A Laravel Forge alternative without servers to manage.
Laravel Forge sets up and manages servers at a provider of your choice, Hetzner included, and deploys your app to them. Brewless has no servers: your Laravel app runs in serverless containers in your own Scaleway account, behind bunny.net, and scales with its traffic. Forge gives you root on a server; Brewless takes the server away.
Facts checked on 20 October 2026. See the sources.
Laravel Forge and Brewless at a glance
| Topic | Laravel Forge | Brewless |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Laravel Holdings Inc., New York, United States. | Coding Agency, Meppel, the Netherlands. |
| How your app runs | Server management: Forge sets up Ubuntu servers with Nginx, PHP, a database and Redis, and deploys to them over SSH. | Serverless containers: your app starts with traffic and stops when it is quiet. There are no servers to manage. |
| Whose account | Yours: servers at DigitalOcean, Akamai, Vultr, AWS, Hetzner or any VPS. Or a Laravel VPS, billed through Forge. | Yours: your own Scaleway project and bunny.net account. Brewless is the control plane and is not in the path of your visitors. |
| Infrastructure | The provider you pick, European ones such as Hetzner included. | Scaleway (France) for your app, bunny.net (Slovenia) for the edge in front of it. Both European companies. |
| Regions in Europe | Those of your provider. | Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan. |
| Scales to zero | Not applicable: a server stays on. | Yes, when you set the minimum to zero. |
| Price | Hobby $12, Growth $19 and Business $39 a month, with unlimited servers. Your provider bills the servers. | 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 | The scheduler, queue workers, Horizon, Octane, Reverb and Inertia SSR as switches, and zero-downtime deploys on one server. | 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 Laravel Forge does well
- Full root access, on any provider, European ones included.
- A flat fee, however much traffic you get.
- Mature and widely used.
- Runs more than Laravel: other PHP or Node apps can share the server.
Where Brewless is different
No servers
There is nothing to patch, resize or keep running. Scaleway runs the machines; your containers start with traffic and stop when it is quiet.
Scales on its own
More copies of your app start when traffic rises, within bounds you set. With servers, you resize or add them yourself.
A European control plane
Brewless is run from the Netherlands, on European providers. Forge is run by Laravel Holdings Inc. in the United States.
Configuration in your repository
Brewless reads brewless.yml from your repository. Forge keeps the deploy script in its dashboard.
Which one fits?
Pick Laravel Forge if
- You want root access and full control of the machine.
- Your traffic is steady, and a fixed monthly server is the cheapest fit.
- You run several apps or stacks on one server.
Pick Brewless if
- You would rather not patch or size servers.
- Your traffic goes up and down, or the app sits idle at night.
- You want deploys, rollbacks and queues without SSH.
Moving from Laravel Forge to Brewless
Your Forge deploy script maps onto brewless.yml: the build steps become build commands and php artisan migrate becomes a release command. Queue workers and the scheduler need no Supervisor or cron: Brewless reads the schedule from your app. Copy your database, test, then move your domain.
Questions about Laravel Forge
- Is Laravel Forge a hosting provider?
- No. Forge sets up and manages servers that you rent from a provider, or a Laravel VPS that it bills you for. The servers do the hosting.
- Can I use Forge with a European provider?
- Yes. Forge supports Hetzner Cloud and any VPS it can reach over SSH, so your servers can sit with a European provider. Forge itself is run from the United States.
- When is a server cheaper than serverless?
- When your app is busy around the clock at a steady level. Serverless pays off when traffic varies or the app is idle for long stretches, because you pay only while containers run.
Sources
The facts about Laravel Forge 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 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
- Cloudways alternative Managed servers
- 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.