A Cloudways alternative without servers to manage.
Cloudways, part of DigitalOcean, runs managed servers at DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud, with a control panel for PHP apps and a one-click Laravel install. Brewless has no servers: your Laravel app runs in serverless containers in your own Scaleway account, behind bunny.net.
Facts checked on 20 October 2026. See the sources.
Cloudways and Brewless at a glance
| Topic | Cloudways | Brewless |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Cloudways, part of DigitalOcean, LLC, United States. | Coding Agency, Meppel, the Netherlands. |
| How your app runs | Managed servers: one virtual machine per server, billed by the hour, that you scale up by changing its size. | Serverless containers: your app starts with traffic and stops when it is quiet. There are no servers to manage. |
| Whose account | Cloudways’ own accounts at the provider you pick; your own cloud credentials cannot be used. | Yours: your own Scaleway project and bunny.net account. Brewless is the control plane and is not in the path of your visitors. |
| Infrastructure | DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud. | Scaleway (France) for your app, bunny.net (Slovenia) for the edge in front of it. Both European companies. |
| Regions in Europe | At DigitalOcean: Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London; more at the other providers. | Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan. |
| Scales to zero | Not listed: a server stays on. | Yes, when you set the minimum to zero. |
| Price | Per server, billed by the hour; its Laravel page starts at $14 a month. 3-day free trial. | Free to try with one application. Paid plans from €15 a month, with unlimited environments on every plan. Scaleway and bunny.net bill you directly, and Brewless takes no percentage of that. |
| For Laravel | A one-click Laravel install, Git deploys, Supervisor jobs for queues, a cron manager for the scheduler, Redis and free staging. | Migrations as their own step in every deploy, queues on Scaleway Queues, the schedule read from your app, Artisan on the live release, and brewless init to start from a vapor.yml. |
What Cloudways does well
- A choice of five cloud providers and many locations.
- Fixed capacity on a server, with no cold starts.
- Laravel tooling: Supervisor, a cron manager, Redis and staging.
- A free trial without a credit card.
Where Brewless is different
No servers
There is no machine to size or keep running. Scaleway runs the machines; your containers start with traffic and stop when it is quiet.
Your own accounts
With Brewless, the Scaleway project and bunny.net account are yours and bill you directly. At Cloudways, the cloud account is Cloudways’.
European clouds
Brewless runs on Scaleway (France) and bunny.net (Slovenia). Cloudways is part of DigitalOcean and runs on American clouds.
Migrations in every deploy
Migrations run as their own step in every deploy; if one fails, the old release stays live.
Which one fits?
Pick Cloudways if
- You host WordPress and Laravel sites side by side.
- You want a familiar server with a control panel.
- Your traffic is steady.
Pick Brewless if
- You would rather not size servers.
- You want the infrastructure in your own name, with European-owned providers.
- Your traffic varies, or the app is idle at night.
Moving from Cloudways to Brewless
Your Cloudways deployment steps map onto brewless.yml: Composer and the asset build become build commands, and migrate becomes a release command. Supervisor jobs and the cron manager are not needed: Brewless calls the worker when a job is queued and reads the schedule from your app. Files on the server move to a bucket, your database to Scaleway. Test, then move your domain.
Questions about Cloudways
- Who owns Cloudways?
- DigitalOcean, which completed its acquisition of Cloudways in September 2022. Its terms are DigitalOcean’s.
- Can I use my own cloud account with Cloudways?
- No. Cloudways creates the servers in its own accounts at the provider you pick.
- Cloudways or Brewless?
- Cloudways manages servers for you on American clouds. Brewless runs Laravel serverless in your own Scaleway and bunny.net accounts in Europe, without servers.
Sources
The facts about Cloudways on this page come from its own pages, read on 20 October 2026. Prices and features change, so check them before you decide. Spotted something out of date? Mail contact@coding.agency.
Other alternatives
- Laravel Vapor alternative Serverless platform on AWS Lambda; no new signups
- Laravel Cloud alternative Managed platform on AWS
- Laravel Forge alternative Server management
- Laravel Envoyer alternative Zero-downtime deployments to your servers
- Clever Cloud alternative Platform-as-a-service
- Scalingo alternative Platform-as-a-service
- Upsun alternative Platform-as-a-service on several clouds
- Koyeb alternative Serverless platform on its own servers
- Northflank alternative Container platform, own cloud or yours
- Render alternative Managed cloud platform
- Railway alternative Usage-billed cloud platform
- Fly.io alternative Micro-VMs on its own servers
- Heroku alternative Platform-as-a-service on AWS
- Sevalla alternative Managed app platform
- Coolify alternative Self-hosted PaaS, open source
- Dokku alternative Self-hosted PaaS, open source
- Ploi alternative Server management
- RunCloud alternative Server management
- Bref alternative Open-source framework for AWS Lambda
- Google Cloud Run alternative Serverless containers on Google Cloud
Try Brewless with your Laravel app
We open access to Laravel teams in small batches. Brewless is free to try with one application, production included; you start paying when you want your own domain or more.