Dokku is an amazing single-server Heroku using git hooks. Try it compared to Peon as your number of teams or servers increases.
What Dokku gets right
Dokku is a masterpiece of minimalism and has proven itself worthy of survival. Link a git remote, then git push dokku main and your application will build through buildpacks and/or Dockerfile and deploy to a single server with zero downtime validation. The plugins can manage Postgres, Redis, Let’s Encrypt, and many other functionalities all through sharp CLI commands.
For a solo developer with one server and some CLI skills, Dokku might actually be all you need. It is free, stable, well documented, and has been deployed millions of times over many years. Nothing in this comparison is meant as "Dokku is bad".
The friction is created by people, not applications
In Dokku, everything is a CLI command run against the server over SSH. This is a beautiful approach until someone else needs access. Adding another team member involves providing access via SSH and training them how to use the commands. No dashboard to see if the staging was deployed by the designer, no per-project permission for the client to have visibility without access. No consolidated logging system which would not require SSH.
Using multiple servers is another barrier. Dokku manages the machine it is deployed onto. Using five servers will result in having five Dokku deployments and five separate states, no unified overview of what is running where. Database backups can be scheduled through the plugin flags, but not all servers can be configured.
Peon as the team-scale equivalent
Peon retains the relevant piece of Dokku, namely git push, build on the server, zero-downtime proxy swap with automatic TLS, while adding the layer that teams require:
A dashboard across all servers, projects, and services, including real-time build and runtime logs
Role-based access with unlimited members: clients see their project, contractors deploy, admins manage servers
Backup databases as configuration (schedule, destination S3 bucket, retention time) rather than a cron job
Automatic deployments triggered via webhooks from GitHub/GitLab without exposing CI secrets in production SSH key
Marketplace of templates for the services required to be installed by hand
Choosing between options
For one person, one server, and a fondness for the terminal: Dokku still reigns supreme. From the time the question "Who else needs to see this?" yields an answer of more than no one, or when the number of servers exceeds one, a dashboard-centric approach quickly proves its worth. No drama for migrations because both use Docker containers.
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