Our take
Pick Dokploy if small teams who will run the free self-host installer on a 2 GB VPS, or start the 7-day Cloud trial and land on Hobby at $4.50/server/month (Yearly toggle) for one user and two environments when they want git → Deploy without a $15+ Startup seat. Pick Northflank if app teams who will stay on Sandbox at $0 (2 services, 2 jobs, 1 database, $20 of Cloud resources, no seat fee) while they ship a first
usage-metered deploy desk
Best for
Dokploy Apps you start at $4.50 Cloud or OSS $0
Northflank Workloads you start at $0
Free plan
Dokploy $0 · gitHub README: “free, self-hostable Platform as a Service.” curl -sSL https://dokploy.com/install.sh | bash on your VPS (installation). You pay the VPS, not Dokploy
Northflank $0 · no card. 2 services, 2 jobs, 1 database. Up to $20/month of resources on Northflank Cloud. 1 BYOC cluster, up to 12 vCPU / 48 GB (your cloud still bills that infra). Always on, no sleeping. 2 projects. Best-effort support
Lowest paid
Dokploy Startup (Cloud) $15/mo
Northflank Printed compute plans $12
Runs where
Dokploy Local; you host it
Northflank Local; you host it
Watch out
Dokploy $4.50 is per Cloud server on the Yearly toggle
Northflank Sandbox is 2 services, 2 jobs, 1 addon, and $20 of Cloud resources
Last checked
Dokploy 2026-10-22 · dokploy.com/pricing
Northflank 2026-10-23 · northflank.com/pricing
small teams who will run the free self-host installer on a 2 GB VPS, or start the 7-day Cloud trial and land on Hobby at $4.50/server/month (Yearly toggle) for one user and two environments when they want git → Deploy without a $15+ Startup seat.
Read the Dokploy pageapp teams who will stay on Sandbox at $0 (2 services, 2 jobs, 1 database, $20 of Cloud resources, no seat fee) while they ship a first project canvas, then move to Pay as you go when they need unlimited services and horizontal scale — billed from $0.01667/vCPU-hour on Northflank Cloud.
Read the Northflank page