DigitalOcean App Platform (Nanobox) vs Dokku

Likelihood to Recommend

I would only get into it if I where willing to pay for the support plan and getting some assurances from the team as to where they are headed. The platform itself is great and can save you a ton of hard work and money. but it's hard to be confidant in it's sustainability.

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Sagiv Frankel

Co-Founder

LoroTalkInternet, 1-10 employees

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If you have your own in-house servers or have a cloud server with the freedom to configure any PaaS that you want, then Dokku is for you. So far, I have never run into a scenario where Dokku was not able to fit my needs, after deploying many different types of applications with varying frameworks, languages, and connected services. If you already have a PaaS available, however, Dokku may not be for you.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 51-200 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

DigitalOcean App Platform (Nanobox)

Dokku

Scalability

Platform management overhead

Platform access control

Services-enabled integration

Development environment creation

Development environment replication

Issue monitoring and notification

Issue recovery

Upgrades and platform fixes

Workflow engine capability

Pros

Relatively easy setup. One file named "boxfile.xml" controls all relevant services including there communication ports, routes and build steps.
Scaling is easy - you can put everything on one machine, split certain services to dedicated machines and scale services to multiple machines. best of all this can be done at any time with almost zero down time.
I have not used this yet, but for a few hundred dollars a month you can get dedicated operational services to help you make your setup even easier and ensure your system is operational.

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Sagiv Frankel

Co-Founder

LoroTalkInternet, 1-10 employees

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Dockerfile deployments are an incredibly simple and straightforward way to spin up applications.
The docker-options plugin allows endless direct configuration of options passed to different docker lifecycle stages.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 51-200 employees

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Cons

The company has not been very communicative as of lately. Not much news, no apparent work on missing features.
Some components are incomplete as far as some critical features. For example, I use RethinkDB as my database and it's missing critical features like backup and clustering, so It is unusable and they should have made that clear from the get go.
The pricing on the support plan is vague. I do have the feeling it is actually well worth the money, but it's hard to form a decisions based without more predictable specific.
Seems to me like the platform's future is unclear.

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Sagiv Frankel

Co-Founder

LoroTalkInternet, 1-10 employees

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Dokku might overreach on its assumptions about how you want to host your app, using its own VHOSTS plugin by default. This may be a pro or a con depending on what you want.
Proxy port configuration can be somewhat difficult, with Dokku resetting any pre-deployment configuration to "smart" defaults on the first deployment.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 51-200 employees

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Support Rating

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Dokku 5.0

Based on 2 answers

Dokku is incredibly well documented and also takes advantage of the documentation and community of Heroku, being essentially the same thing, but in the case that you encounter an actual bug or issue, it can take time for a fix to make it into a new version. Since you manage Dokku yourself, there is no support team to call for help.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

The ability to choose your own cloud provider is huge, especially for a small start up like I have. We have a lot of free credit from AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Azure, etc...The data layer is baked into the system which is better for integration then an external provider.There are also a lot fewer differences between environment as everything is Docker based which gives me the confidence that what works on my machine is going to work in production.Heroku doesn't have good support for Docker containers yet and although Heroku has served me well in the past, it is limited in some aspects.

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Sagiv Frankel

Co-Founder

LoroTalkInternet, 1-10 employees

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Dokku is essentially the same thing as Heroku, except maintained by you on the platform of your choice. If you have any experience using Heroku, then you will feel right at home using Dokku. Dokku is an entirely free to use PaaS, requiring only that you have a platform to deploy it on, making it far more versatile than Heroku in my opinion.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

The platform is saving me a lot of time I would have been wasting on operations instead of development.
The platform is saving me a lot of money as I can easily switch between cloud providers to find the best price.
I am worried though for the price I might have to pay in case of an unexpected system issue.
Hopefully I will be able to pay the support plan before that.

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Sagiv Frankel

Co-Founder

LoroTalkInternet, 1-10 employees

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Since there's no investment besides a little time to set up, the return has been overwhelmingly positive.
Deploying a new app is incredibly quick and easy.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 51-200 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Rating Summary

DigitalOcean App Platform (Nanobox)

Dokku

DigitalOcean App Platform (Nanobox)

Dokku

DigitalOcean App Platform (Nanobox) vs Dokku