Buddy vs Coolify
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Buddy and Coolify.
Quick Verdict
3.9/5
Buddy
0 reviews
4.2/5
Coolify
0 reviews
Coolify is rated higher (4.2 vs 3.9). Buddy is a DevOps automation platform with 150+ actions for building, testing, and deploying to any server or cloud. Visual pipeline builder, Docker support, and good free tier. Coolify is a free, open source self-hosted platform for deploying apps, databases, and services on your own servers. Supports any Docker image, one-click databases, and automated SSL.
Buddy DevOps automation with 150+ deployment actions | Coolify Self-hosted open source Heroku/Netlify alternative | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.9 (0 reviews) | 4.2 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Small-to-mid teams, especially in Europe, that want visual CI/CD with mixed Linux/Windows/macOS runners and prefer per-minute metering over YAML maintenance | Solo developers and small teams with Linux skills who want Heroku-style deploys on their own cheap servers without per-app PaaS pricing |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | — | Bring your own servers; Cloud control plane on Hetzner in Falkenstein, Germany |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accessteam features | free tieropen sourceself hostable |
| Visit Buddy → | Visit Coolify → | |
Buddy
Pros
- + Visual pipeline builder with YAML pipelines as an escape hatch — editable by both terminal and non-terminal users
- + Transparent usage metering with worked cost examples on the pricing page
- + Free plan includes all features except SSO and advanced permissions, with $1/month usage credit
- + Linux, Windows, and macOS VM runners on Intel and ARM cover desktop and mobile builds in one tool
- + Sandbox previews with custom domains, plus Terraform, tunnels, CLI, and API across all plans
Cons
- - Free workspaces are frozen after 60 days of inactivity and permanently terminated 30 days later
- - SSO and advanced permissions gated behind the $299/month Team plan
- - Seats, concurrency slots, and compute usage are three separate meters that stack on busy teams
- - Smaller action ecosystem than GitHub Actions; no self-hosted runners on your own hardware
- - macOS VM usage is billed at 6x the memory rate — iOS builds get expensive quickly
Coolify
Pros
- + Self-hosted is free forever with the complete feature set — unlimited servers, deployments and team members, Apache 2.0, no feature paywall
- + Coolify Cloud is $5/month including 2 connected servers ($3/month per extra server) — a flat fee that takes no margin on your compute
- + Deploys apps, databases and 280+ one-click services with automatic Let's Encrypt TLS and git push workflows on any SSH-reachable Linux host
- + Open codebase with a large, active community (20k+ Discord members) and near-daily development
Cons
- - You own server security, patching, firewalling and workload backups — the platform only removes deployment tedium
- - No uptime SLA, no enterprise support tier, SSO or compliance package; support is community plus limited email on Cloud
- - Fast-moving project: frequent releases and occasional upgrade friction, with a busy issue tracker
- - Cloud base plan covers only 2 servers and each team needs its own subscription
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