What does Forge do that an alternative has to replace?
- •Provisioning: creates a server on your cloud account with nginx, PHP, a database, Redis and a firewall
- •Sites and deploys: Git push to deploy, environment files, zero-downtime deploys (with Envoyer), SSL from Let’s Encrypt
- •Laravel plumbing: queue workers, the scheduler, Horizon and daemons kept running under Supervisor
- •Basic server monitoring: CPU, memory, disk and load alerts on the plan that includes it
The first three are what people switch for, usually on price, on wanting to self-host the panel, or on wanting no servers at all. The fourth is the part every panel does lightly, and the part that matters at 2 a.m.
Laravel Forge alternatives compared
| Tool | Type | Best for | Pricing model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ploi | Hosted control panel; provisions servers on your cloud account | The closest drop-in for Forge, with sites, queues, deploys and backups | Monthly subscription by tier |
| RunCloud | Hosted PHP server panel | Mixed PHP fleets: Laravel next to WordPress | Monthly subscription by tier |
| Laravel Cloud | Managed platform from the Laravel team; no servers to manage | Teams that want to stop running servers altogether | Usage-based compute and resources |
| Laravel Vapor | Serverless deploys to AWS Lambda | Spiky traffic on AWS | Subscription plus your AWS bill |
| Coolify | Open-source, self-hosted platform built on Docker | Teams that want Heroku-style deploys on their own servers | Free self-hosted; paid hosted version |
| CloudPanel | Free, self-hosted PHP control panel | A single VPS with several PHP sites | Free |
| Cipi | Open-source, self-hosted panel aimed at Laravel | Developers who want a free, Forge-like panel they run themselves | Free |
| Laravel Forge | Hosted control panel from the Laravel team | Staying put, with the official tool | Monthly subscription by tier |
Compared on 10 November 2026. Pricing describes each vendor’s published model; see their pricing pages for current numbers.
How do you choose?
- •You like Forge but want a different vendor or price: Ploi
- •You also run WordPress or plain PHP sites on the same servers: RunCloud or CloudPanel
- •You never want to SSH into a server again: Laravel Cloud, or Vapor if you are on AWS
- •You want everything self-hosted and free: Coolify for Docker-style deploys, Cipi for a Forge-style panel
Moving panels is mostly re-creating sites, daemons and the deploy script; the servers themselves can usually stay. Test the queue workers and the scheduler on the new panel before you switch DNS.
What none of them do: tell you why the server is slow
A panel knows a daemon stopped. It does not know that Horizon stopped because the server ran out of memory, that the disk fills in six days because laravel.log stopped rotating, or that one query against orders got slow as the table grew. That is a monitoring job, and it is the same job whichever panel you pick.
Opservo installs with one command next to any of these panels and reads the server without configuration: Laravel apps, queues, the scheduler, PHP-FPM, nginx, MySQL and Redis. It scores the server’s health 0–100, explains each problem in plain English with the fix, and runs the fix with your approval. It is read-only by default and never touches the panel’s config.
curl -sSL https://api.getopservo.com/install.sh | sudo bashPricing: free for 2 servers; Growth is ₹999 (about $12) per server per month with on-call and one-click fixes; Agency is ₹799 per server per month with a 10-server minimum.
Last updated 2026-11-10.