Comparison
Taxiway vs Dokku & CapRover
Two long-running, genuinely free, genuinely open-source projects. Taxiway is not trying to beat them on price, because nobody beats free and MIT.
The short version
Written by the person who makes Taxiway, so read it with that in mind. I have tried to make the case against us as well as for us.
Dokku has been doing git-push deploys since 2013, is MIT licensed, and is the smallest honest answer to 'I want Heroku on one box'. CapRover wraps Docker Swarm in a web UI with a one-click app catalogue. Both are free, both are open source, and neither asks you to trust a third party with anything.
What they don't give you is the managed half. Dokku is a CLI you drive over SSH; observability, backups and dashboards are plugins you assemble and maintain. CapRover has a UI, but it is an older one, and it is still a panel you host and upgrade on the same Swarm that runs your apps.
Taxiway's pitch against them is not cost. It is that logs, metrics history, S3 backups, TLS, DNS and deploy history are already wired together and rendered, and the only thing on your host is an agent that dials out. If assembling that yourself sounds like a good weekend, Dokku is a fine choice and always has been.
At a glance
Interface
Taxiway
Web app, plus a native iOS app in development
Dokku / CapRover
Dokku: CLI over SSH · CapRover: self-hosted web UI
Licence
Taxiway
Closed source, for now
Dokku / CapRover
Dokku: MIT · CapRover: Apache 2.0
Reaches your server via
Taxiway
Outbound WebSocket from the agent
Dokku / CapRover
SSH, or the panel on the host itself
Observability
Taxiway
Logs and metrics history included
Dokku / CapRover
Plugins you choose and maintain
The difference is the arrow.
Both diagrams are drawn on the same grid. The thing worth staring at is which way the connection points, and how much of it you are responsible for keeping alive.
Feature by feature
Including the rows we lose. A comparison table with no crosses in our own column would not be worth your time.
Free to use
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Open source, forkable
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Git push to deploy
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Managed web dashboard, hosted for you
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Log search across services, no setup
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Retained per-service metrics
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Scheduled database backups to S3
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Free SSL and a hostname on day one
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
No inbound port opened on your server
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Deploy a repo with no Dockerfile
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Works with no third party involved
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Cron jobs and scheduled tasks
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Native iOS and iPad app
Taxiway
Dokku / CapRover
Checked September 2026. Products move, and Dokku & CapRover moves quickly. If something here is out of date or simply wrong, tell me and I will fix it .
Pick Dokku & CapRover if…
- You want zero third parties. No account, no control plane, no company that could change its mind. That is a real and defensible position, and Taxiway cannot offer it.
- You are happy on the command line and Dokku's plugin ecosystem already covers what you need.
- You want buildpacks so a plain repo deploys without you writing a Dockerfile.
- You value a decade of community answers to search when something breaks at midnight.
Pick Taxiway if…
- You want the observability and backup half done for you, not assembled from plugins.
- You want to look at your apps from a phone, or hand a dashboard to someone who does not use a terminal.
- You do not want the control panel competing for RAM with the apps it manages.
- You want deploy history, rollback and per-service metrics without standing up a monitoring stack.
Other comparisons
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