should give it a whirl? I don't know your exact use-cases
(not coolify)
Solutions like Coolify help to save more than 30 minutes.
I have recorded a sample of my own herokulikeinspiredbycoolifysuccesssaas where I deploy a WordPress instance (with MySQL and ability to enable backups with 1 click) in less than 3 minutes, including introduction, explanations and afterword.
https://youtu.be/k34Zdwcsm6I
Having the right app template allows to easily spin any number of services you need in an ultra-short time.
Mine is based on the Docker Swarm, so you're getting the proven solution under the hood.
1 reply →
It's easier for me to spin up postgres and redis with automated backups using coolify than manually write a deploy/backup script.
Outside that I deploy apps outside coolify as it doesn't scale automatically.
We've been using Coolify to power all our products. It's a great tool for quickly starting new projects. We're very happy with it. We got our servers from Hetzner and we're not looking back.
Sounds great! Any resources on where to start? This thread is the first time I heard from that
Can you describe what it is?
Coolify has enabled me as a technical marketer to self-host with ease. Much cheaper than putting something on Railway too!
I've been trying Coolify lately and the idea is great. I really hope it gets more support from companies. I wanna see where this project could go.
Just an ad, hasn't even even been spell checked, c'mon can we stop with this
I was definitely expecting more substance, pretty weak article even if it was intended to be more than an ad.
I'm starting to feel like the old man yelling at people to get off my lawn, but I don't understand why tools like this are desirable for something as critical as your infrastructure.
> Before that, I had only known pain. From renting a server, dockerizing, setting up a proxy, SSL certificates, monitoring—you name it!
Is this really so difficult? Especially in the age of docker I've never felt like deploying a new project was more straightforward. I have a handful of docker-compose files that I can copy-paste for any new project that get me spun up with a Node/Python server with LetsEncrypt SSL, optionally behind a reverse proxy. It takes me no more than 20 minutes to setup a new project which involves SSH'ing to the server, copying the files, and updating configs.
Why would I ever want to give up that level of control and reliability to saddle myself to a third party who does _magic_ to make my deployments happen? They can change their offering or their pricing at any time, and if I don't like it I now have to rip out all of their _proprietary magic_ in order to move to something more sensible.
I do think Coolify is an interesting exception as it's _self-hosted magic_, but that still leaves me with a single point of failure where I'm relying on someone else to make sure my backend keeps working. If your Coolify instance ever has a critical failure or your requirements are no longer compatible then you're right back to the same problem.
Am I out of touch? Are you really spinning up servers so frequently that this type of hard dependency is justified? Or are developers these days the ones who are out of touch (with their backend)?
In my experience the actual time is usually vastly underestimated. You might take 20 minutes if you've just setup an equivalent project, but otherwise you're gonna take a lot longer to get everything wired up, including https certs. And you're likely only thinking of deploying already existing images right now, so you'll have to add another hour or so to configure a ci/CD pipeline, a container registry, permissions etc. unless you're fine doing deploys/builds manually. Unless you configure a cronjob to poll for changes via git, but now you're still gonna have to ssh in to check if everything worked with the build/deploy.
Tools like Coolify streamline this process and give you a preconfigured template to get everything wired up from a git repository push event to a deployment on a docker-swarm cluster, with a shiny UI to configure env variables and check the terminal output of the container etc
I'm not sure what you'd consider magic here though, it's mostly just quality of life templates and a coherent UI so you don't have to execute various commands via ssh
I feel like Vercel needs VPS options in order to compete with Coolify.
such a trip, beginning of this year it didnt have that many stars
im banned from heztner because my card expired and i coudnt pay invoice, can i register as a company?
Coolify is good, I haven't found anything comparable. But it is so dumb silly in case of UX.
You switched to static container name for your release? (this turns off rolling updates) - try to find how to switch it back. I've not found.
It's complicated to understand what happened with your dockerfile build and find an error, because coolify wraps it with docker-compose dockerfile builders.
You want to move your deploy to another env? Oh, for some reason you can manage it inside deploy in Resource Operations inside deploy. You want to migrate 10 deploys? Haha, good luck.
Also I've met some problems while integrating private gitea with deploy sources for other deploys.
So, it's complicated and not just works, but there is nothing better