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Nixploy vs Coolify
This one is not about price — Coolify's self-hosted build is free and complete. The differences are architectural.
Every claim about Coolify 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 These projects ship weekly, so if something here is out of date, tell us and it gets fixed.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 Coolify is
The largest open-source self-hosted PaaS by some distance. Deploys applications, databases and Compose stacks to servers you own, with automatic TLS and a big integration surface. Self-hosting is free with no feature restrictions; the paid product is their managed cloud, which runs the control plane for you.
- GitHub stars
- 62.0k · Nixploy has 3
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
Where they differ
What is paid
- Coolify
- Nothing, if you self-host: the pricing page states full access to all features with no limitation or restrictions. The paid tier is their managed cloud. source
- Nixploy
- Also nothing. There is no managed cloud to sell you either.
Licence
- Coolify
- Apache-2.0. source
- Nixploy
- Apache-2.0.
Agent surface
- Coolify
- Ships an MCP server whose tools can inspect and operate resources, with read-only MCP resources alongside them. source
- Nixploy
- 42 MCP tools, each carrying hand-declared readOnlyHint / destructiveHint / idempotentHint with a test that fails the build on a missing entry, plus task tools that return a deploy's real outcome in one call instead of a polling loop.
Size and maturity
- Coolify
- 62.0k stars, years of production use, a large contributor base. source
- Nixploy
- 3 stars. New. You are early.
Pick Coolify if
- It is vastly more mature and more widely deployed. If the most important property to you is “many people have already hit the bugs”, that is a real and correct reason.
- Far more integrations, providers and community content, and an active Discord with people who have solved your problem already.
- They offer a managed cloud, so you can stop running the control plane yourself without giving up the product.
Pick Nixploy if
- Swarm-native throughout: remote servers join one cluster over SSH and deploys, logs, metrics and backups behave identically on all of them.
- A closed set of Traefik middlewares with a hand-written schema and renderer each — there is no raw-YAML escape hatch, so nothing a tenant types reaches the proxy config unvalidated.
- Tenancy is enforced in one place and tested: every list procedure must declare how it filters by organization and by project, or CI fails.
- Agent-first by design — annotated MCP tools, llms.txt, agents.md and a Markdown twin of every docs page.
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