Cleavr vs Northflank Containers
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Cleavr and Northflank Containers.
Quick Verdict
3.8/5
Cleavr
0 reviews
3.9/5
Northflank Containers
0 reviews
Northflank Containers is rated higher (3.9 vs 3.8). Cleavr is a server management and deployment tool for deploying Laravel, Node.js, and static sites to your own VPS. Manages Nginx, databases, SSL, and deployments through a UI. Northflank provides container deployments with automatic Docker image builds from GitHub, background workers, cron jobs, and secret management. Kubernetes-powered with a developer-friendly interface.
Cleavr Deploy Laravel and Node.js apps via UI | Northflank Containers Container deployments with built-in CI/CD | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.8 (0 reviews) | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | paid | freemium |
| Starting price | From $5.5/mo | Free tier available✓ |
| Best for | Solo developers and small teams running PHP, Laravel, WordPress, or Node apps who want Forge-style deployment workflows on their own VPS at half the price | Engineering teams wanting Heroku-grade developer experience with Kubernetes-grade control: GitHub-to-deployment pipelines with per-PR previews, multi-cloud deployment including your own VPC, and GPU/AI workloads on the same platform. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ✓ | |
| Automated backups | ✓ | |
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ✓ | |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | managed option | free tiermanaged optionteam featuresapi accesskubernetes support |
| Visit Cleavr → | Visit Northflank Containers → | |
Cleavr
Pros
- + Cheap and honest: Lite $5.50/mo for one server with unlimited apps, Pro $15/mo for unlimited servers with backups and monitoring
- + Production deployment features — zero-downtime releases, rollback, canary with health checks, push-to-deploy
- + Works with all the usual VPS providers plus a custom BYO-server connector; servers remain fully yours
- + Complete stack management from the UI: Nginx/PHP, MySQL/PostgreSQL/MariaDB, SSL, Fail2Ban/UFW, cron, PM2
- + Real free trial (5 days, Pro features, no card) and 7-day refunds; 50% discounts for students and non-profits
Cons
- - Bootstrapped two-person company with no published uptime SLA and email-only support
- - API access is locked to trial and Business ($30/mo); team features are Business-only
- - Agent plus panel components reportedly consume ~200-500 MB RAM on each managed server
- - Published prices are yearly-billing rates; the monthly-billing rate is not shown on the pricing page
- - Younger areas (Next.js, newer app types) are thinner than the mature Laravel/PHP core
Northflank Containers
Pros
- + Per-second, usage-based pricing with published unit rates and no seat fees
- + Real free Sandbox: 2 services, 2 jobs, 1 database, up to $20/mo resources, always-on compute
- + BYOC runs the platform in your AWS/GCP/Azure/Oracle VPC while you keep your cloud commitments
- + Strong CI/CD: per-PR preview environments, stored builds with rollback, release pipelines
- + GPU workloads (L4/A100/H100), Jupyter, secure code execution, RWX volumes: AI-ready beyond typical PaaS
- + UI, CLI, API, and GitOps control surfaces with RBAC, secrets, and audit-oriented enterprise features
Cons
- - Young company (founded 2019, Series A): less operational track record than incumbents
- - Contractual SLA and 24/7 support are Enterprise-only
- - Storage, IOPS, throughput, egress, and gateway line items stack up on database-heavy architectures
- - Card/payment-method requirement for the free tier conflicts between the pricing page and billing docs
- - Deep platform abstraction means application-level lock-in even with BYOC
- - Documentation is thorough on features but thin on migration patterns and BYOC networking edge cases
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