Coolify: minimum requirements, features and pricing

Coolify's official minimum is 2 CPU cores, 2 GB of RAM and 10 GB of free disk on a 64-bit (amd64 or arm64) Linux server you can reach over SSH. The docs say it can limp along on less (1 core, 512 MB, 4 GB of disk), but they don't recommend it. If money is tight, they suggest starting on 1 core and 1 GB and upgrading once builds start to hurt.

That's the short answer. The rest of this page covers what those numbers mean in practice, what Coolify does, and where it falls short.

#What Coolify is

Coolify is an open-source, self-hostable platform for deploying apps, databases and one-click services onto servers you control. Its own docs describe it as a PaaS workflow (the Heroku or Vercel style of "push code, get a URL") where everything underneath stays standard Docker.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Coolify is the control plane. It connects to each server over SSH, gets Docker ready, and handles builds, deployments, domains, HTTPS and health checks. The workloads themselves are ordinary containers, networks and volumes. The docs say that if the Coolify instance goes down, running apps keep running. You lose the dashboard and the automation until it comes back, not your sites.

One Coolify instance can manage several servers. So a common pattern is a small box for Coolify itself and bigger boxes for the apps.

#Requirements in detail

From the official installation page (accessed 2026-09-29):

Supported operating systems: Debian and Ubuntu, the Red Hat family (CentOS, Fedora, RHEL, AlmaLinux, Rocky and a few others), SUSE, Arch, Alpine and 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS. On Ubuntu, use an LTS release (20.04, 22.04 or 24.04). The docs say non-LTS releases can behave differently, so switch to the manual install if the script trips up. Coolify runs only on Linux. On macOS or Windows you'd need a Linux VM.

What the 2 GB really buys you. The minimum covers Coolify itself. Your apps sit on top of that. The docs warn that running builds and Coolify on the same server can push resource use high enough to make the machine unresponsive. That's the usual failure mode on a small VPS: a Node or Rust build eats the RAM, and the dashboard goes with it.

For a sense of scale, the docs include one real example from a Coolify team member. It's a Hetzner CAX11 (2 ARM cores, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB disk) running 16 static sites, 25 Rust APIs, apps, bots and workers, two PostgreSQL and two Valkey databases, Umami, Beszel and Coolify itself. The docs list average use at 3.2 GB RAM and 70–90% CPU. They call it "a rough reference point, not a fixed recommendation", and it's one person's workload, so read it that way. Still, it shows that 4 GB goes a long way when the apps are lean.

The practical takeaway: 2 GB is enough to try Coolify. For anything you care about, 4 GB is more comfortable. Or move builds elsewhere, since Coolify can build on a dedicated build server and ship the image through a registry.

#Installing it

On a fresh server (the docs recommend fresh, to avoid clashes), the automated install is one command run as root:

curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash

Three things from the docs are worth knowing before you run it:

• Remove snap Docker first. If Docker came from snap, uninstall it and let the script install Docker Engine properly.
• Register straight away. The dashboard comes up on port 8000. The docs are blunt: whoever reaches the registration page first becomes the instance admin and gets root-level control of your server. Don't leave it sitting there.
• Back up /data/coolify/source/.env. It holds APP_KEY, which encrypts Coolify's database values. Without it you can't restore from a backup.

There's also a manual install for when you already have Docker or want to control each step. On Hetzner, Coolify is available as a ready-made app image in the Hetzner Console and API. It comes preinstalled but not activated until you log in.

#Features that matter day to day

• Sources: Git repositories (built with Nixpacks, Railpack (in beta), Static, Dockerfile or Docker Compose), or a prebuilt Docker image.
• Databases with persistent storage and backup settings, plus one-click services from maintained Compose templates.
• Proxy and HTTPS: Traefik by default, Caddy as an option, or "Custom (None)" if you'd rather run your own proxy. Certificates are automatic for the built-in proxies.
• Rolling updates for single-container apps. The docs list what disables them: host port mappings, a fixed container name, preview deployments or a custom IP. Compose deployments don't use this path.
• Docker Swarm targets for image-based apps (via docker stack deploy).
• API access on both the self-hosted and the Cloud edition.

#Pricing

Per the pricing page on 2026-09-29:

• Self-hosted: free. "Full access to all features" with "no limitation or restrictions". You supply and run the server.
• Coolify Cloud: $5/month, which covers 2 connected servers, plus $3/month for each extra server. Annual billing is listed as 20% cheaper. The Coolify team runs the control plane. You still bring your own servers from any provider, and your apps run on them.

Cloud is worth a look if you don't want Coolify's own RAM use on your app server, or you don't want to handle Coolify updates and backups yourself.

#Licence and project activity

The GitHub repository's licence is Apache-2.0. The latest release from the GitHub releases API is v4.3.23, published 2026-09-18, and the repo had 62,351 stars as of 2026-09-29. The codebase is mostly PHP.

#Who should pick Coolify

Pick it if you want a Heroku-like dashboard on your own VPS or Pi, you deploy a mix of Git apps, Compose stacks and databases, and you like the idea that your apps don't depend on the control plane staying up.

Look elsewhere if you want a lighter, CLI-first tool (Dokku is the classic), or a panel built around Docker Swarm from the start (see Dokploy). The side-by-side is at /compare/coolify-vs-dokploy, and the wider field is at /best/self-hosted-paas. To pick a server that clears the requirements above, see /best/vps-for-self-hosting.

This is a profile built from Coolify's documentation and repository. It is not a hands-on review.