--- title: Dokku Reviews meta\_title: 'Dokku Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta\_description: Filter 55 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Dokku works for a business like yours. aggregate\_rating: rating\_value: 4.2 review\_count: 55 scale: '5' date\_modified: '2026-08-09' parent\_category: name: Development url: https://www.g2.com/categories/development --- # Dokku Reviews & Product Details The smallest PaaS implementation you've ever seen. Docker powered mini-Heroku in around 200 lines of Bash * * * Seller [Dokku](https://www.g2.com/sellers/dokku) Discussions [Dokku Community](https://www.g2.com/products/dokku/discuss) Solution Type Best-of-Breed Overview by Jose Diaz-Gonzalez (Technical Director at Plotly) Show More ## Value at a Glance Averages based on real user reviews. ### Time to Implement 2 months ### Perceived Cost $$$$$ [ View More Pricing Information ](https://www.g2.com/products/dokku/pricing) ## Top-Rated Alternatives [ ![Salesforce Heroku](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Salesforce Heroku") Salesforce Heroku 4.2/5(148) ](https://www.g2.com/products/salesforce-heroku/reviews) [ ![AWS Elastic Beanstalk](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "AWS Elastic Beanstalk") AWS Elastic Beanstalk 4.2/5(200) ](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-elastic-beanstalk/reviews) [ ![Google App Engine](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Google App Engine") Google App Engine 4.1/5(216) ](https://www.g2.com/products/google-app-engine/reviews) [ View All Alternatives ](https://www.g2.com/products/dokku/competitors/alternatives) ## User Insights Average based on 55 real user reviews. Implementation Time 2 months Perceived Cost $$$$$ [Log in to unlock pricing and user insights](/login) ![Verified User in Information Technology and Services](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Information Technology and Services") AI Verified User in Information Technology and Services Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 3/23/2017 "Poor man's Heroku :)" 4/5 What do you like best about Dokku? - very straight forward installation on Ubuntu 16.04 - mostly Heroku app compatible - CLI interface is pretty easy - easy to handle logs - has beta plugins for persistence services like Postgres and Redis Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Dokku? - sometimes upgrades can get borked - remote access is still not as easy as Heroku - documentation can be improved - persistence plugins are still beta - doesn't work across hosts Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Dokku: if you have a single node application, this is a great heroku replacement Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you? - easy management of small scale applications - simplified git based deployments - cost savings compared to Heroku Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Information Technology and Services](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Information Technology and Services") AI Verified User in Information Technology and Services Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 2/1/2017 "As easy as Heroku for simple applications. " 5/5 What do you like best about Dokku? It's so easy! When Heroku killed their free teir I needed a replacement. This solved my problem for simple apps while I worked on them. You just git push and the application is live on the web. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Dokku? This works great for simple applications, but if you need a database you'll need to use plugins. These require a little more configuration than Heroku. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you? While working on a new idea or project, it's nice to have free hosting for it. You can spin up as many apps as I want for $5 dollars a month (Digital Ocean) and they'll always be ready. You don't have to worry about your application being down because you ran out of free dyno minutes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Sergei S.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Sergei S.") SS Sergei S. Ruby developer Internet Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 4/21/2016 "1 year with dokku as a platform for staging and internal services" 4.5/5 What do you like best about Dokku? It is really fast way to setup bare server as development/staging environment. It especially good, if your production environment will use some similar technology stack, for example deis/flynn It has nice plugin system with a huge number of plugins for daily use: Postgres, Maria DB, Mongo, Redis everything works out of box. Just like heroku, it really simple to deploy with single 'git push', all things happens magically. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Dokku? It's not easy to monitor states of current containers, all management only possible through command line. Web gui is used only for initial setup, although it will be nice to have web interface for whole management. Because plugins are supported by community, some of them often out of date, for some tasks (for example postgres db) there are several plugins and it's hard to choose best one. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Dokku: If you are using Heroku or other PaaS you have to try dokku as an alternative for dev and internal services Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you? We searched for simple and fast way to build enviroment on test, development and staging servers. It really take 15 minutes to setup machine from scratch using dokku. Dokku is good solution for internal services, which not require to host high loads. Our main application use some microservices, which are ok to be not very reliable. For example geo IP resolver. It hosted with dokku. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Iain C.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Iain C.") IC Iain C. Hack/Hacker Online Media Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 4/22/2016 "Not ready for prime time" 1.5/5 What do you like best about Dokku? When dokku actually works it's good. The plugin system seems promising. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Dokku? Unfortunately it doesn't work out of the box in a lot of cases - even incredibly typical use cases like installing on vanilla Amazon EC2 instances. Sadly the team seem a bit too keen to blame user error and less keen on investigating or acting on bug reports before closing them (regarding installation, setup and removal) so there are plenty of duplicate bug reports about it not working with the same types of errors that don't end in any actual changes to dokku. The debug option rarely seems to help and it's missing simple sanity checks which make it fragile software even when run on a clean installation of a specific version of a specific distribution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you? It's supposed to make it easier to deploy software. I have realised it's not worth the pain and effort because it's no less buggy than it was a year ago and it's just a time sink; even when it works upgrades are painful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Daiwei L.