A Ploi alternative without servers to manage.
Ploi is a Dutch control panel that sets up and manages servers you rent, at Hetzner, Scaleway, DigitalOcean and others, and deploys your PHP apps to them. Brewless is European too, but 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.
Ploi and Brewless at a glance
| Topic | Ploi | Brewless |
|---|---|---|
| Company | WebBuilds B.V., Nijkerk, the Netherlands. | Coding Agency, Meppel, the Netherlands. |
| How your app runs | A server management panel: your app runs on a VPS that Ploi sets up with Nginx and PHP. | Serverless containers: your app starts with traffic and stops when it is quiet. There are no servers to manage. |
| Whose account | Yours: your own servers, linked through your provider’s API or added by hand. | Yours: your own Scaleway project and bunny.net account. Brewless is the control plane and is not in the path of your visitors. |
| Infrastructure | Your choice: UpCloud, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr, AWS, Scaleway or any VPS. | 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 | Free for one server; Basic €8, Pro €13 and Unlimited €30 a month. 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 | A Laravel mode that sets up queue workers, the scheduler and Octane, and zero-downtime deploys on Pro and up. | 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 Ploi does well
- A free tier and low, flat prices.
- A long list of providers, European ones included, or any VPS.
- A Dutch company that hosts in Europe.
- A Laravel mode that sets up workers, the scheduler and Octane without manual Supervisor work.
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 with traffic
More copies of your app start when traffic rises, within bounds you set.
An edge in front
bunny.net serves your static files and cached pages close to your visitors, from your own account.
Releases you can put back
Every deploy is a release; any release that was live can be put back with one command.
Which one fits?
Pick Ploi if
- You want a friendly panel for servers you control, at a low price.
- You host many sites on one server.
- Your traffic is steady.
Pick Brewless if
- You would rather not patch or size servers.
- Your traffic varies, or the app is idle at night.
- You want queues and a schedule without a server that runs all the time.
Moving from Ploi to Brewless
Your Ploi deploy script maps onto brewless.yml: the build steps become build commands and migrate becomes a release command. Queue workers and cron need no Supervisor: Brewless calls the worker when a job is queued and reads the schedule from your app. Copy your database, test, then move your domain.
Questions about Ploi
- Is Ploi European?
- Yes. Ploi is made by WebBuilds B.V. in Nijkerk, the Netherlands.
- Can Ploi deploy to Scaleway?
- Yes, Scaleway is one of the providers Ploi lists. Ploi then manages a server there; Brewless uses Scaleway’s serverless containers instead.
- Is Ploi Cloud the same product?
- No. Ploi Cloud is a separate managed hosting product from Ploi Cloud B.V., running on UpCloud. This page compares the Ploi server panel.
Sources
The facts about Ploi 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
- 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.