Coolify Was a Mistake

I tried running Coolify because I wanted a nicer UI and a more hands-off deployment flow, but in practice it just added more moving parts. The defaults were opinionated in ways I didn’t need, and I spent more time fighting the platform to set things up how i want to. For my use case, that was a mistake.

Dokku was already good enough. It’s simple and predictable.

So the lesson for me is to keep it boring. Dokku handles the common cases, and Compose handles the rest. Coolify looks great on paper, but it didn’t improve my day-to-day reality.