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Daiwei L.") DL Daiwei L. Software Engineer E-Learning Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 4/20/2016 "Easy installation, same usage as Heroku, feature rich, complete solution." 4.5/5 What do you like best about Dokku? Plugin system of Dokku is awesome. I often find it hard to create backing services like databases within a few command. But Dokku's plugin system solved that problem very well. E.g. postgresql plugin has very meaningful default for security, connections and etc. That help a ton when you trying to provision a complete server. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Dokku? Nothing to dislike. It's doing what it says to do. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Dokku: Notice I haven't tried to use Dokku in a multiserver setup. I think it should work, but I expect additional work on top of Dokku, which will reduce its value. You might want to look for more robust deployment tool for multiple server environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you? I was trying to find a hosting solution for my hobby projects. While I could use a Heroku free tier, but it's still costly if I want high availability for a simple hobby project. I want to spend minimum time fighting with the infrastructure and focusing on the fun part. Dokku is a perfect alternative for this. It also have very good Docker support, which extends its use case even further. Although it's kinda a hack to use its Docker integration, but haven't that document and available has a lot of potential. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Alejandro V.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Alejandro V.") AV Alejandro V. Co-fundador Program Development Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 4/20/2016 "A platform for makers" 4.5/5 What do you like best about Dokku? Easy of installation, universality of concepts, great plugin ecosystem. Very responsible maintainers, strong community and good stability. It has the more common tools to catch good programmers, I mean almost any modern language and database can be used with this. Also, expanded with additional plugins, which makes it a lot more than a runtime and database container.. Great UX and can be used on low cost hardware quickly to get the job done. It can be used remotely withput SSH-ing into the server, which is something very handy once you get used to it. I really like the workflow of git-push, using the tools we already know. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Dokku? Altough some initiatives were ongoing to make a all-in-one package, it ended up failing, with a missing maintainer. And that's something quite inherent to Dokku; it has to be separate components from separate people and sometimes different communities. That's something I dislike but I gladly accept. The somewhat weird mechanism to add keys from stdin. Would love to automate it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Dokku: Buy a remote server. Not just the ones you have lying around and using for internal ops. It will happen that you get so used to it that you may be tempted to release on it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you? Continuous delivery, product iteration and innovation. Empowering teams to try new things and see them live in seconds, without fuss and using the tools they already know with the exact git-flow. One branch for release, other for dev and also some others for experiments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Alexander P.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Alexander P.") AP Alexander P. CEO, co-founder, chief developer Information Technology and Services Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 4/19/2016 "One of the easiest-to-use self-hosted PaaS out there" 5/5 What do you like best about Dokku? Dokku's slogan is «Docker powered mini-Heroku». It is true: to everybody who knows Heroku, Dokku will be an easy transition. There's one difference though: Dokku runs on your own server. This is possible because of Docker, a lightweight container system. One container, one app; it's that easy. To those who aren't used to the Heroku workflow, it's not hard: you just add a bit of configuration to your repository (just a bit: a Procfile, which defines what command to run to start your application, and a requirements file — this one depends on the language your app is written in), then push it to your Dokku server, and it gets built automatically. Magic! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Dokku? Apparently there is nothing I dislike about Dokku at the moment! The architecture is a bit odd, but this won't get in your way unless you'll want to mess with plugins, and if you do, you'll get used to it right away. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you? In our company, we use Dokku as a staging server for our projects. It is really easy to use: we just git-push our sources onto a server and everything is built automatically. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Omar Q.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Omar Q.") OQ Omar Q. Marketer and Developer Internet Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 4/19/2016 "Amazing piece of software, use it all the time for personal deployments! AMAZING!" 4.5/5 What do you like best about Dokku? I love dokku's simplicity. Dokku allows you to get a simple server up and running in no time, do some configuration and start testing your code! Just the speed and simplicity of Dokku means everything to me. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Dokku? Unfortunately, Dokku is not multi user. Who has the time to setup Flynn or Deis? So it would have been AMAZING if it were multi user. Especially in a team environment when you want to give specific people access to specific repos, manual work is too hard! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Dokku: Very good for single developer or small teams. Fast code deployment and very minimum setup. If you want are not interested in spending hours and hours of work just to setup a development server then Dokku is the best for you! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you? For our mobile app we are creating, we are able to quickly push change to our API into development servers and use those for testing while the real one remains untouched. The git push allows for a simple and efficient way to upload code and get testing much quicker! Business and development becomes efficient and very quick this way! