Laravel Forge vs Shuttle
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Laravel Forge and Shuttle.
Quick Verdict
4.1/5
Laravel Forge
0 reviews
3.4/5
Shuttle
0 reviews
Laravel Forge is rated higher (4.1 vs 3.4). Laravel Forge provisions and manages PHP servers for Laravel applications. Auto-deploys from GitHub, manages Nginx, databases, SSL, and cron jobs. The standard for Laravel deployments. Shuttle deploys Rust backend services with zero configuration — annotate your code with macros and Shuttle handles the infrastructure. No YAML, no Terraform. Pay-per-use serverless Rust.
Laravel Forge Server management for PHP/Laravel deployments | Shuttle Deploy Rust backends from your code — no config | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.1 (0 reviews)✓ | 3.4 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | paid | freemium |
| Starting price | From $12/mo | Free tier available✓ |
| Best for | Laravel and PHP developers — and agencies running multiple client servers — who want automated provisioning and deployment to any cloud VPS while keeping root access and provider choice | Rust developers — solo or small teams — who want a backend live in minutes from annotated code and can accept a London-only region and no contractual uptime guarantee. |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | — | 0 vCPU |
| RAM | — | 1 GB |
| Storage | — | 1 GB |
| Bandwidth | — | — |
| SLA uptime | — | — |
| Data-center count | — | 1 |
| €/GB RAM/mo | — | €0.00 |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ✓ | |
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | — | AWS eu-west-2 (London) |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | managed optionapi access | free tieropen sourceus datacenter |
| Visit Laravel Forge → | Visit Shuttle → | |
Laravel Forge
Pros
- + Flat, published pricing ($12/$19/$39) on top of cheap self-chosen servers — strong cost control versus PaaS
- + Zero-downtime deployments, automated SSL, managed databases, queues, cron, monitoring and heartbeats in the box
- + Provider flexibility: Laravel VPS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, Hetzner Cloud, or bring your own server
- + A decade of Laravel deployments behind it; backed by Laravel Holdings with a $57M Series A and active development
- + Agency-friendly: organizations with role-based access and billing separation, unlimited sites and deployments
Cons
- - Monthly fee on top of server costs — poor value for a single small site
- - PHP-first; Node/Nuxt/Next.js support is newer and broader language support is still promised
- - No uptime SLA and community-only support on the Hobby plan
- - Power tool: provisioning existing servers can cause data loss; backups and OS security are your responsibility
- - Reliability of the running app depends on the underlying provider Forge does not control
Shuttle
Pros
- + Infrastructure from code annotations: databases, secrets and static assets provisioned from function signatures, no YAML or Terraform
- + Real free tier (0.25 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM, 0.5 GB database, 100 build minutes/month) with custom domain support
- + Published, itemized usage rates ($0.12/GB storage, $0.025/build minute, $0.10/GB egress) instead of sales-quoted pricing
- + Clear isolation tiering: spot instances on free, reserved VM-isolated instances from Pro
- + First-class Rust framework support (Axum, Actix Web, Rocket, Serenity) and open-source platform code
Cons
- - Rust only — other language stacks are not supported today
- - Single AWS region (London, eu-west-2) with no region choice below the not-yet-available Enterprise tier
- - No published uptime SLA on any current tier; support is Discord-based with 1-business-day response on Pro
- - Steep jump from $20/mo Pro to $250/mo Growth, with metered usage on top of every paid tier
- - Tier contents have changed materially over time (projects and included egress were cut in 2025)
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