If you want Heroku- or Vercel-style deploys on your own server, four names come up again and again: Coolify , CapRover , Dokploy and ShipOwn . They solve the same problem, getting your app from a repo to a live URL on hardware you control, but they make very different design choices.

Full disclosure: I built ShipOwn . I'll stick to architecture and documented behaviour, and say plainly where the other tools are the better pick. Feature lists change fast, so check each project's docs before deciding.

The one difference that matters most

Coolify, CapRover and Dokploy are platforms you install on the server. A web dashboard and its supporting services run on your VPS, and your apps are deployed as Docker containers.

ShipOwn is a desktop app. It runs on your Windows, macOS or Linux computer and connects to the server over plain SSH. No ShipOwn deployment agent is installed on the server.…