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Entertainment](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Entertainment") UE Verified User in Entertainment Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 4/18/2016 "Dokku - A tricky alternative to Heroku" 3.5/5 What do you like best about Dokku? Dokku was fairly easy to get into despite my lack of experience in setting up servers let alone a PaaS. The documentation is fairly clear for the initial setup and for basic functionality. Dokku being free is by far it's biggest selling point but it seemed to be very well made and compatible with a lot of different setups. Deployment was also very similar to Heroku, which is to say it was very simple and painless(although not without issue). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Dokku? The downsides to Dokku largely come down to it's status as an open source project that is not supported by an army of devs. When I was attempting to deploy a simple test rails app I ran into issues and was unable to find a way to troubleshoot effectively. When I tried deploying a different rails app it seemed to work perfectly fine despite almost identical settings. Overall Dokku seems like a promising and ambitious project but there seem to be quirks that established solutions like Heroku have worked out long ago. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Dokku: I would recommend trying Dokku if you are using it for a small hobby app or similar. I would not recommend using Dokku for any serious mission-critical apps unless you have experts on hand to monkey-patch issues as they come up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you? I was attempting to use Dokku to set up a Heroku-like droplet on DigitalOcean to host a small app that helps my gaming group plan events, manage members, track attendance, and communicate via. forums. I was using the $7 tier on Heroku to host this but wanted to switch because I was about to hit the 10k limit of the free-tier of Heroku's Postgres service. Unfortunately I was unable to successfully set this app up using Dokku and have since collected donations to simply pay for Heroku. I look forward to trying Dokku again when the bugs get sorted out since a free PaaS is a very attractive option for these sorts of small apps that generate zero profit. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerSource: Organic ![Lucas R.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Lucas R.") LR Lucas R. System Architet & Co-Founder Computer Software Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 4/18/2016 "Great PaaS for those that feel comfortable configuring it" 3/5 What do you like best about Dokku? What I like the most about dokku is the similarity with the heroku workflow. I usually start my python and nodejs projects on Heroku free plan and after a while some of them need a migration to a bigger service. Since using Heroku is not always possible, Dokku is great at that point because it allows me to only change my git endpoint. Aligned to some build and deploy automation tools this process is transparent to most developers working in the project. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Dokku? The initial configuration is sometimes painful for bigger project as it requires a new server most times. At least in my experience, sharing the server with other tools running alongside dokku is not great. This problem is greatly minimized by using Digital Ocean and other cloud providers that offer servers with a working dokku image, but then again, for a small budget having a server only for build control is not always possible. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Dokku: It is a great tool but it works best if you feel comfortable with server administration to better configure it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you? On the projects that I have worked that uses dokku, the business problem varies as it is more common in third-party companies that build software on-demand. The main benefit is the small overhead on deployments and the minimum dedication required to create a working build flow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ## Pricing Insights Averages based on real user reviews. ### Time to Implement 2 months ### Perceived Cost $$$$$ [ View More Pricing Information ](https://www.g2.com/products/dokku/pricing) Dokku Comparisons ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_da16878589afcd15c61bcb8a7b6b66a7/kubernetes.png "Product Avatar Image") Kubernetes 4.6/5(159) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/dokku-vs-kubernetes) ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_b3ddc97808eba7070858084e6bdc599b/mirantis-kubernetes-engine-formerly-docker-enterprise.png "Product Avatar Image") Mirantis 4.4/5(286) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/dokku-vs-mirantis-kubernetes-engine-formerly-docker-enterprise) ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_bf0fb4cb7fe948c42f37ded73895638f/salesforce-heroku.png "Product Avatar Image") Heroku 4.2/5(148) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/dokku-vs-salesforce-heroku) ##### Categories on G2 [Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS)](https://www.g2.com/categories/cloud-platform-as-a-service-paas) ##### Explore More [Top-rated AI tools for creating training videos](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-the-top-rated-ai-tools-for-creating-training-videos-for-small-businesses)[Highly recommended CRM software for large enterprises](https://www.g2.com/discussions/crm-highly-recommended-crm-software-for-large-enterprises)[Best employee intranet software for small tech company](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-s-the-best-employee-intranet-software-for-a-small-tech-company) [What are the top reputation management services platforms for organizations of 50–500 employees in retail, e-commerce, and services?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-the-top-reputation-management-services-platforms-for-organizations-of-50-500-employees-in-retail-e-commerce-and-services)[What influencer marketing tools make it easy for a marketing team to keep creators and campaigns organized without the platform getting in the way?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-influencer-marketing-tools-make-it-easy-for-a-marketing-team-to-keep-creators-and-campaigns-organized-without-the-platform-getting-in-the-way)[Which eTMF systems include integrated quality event tracking and customisable workflow routing for complex multi-department approval chains?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/which-etmf-systems-include-integrated-quality-event-tracking-and-customisable-workflow-routing-for-complex-multi-department-approval-chains%20) [Show MoreShow Less](javascript:void(0);)