Coolify and Hangar give you a similar experience: connect a repository, deploy apps and databases, add a domain with HTTPS. The difference is underneath. Coolify is software you install on servers you own and operate. Hangar is a managed service: the servers, their updates and their capacity are ours to run.
Facts about Coolify below come from its public pricing page, documentation and GitHub repository as of October 2026. Check coolify.io for the current state.
At a glance
| Hangar | Coolify | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Managed deployment platform | Open source (Apache-2.0) platform you self-host |
| Who runs the servers | Hangar | You, on any provider or your own hardware |
| What you pay for | Usage: CPU, memory, storage, egress | Your servers, plus Coolify Cloud if you use it |
| Server updates, security patches, capacity | Included | Your job |
| Builds | Automatic (Railpack), Dockerfile, Nixpacks, buildpacks | Nixpacks, Railpack, Dockerfile, Docker Compose |
| Managed databases | PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, libSQL | PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, Dragonfly, KeyDB, ClickHouse |
| Point-in-time database recovery | PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, on plans that include it | Not documented |
| Spend limits | Per organization and per project | Not applicable: you pay for servers |
Who operates what
With Coolify you install the platform on a server with one command and connect more servers over SSH. From then on the servers are yours: operating system updates, disk space, Docker upgrades, firewall rules, what happens when a node fails at night. Coolify makes the deploys easy; it does not make the servers go away.
Coolify Cloud removes one piece of that. In October 2026 it costs $5 a month with 2 connected servers and $3 a month for each additional one, and Coolify hosts the control panel. Your apps still run on servers you connect and pay for separately.
On Hangar there is no server to connect. You pick a region and deploy. Servers, their patches and their capacity are part of the service.
Pricing
The two models answer different questions.
- Coolify: the software is free to self-host. What you pay is your servers, sized for your peak and paid for whether they are busy or idle, plus Coolify Cloud if you use it, plus the time you spend operating them.
- Hangar: a plan whose monthly price becomes usage credit, then metered CPU, memory, storage and egress, so a quiet service costs little. Rates are on the pricing page, with an estimator for your workload. You can cap spending per organization and per project.
For a team that already runs servers well and has steady, predictable load, a self-hosted Coolify on cheap hardware can cost less in cash. For a team that would rather not be on call for servers, or whose load varies, Hangar usually costs less in total.
Databases and backups
Both run databases next to your apps on a private network, and both can dump databases on a schedule.
Hangar adds point-in-time recovery for PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB, so a database can be recovered to any second of its history into a new database, and volume backups as often as every 15 minutes where your plan includes it, stored away from the server. Coolify's documentation describes scheduled dumps and warns that persistent storage is not a database-aware backup.
Coolify supports more engines, including Dragonfly, KeyDB and ClickHouse, and offers a catalog of more than 300 one-click services.
Observability
Coolify charts CPU and memory through Sentinel, an agent on each server. Hangar collects logs with history, CPU, memory, network and disk metrics, the HTTP requests each service receives, and OpenTelemetry traces, with alerts on CPU, memory, error rate and latency. See Observability.
When Coolify is the better choice
- You want to own the whole stack, on your own hardware or a provider of your choice.
- You already operate servers and have the time for it.
- You need one of its 300+ one-click services, or a database engine Hangar does not offer.
- You need it to run somewhere Hangar has no region, or fully offline.
When Hangar is the better choice
- You do not want to patch, monitor or resize servers.
- Your load varies and you would rather pay for what you use than for peak capacity.
- You need point-in-time recovery, traces and alerts without setting them up.
- You want hard spend limits per project.
Moving from Coolify to Hangar
- Create a project on Hangar and add a service from the same repository. Apps that built with Railpack, Nixpacks or a Dockerfile on Coolify build the same way; a Docker Compose resource can be deployed as a compose stack.
- Copy your environment variables. See Environment variables.
- Create the databases, restore a dump into each and update the connection URLs.
- Add your domain on Hangar, then switch the DNS record once the new deploy is healthy.
The quickstart walks through the first deploy.