PaaS / Deployment

CapRover14.9k★

If you want your own Heroku — push code, get a deployed app with HTTPS — but on a $5 VPS instead of paying Heroku prices, CapRover does that. It's a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) you install on your own server. One-click apps, automatic SSL via Let's Encrypt, Docker under the hood. Setup takes about 20 minutes on a fresh Ubuntu server. After that, you get a web dashboard where you can deploy apps from Git, Docker images, or one-click templates (WordPress, Postgres, Redis, Ghost, etc.). It handles nginx reverse proxying, SSL certificates, and Docker orchestration automatically. 15k stars. Mature and stable. The community is active and the one-click app library is extensive. Completely free. No paid tier. No cloud offering. You bring the server, CapRover runs on it. The catch: single-server by default. You can add worker nodes for horizontal scaling, but it's Docker Swarm underneath — not Kubernetes. For most small-to-medium workloads, that's fine. But if you're scaling to dozens of services, Coolify (which also does this) has more active development, or Dokku if you want something even simpler. CapRover's web UI is functional but dated. And if something breaks at the Docker/nginx layer, you're debugging it yourself.