Girder vs the alternatives.

Vs hosted PaaS: Heroku, Railway, Render, Fly.io

Hosted platforms are excellent until the bill arrives. They meter every app, every database, every gigabyte, and the pricing punishes exactly the behavior you want: shipping lots of small things.

Girder gives you the same workflow (git push, automatic builds, TLS, databases on demand) on hardware you already pay for. A Hetzner box that costs a few euros a month runs as many apps as it fits, unmetered.

Choose hosted when

• You never want to think about servers at all, including at 3 AM.
• You need managed global edge deployment, which is genuinely hard to self-host.
• The bill is someone else's problem and it is small anyway.

Choose Girder when

• You run several apps and the per-app metering is the pain.
• You want your data and your deploys on your own hardware, full stop.
• You are comfortable with a server existing, as long as you rarely have to touch it.

Already on Heroku? The migration guide covers the whole move in four steps, database included.

Vs self-hosted tools: Dokku, Coolify, CapRover, Dokploy, Kamal

These are free and open source, and the good ones are genuinely good. Girder is commercial. The honest question is what the license buys you.

What they do well

• Dokku is the veteran: a minimal, git-push mini-Heroku on a single host. Huge plugin ecosystem, but you assemble the platform yourself: databases, backups, TLS, and monitoring are plugins and cron jobs you own.
• Coolify is the full web-UI option: dashboards, one-click services, many buildpacks. The trade-off is a bigger system: more components, more moving parts, more that is yours to operate. We wrote a dedicated Coolify comparison.
• CapRover pioneered one-click apps on Docker Swarm. Swarm is also the commitment: it is the orchestrator for everything, whether you needed it or not.
• Dokploy is a newer, Traefik-based UI in the Coolify mold. Active and improving fast, with the same operating-surface trade-off.
• Kamal is 37signals' answer: deploy containerized apps over SSH from your laptop. Excellent for what it is, but it is a deploy tool, not a platform: no built-in git server, no databases, no backups, no dashboard.

What Girder does differently

• One static binary. No Swarm, no Kubernetes, no control plane made of a dozen containers. The whole platform is one process, and the failure modes fit in your head.
• The platform is the git origin. A built-in git server builds on pre-receive and rejects broken pushes before they can ship. No CI middleman, no webhooks to glue.
• Backups you have actually tested. Nightly dumps, point-in-time recovery, and restore drills that prove a restore works, because an untested backup is a rumor.
• A security posture, not a checklist. Only ports 80 and 443 are public; git, the dashboard, and every database sit behind Tailscale by default.
• Agent-native. An MCP server exposes the whole platform as tools, so your coding agent can deploy, debug, and operate it for you.
• Support. The license includes a year of updates and someone to email. The others have issue trackers.

If you enjoy assembling and running the stack itself, the free tools are the right choice and we mean that. Girder is for people who want the platform to be finished when they install it.

Who Girder is for

• Indie hackers leaving Heroku or Railway because ten small apps should not cost more than the server they fit on.
• Agencies and freelancers hosting client sites on their own infrastructure, who need backups and restores they can defend in front of the client.
• Small teams that want an internal platform without adopting Kubernetes to get one.

Sound like you? The pricing page has the deal, the docs show exactly how it works, and the waitlist is one email at launch.