Short answers to what readers ask most about this topic.
Easypanel is commercial with a free plan; Coolify and Dokploy are open source. Licence, pricing, Docker Swarm, templates, backups and lock-in compared.
Matthews Wong
Software Engineer
Key Takeaway
Easypanel is a commercial, closed-core server panel with a free plan capped at three projects and paid per-server licences from 10.90 USD a month on annual billing. Coolify is Apache-2.0 with no self-hosted feature limits. Dokploy is Apache-2.0 apart from a proprietary enterprise directory. Choose on licence, backups and support, not template count.
Easypanel vs Coolify vs Dokploy is really one question: how much do you care that the panel running your VPS is open source? All three install with one curl command, put a dashboard over Docker, issue Let's Encrypt certificates and deploy from git. The difference that lasts is the licence. Easypanel is commercial software with a free plan. Coolify and Dokploy are open source, with Dokploy keeping a small set of enterprise features under a separate proprietary licence.
I have already compared Coolify and Dokploy head to head in an earlier post, and Easypanel came up afterwards when its founder wrote to suggest it as a third option for people who want a simple interface, a large maintained template catalogue and direct support. Nobody paid for this post and nobody reviewed it before publication. Every price, limit and licence below comes from the projects' own pricing pages, docs and licence files as of 1 October 2026, and where I quote Easypanel's comparison page I treat it as what it is: a vendor writing about its competitors.
The licence decides what you can do on the day you disagree with the vendor, so it comes before features. Here is where each project stands, from its own repository or its own website.
That third point is more precise than the way I put it in my earlier Coolify vs Dokploy comparison, where I called Dokploy's core source-available. Reading the LICENSE.MD file itself, the core is plain Apache-2.0; only the enterprise directories are proprietary. For a solo developer or a small team that never needs SSO or audit logs, Dokploy behaves like fully open software. Easypanel does not, and that is not a criticism, it is the business model: the company sells licences and support for a closed product, and says so.
The table puts the verified facts side by side. Template counts are Easypanel's figures from its own comparison page, verified by Easypanel on 29 September 2026 according to that page; I did not recount them, and the three projects do not count the same way.
| Factor | Easypanel | Coolify | Dokploy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence | Proprietary, closed core; templates public on GitHub | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 core, proprietary enterprise directories |
| Self-hosted price | Free plan up to 3 projects; Hobby, Growth and Business licences per server | Free, no feature restrictions | Free; enterprise features need a license key |
| Paid option | 10.90, 16.90 or 29.90 USD per server per month billed annually; 14.90, 23.90 or 37.90 monthly | Coolify Cloud: 5 USD a month including 2 servers, 3 USD per extra server | Dokploy Cloud: 4.50 USD per server; Startup from 15 USD a month; Enterprise on quote |
| Runtime | Docker, Docker Swarm initialised by the installer | Docker; Swarm support deprecated, removed in v5 | Docker Swarm initialised by the installer |
| Minimum server | Fresh Ubuntu, 2 GB RAM | 2 cores, 2 GB RAM, 10 GB disk, many Linux distros | 2 GB RAM, 30 GB disk |
| Builders | Dockerfile, Railpack, Nixpacks, Cloud Native Buildpacks | Nixpacks, Railpack beta, Static, Dockerfile, Docker Compose | Nixpacks, Railpack, Dockerfile, Heroku and Paketo buildpacks, Static |
| Templates, per Easypanel | 845 | 293 | 532 |
| Database backups | From the Hobby plan; S3-compatible, Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP or SFTP, local | Included; S3-compatible storage | Included; databases and volumes |
| Multi-server | Cluster support in alpha, Business plan only | Many servers over SSH from one instance | Remote servers and Swarm nodes |
| Support | Discord on standard plans; direct team support on Business | Community; limited email on Cloud | Discord on free and Hobby; email and chat on Startup |
Two rows deserve a second look. The paid options are not like for like: Coolify Cloud and Dokploy Cloud host the control plane for you while your apps run on your servers, whereas an Easypanel licence is permission to run the panel yourself on one more server. And the backup row is the one that changes most between a free and a paid Easypanel install, which section five comes back to.
Installation is a non-event on all three, which is why it is a poor way to choose. What matters is what the script leaves behind. Easypanel's docs say the installer initialises Docker Swarm; Dokploy's installation guide says the same and documents the environment variables for tuning it. Coolify installs plain Docker and manages containers directly.
# Easypanel — fresh Ubuntu, 2 GB RAM minimum, ports 80 and 443 free
curl -sSL https://get.easypanel.io | sh
# -> installs Docker and initialises Docker Swarm on this node
# Dokploy — 2 GB RAM and 30 GB disk minimum, ports 80, 443 and 3000 free
curl -sSL https://dokploy.com/install.sh | sh
# -> also initialises Docker Swarm; tune it with DOCKER_SWARM_INIT_ARGS
# if the default address pool collides with your private network
# Coolify — 2 cores, 2 GB RAM, 10 GB disk; Docker from the official repo, not Snap
curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash
# -> plain Docker, no Swarm. Back up the .env file the installer generates
# right away: it holds the encryption secrets for what Coolify stores
# Afterwards, see what each panel actually created
docker info --format '{{.Swarm.LocalNodeState}}' # "active" on Easypanel and Dokploy
docker service ls # Swarm-based panels: your apps live here
docker ps --format '{{.Names}}\t{{.Image}}' # Coolify: your apps live hereOn Coolify, Swarm was never the main path, and it is now on its way out. The Coolify docs label Docker Swarm support as deprecated, say parts of it were never fully implemented, and state it will be removed in v5 in favour of Docker Compose replicas and Coolify's own scaling. If an older comparison, including mine, told you Coolify offers optional Swarm clusters, that is no longer advice to build on: for new multi-server setups the docs recommend multiple servers behind an external load balancer.
