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Nixploy vs CapRover

Both are Swarm-native and both are free. CapRover is the smaller, simpler tool; Nixploy carries the operations surface — backups, monitoring, teams, audit — that CapRover leaves to you.

Every claim about CapRover below links to where it was read, and was read rather than remembered — last checked 18 September 2026. These projects ship weekly, so if something here is out of date, tell us and it gets fixed. We have not included opinions about anybody's reliability or security history.
What CapRover is

One of the oldest projects in this category, and the most deliberately simple. Docker Swarm underneath with nginx as the reverse proxy and Let's Encrypt for certificates, one-click apps, CLI and webhook deploys. Free forever, with no paid tier at all.

GitHub stars
15.2k · Nixploy has 3
Licence
Apache-2.0

Where they differ

Orchestration

CapRover
Docker Swarm, with nginx as the reverse proxy and Let's Encrypt for TLS. source
Nixploy
Docker Swarm, with Traefik v3 as the reverse proxy and Let's Encrypt for TLS.

Price

CapRover
Free forever, Apache-2.0, no paid tier. source
Nixploy
The same.

Deploys

CapRover
CLI, dashboard, webhooks and Git workflow integration; one-click apps for common services. source
Nixploy
The same sources plus Compose stacks as first-class services, PR previews with a fork gate, rollbacks that restore config and environment, and deploy-any-ref.

Size

CapRover
15.2k stars, active since 2017. source
Nixploy
3 stars. New.
Pick CapRover if
  • It is simpler, and simple is a feature. If you want one box, a handful of apps and nothing to learn, CapRover asks less of you than we do.
  • Eight years of production use and a large body of community answers.
  • Lower resource use, because it does less.
Pick Nixploy if
  • Encrypted database and volume backups on a schedule, to S3 or disk, with verified restores — and a self-backup of the panel itself.
  • Live logs, a web terminal, 48 hours of metrics, alert rules, uptime probes and a per-service event timeline that records OOM kills and restarts.
  • Organizations, a role ladder, capability overlays, teams, SSO and an audit trail with CSV export.
  • A REST API, a CLI, GitOps from a nixploy.yaml and an MCP endpoint for AI agents.
Try it on one box

Nixploy installs alongside nothing and takes one command. Point it at a spare VPS before you move anything real.

install.sh
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bablilayoub/nixploy/main/install.sh | sudo bash

Compare the others · Moving from another panel

Rent the box. Keep the rest.

One command, three services, and the first account is yours.