Best self-hosted PaaS in 2026: six tools compared

Last month I sat with a 4 GB VPS, a Next.js app and a Postgres database, and spent two evenings reading six documentation sites to answer one question: which self-hosted PaaS do I put on this box? Every comparison I found was either written by one of the vendors or stopped at a star count. I did the dull thing. I opened each project's own docs and repository, wrote down what they claim, and checked the one I build against its own repo.

I work on Levelrail, so you should discount my opinion of it. I tried to keep the table below limited to things you can verify, and I say where each tool beats mine.

TL;DR

Tool How it reaches your server Best at Watch out for

Coolify SSH from a web app Broad one-click catalog, polished UI You manage the host over SSH, cloud tier is paid

Levelrail Agent that dials out over mTLS Logs, metrics, traces and one-command rollback built in Smaller one-click catalog than the largest, an agent on each extra server

Dokploy Docker…