Swarm on a single node costs almost nothing and gives Easypanel and Dokploy a ready path to more nodes, rolling updates and service-level resource limits. It also means your apps are Swarm services rather than ordinary containers, which matters when you debug: docker ps shows tasks with generated names, and docker service logs is the command you actually want.
The template catalogue is Easypanel's strongest card, and it is also the hardest number to compare. Easypanel's comparison page claims 845 one-click templates against 293 for Coolify and 532 for Dokploy, while its own pricing page describes a catalogue of 790 plus. Both figures are the vendor's own. The template definitions live in a public GitHub repository, easypanel-io/templates, so you can read exactly what a template deploys before you click it, which is the same property Coolify and Dokploy have by virtue of being open source.
Builders are close to identical across the three, because they draw on the same open tools. Easypanel's docs list Dockerfile, Railpack, Nixpacks and Cloud Native Buildpacks through the pack CLI with Heroku and Paketo builders, pick Dockerfile automatically when one is in the build path, and otherwise fall back to Nixpacks. Dokploy lists Nixpacks as its default plus Railpack, Dockerfile, Heroku and Paketo buildpacks and a Static type served by Nginx. Coolify offers Nixpacks, Railpack in beta, Static, Dockerfile and Docker Compose. Easypanel's app service deploys from GitHub with an auto-deploy webhook, from any Git host over an SSH deploy key, from a Docker image or from an uploaded archive.
Judge a catalogue by the five services you actually need, not by its size. Search each panel's template list for those five, open the definitions and check the image tags and volumes. A catalogue of 800 that is missing your queue broker is worse for you than one of 300 that has it.
All three provision Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB and Redis from the dashboard, issue Let's Encrypt certificates automatically and route custom domains through a managed reverse proxy. Easypanel's pricing page lists automatic SSL and per-service custom domains with host and path routing and 13 built-in Traefik middlewares, plus Cloudflare Tunnel support. What its paid Hobby tier adds is a custom wildcard domain for the default service URLs, not custom domains as such.
Backups are where the plans diverge. On Easypanel, scheduled database backups appear in the list of things Hobby adds to Free, with destinations including S3-compatible storage such as Cloudflare R2 and Backblaze B2, Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP or SFTP and local disk. Coolify's self-hosted edition has no paid tier, so its S3 backups are simply there. Dokploy documents backups for both databases and volumes in its free core.
If you run Easypanel on the free plan, assume you have no scheduled database backups and set up your own dump job on day one. The pricing page lists database backups as a Hobby feature. A panel that makes databases one click away also makes it easy to forget that nothing is copying them off the server.
Scaling past one box and getting help when something breaks are the two places where money changes hands, and each project draws the line differently.
Support is Easypanel's other strong card, with one wrinkle in its own wording. The comparison page says support is included on every paid plan. The pricing FAQ is narrower: on standard plans support runs through the Discord community, and on Business you get assistance directly from the team, with priority support listed for that tier. I would plan around the FAQ's version. Coolify is community-first, with limited email support on Cloud, and Dokploy offers Discord on free and Hobby, email and chat on Startup, and phone and video on Enterprise.
Easypanel answers the stop-paying question directly in its pricing FAQ: if you cancel, Easypanel continues to work on the free plan and existing projects keep running normally. That is a fair policy. The consequence to plan for is that you are back to the free plan's limits, three projects and no paid features such as database backups, and that the panel itself is closed source, so if the company ever stopped shipping there would be no community fork to move to. Coolify's docs make the opposite guarantee structural: workloads are standard Docker containers that keep running even if Coolify becomes unavailable. Dokploy without a licence key simply loses the enterprise features. Whatever you choose, run an exit drill once while everything still works.
# 1. On a Swarm-based panel, recover what the panel would have to tell you:
# image, environment and mounts of every service, as plain JSON.
for svc in $(docker service ls --format '{{.Name}}'); do
docker service inspect "$svc" \
--format '{{json .Spec.TaskTemplate.ContainerSpec}}' \
| jq '{Image, Env, Mounts}' > "spec-$svc.json"
done
# 2. Volumes are where the data is — list them before you trust any backup
docker volume ls
# 3. Take a database dump that does not depend on the panel's backup feature
# (Wrong: assuming the panel's scheduled backup exists on your plan)
# (Right: a dump you made, in a place you control)
docker exec "$(docker ps -q -f name=myproject_db | head -n1)" \
pg_dump -U postgres -Fc postgres > "db-$(date +%F).dump"
# 4. The rebuild path is your repo: Dockerfile or compose file, plus the env
# you just exported. If those two exist, the panel is replaceable.None of the three hides your apps in a format only it can read. They are Docker images, Swarm services or containers, Docker volumes and environment variables, and every one of those can be read with the Docker CLI. The real lock-in is softer: template-specific wiring, panel-managed backups you never tested restoring, and environment variables that exist only in the panel's database.
The practical defence against lock-in is the same for all three panels: keep a Dockerfile or compose file in every repo, export each service's environment somewhere you control, and take one database dump yourself. With those three things, switching panels is an afternoon of work rather than a migration project.
The rule I would carry away is to compare self-hosted panels on licence, backups and support before features, because those three decide what happens on your worst day. Easypanel is a good commercial product with a usable free plan and a clear cancellation policy; Coolify and Dokploy are open source and free on your own server. All three can run the same Docker image tomorrow, so make sure yours can.
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