I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to find a self hosted PaaS to replace my usage of Vercel to host a couple of static websites. I use 11ty and Astro as Static Site Generators and I love the functionality of pushing to a git repo to update my site, and being able to create preview versions using pull requests.

If you haven’t used a PaaS before and are wondering what they’re used for, two of the biggest reasons people use them for are basically as Web GUIs to deploy OCI containers from a marketplace, think similar to the UnRAID App Store, and as hosting environments for code that’s built and deployed directly from the contents of a git repository like static sites or other apps. In my case, I use them to deploy static sites that I either build myself using SSGs, or for example the popular Digital Garden plugin for ObsidianMD.

The defacto leader in this space seems to be Coolify. And while it is fairly robust with a nice feature set, I couldn’t get past the dreadful UI. I’ve never encountered software that goes so far out of its way to hide information from you. It technically has a “dashboard”, but that only consists of a top level list of “Projects” with absolutely zero information about them or their current status Unless you drill down through the options all the way to individual services.

Nixopus appears to have a much more functional UI, but the focus of this one for the time being seems centered around spinning up docker containers of existing services. It has the functionality to deploy your own but that isn’t as fleshed out at this time.

ZaneOps is a little light on extra features, but has the most functional and informational UI of the three. I can see the status of all my deployed services at a glance, and its very lightweight.