Komodo vs Portainer vs Dockge: Self-Hosted Docker Management on a VPS (2026)

If you run more than two servers, the question of how to manage Docker stops being a luxury and starts being a daily chore. I hit that wall myself last year. Across the seven aggregator sites I run on a mix of Hostinger shared plans and a couple of VPS boxes, plus 50+ client projects we've shipped at Warung Digital Teknologi, I was SSH-ing into individual machines, running docker compose pull && docker compose up -d, and reading logs through a terminal multiplexer. It worked until it didn't. The moment you have a CI/CD agent on one box, a Postgres replica on another, and a reverse proxy somewhere else, you want one pane of glass.

That hunt led me to three tools that dominate the self-hosted container management conversation in 2026: Komodo, Portainer, and Dockge. They are not three flavors of the same thing. They sit at genuinely different points on the complexity curve, and picking the wrong one means either fighting features you'll never use or hitting a wall the day your setup grows. I've run all three in production against real workloads, so this is a hands-on comparison rather than a feature-table regurgitation.

The 30-second decision matrix

If you only read one paragraph, read this one:

• One VPS, you live in docker-compose files, you want zero ceremony → Dockge.
• Multiple servers, you want Git-driven deploys and a real audit trail without paying for it → Komodo.
• You need Kubernetes in the same UI, team RBAC, or you're in an enterprise that wants a vendor to call → Portainer.

Everything below is the reasoning, the numbers, and the production scars behind that table.

The three contenders at a glance

Dockge: the one that respects your compose files

Dockge is the work of Louis Lam, the same developer behind Uptime Kuma, and it carries the same design philosophy: do one thing, make it pleasant, don't get in your way. With 22k+ GitHub stars it has one of the largest communities of any tool in this category, and that community shows up in how stable it feels.

Its entire premise is the docker-compose.yaml file. Every stack you create is a real compose file sitting in a real directory on disk — by default /opt/stacks. There's no proprietary database holding your configuration hostage. I tested this deliberately: I created a stack in the Dockge UI, then deleted the Dockge container entirely, and my compose files were still sitting there, perfectly usable with a plain docker compose up -d. That is exactly the property you want in a management tool. The tool should be disposable; your configuration should not be.

The interface gives you a reactive, real-time view of container logs and an interactive compose editor with sane defaults. Converting a docker run command into compose format is built in, which sounds trivial until you've done it by hand forty times.

Where Dockge stops: it does exactly nothing beyond single-host compose management. No Kubernetes. No RBAC. No image builds. No vulnerability scanning. No multi-server fleet view. The developer is explicit that this is by design, and I respect that — feature creep is how good tools die. But it means the day you add a second server, Dockge can't follow you there. You'd run a separate Dockge instance per host, which defeats the single-pane-of-glass goal.

On resource cost, Dockge is featherweight. On one of my smaller VPS boxes (a 2 vCPU / 4 GB Contabo instance) it idles at well under 100 MB of RAM. For a single-server setup where you already think in compose files, it is the path of least resistance, and that is high praise.

Komodo: the one I actually moved my fleet onto

Komodo is the newest of the three and the one with the most architecturally ambitious design. It's written in Rust (with a TypeScript frontend), GPL-3.0 licensed, and built from day one for the problem I actually had: managing Docker across many servers from a single place.

The architecture is two pieces. Komodo Core is the central server — a web UI and API backed by MongoDB (or the FerretDB-compatible equivalent). Periphery is a tiny stateless agent, also written in Rust, that you install on every server you want to manage. Core talks to each Periphery agent over an authenticated API to pull system metrics, container status, and logs, and to issue deploy commands. The Periphery agents restrict access through IP whitelisting, and as of the v2.0 release in early 2026 the old shared-passkey scheme was replaced with proper PKI using Ed25519 keypairs. That security upgrade was the thing that made me comfortable putting it in front of production boxes.

Here's the number that sold me: Komodo Core plus its MongoDB typically sits under 256 MB of RAM combined, and the Periphery agents are so light they're a rounding error on each host. When I migrated my aggregator fleet — boxes running daily import jobs that push 100–200 records each across seven sites — the management overhead was negligible. I'd budgeted a dedicated small VPS for the control plane and ended up co-locating Core alongside other services without a fight.

What you get for that footprint:

• Git-driven image builds. Point Komodo at a repo, and it builds and deploys on push. For my workflow — where article-generation and import scripts live in Git and ship to VPS targets — this collapsed a multi-step manual dance into a webhook.
• Scheduled procedures. Chain actions together and run them on a cron-like schedule. I use this for staggered restarts and nightly maintenance.
• A real audit trail. Every action is logged with who did what and when. The first time a deploy went sideways at 11 p.m., the audit log told me exactly which change caused it.
• RBAC and SSO — free. This is the headline. The developers have stated plainly that there is no node limit, no business edition, and no feature gating, and that there never will be. Unlimited servers, unlimited stacks, every feature, zero dollars.

The project shows real engineering weight: 10,200+ GitHub stars on 2,800+ commits, with active releases through February and April 2026. It is not a weekend project that will be abandoned.

The tradeoff I've seen in production: Komodo asks more of you upfront. You're running MongoDB, installing agents on each host, and learning a resource model (builds, deployments, procedures, stacks) that's richer than Dockge's "here's a compose file." The first hour is steeper. But the payoff scales: the second, fifth, and tenth server cost you almost nothing in added effort. For anyone past a single host who refuses to pay a per-node tax, I'd recommend Komodo over the alternatives without much hesitation.

Portainer: the one with the widest reach and a paywall

Portainer is the incumbent. It's the most established tool here, with the broadest feature set and the largest install base, and it is the only one of the three that gives you a working Kubernetes UI alongside Docker and Docker Swarm. If your environment is mixed — some Docker hosts, a small K8s cluster — Portainer is the only single tool that covers both.

The Community Edition is genuinely capable and actively developed. The 2.39 LTS release introduced Fleet Governance Policies for centrally defining security and configuration standards, brought Helm chart deployments under Git management, and graduated observability alerting out of experimental status. The 2.40 STS that followed in March 2026 added an automatic patch update mechanism and continued tidying up GitOps for Compose stacks. This is a maintained, serious product.

The catch is the commercial gating, and you need to understand it before you commit. OIDC/SSO, RBAC, registry management, and the advanced GitOps and observability features live in the Business Edition. The Business Edition is free for up to 5 nodes for personal use, but commercial use beyond that starts at roughly $99/month. For a solo operator with a handful of nodes, the 5-node free tier may be all you ever need. For an agency like ours managing client infrastructure across many hosts, that per-node math adds up fast — and that arithmetic is precisely what pushed me to evaluate Komodo in the first place.

Resource-wise, Portainer's agent model (the Edge agent for remote hosts) is reasonable, though the Go-based Core carries more weight than Komodo's Rust control plane. On the same class of box I measured Portainer's footprint at noticeably higher idle RAM than Komodo's sub-256 MB, though both are comfortable on a 4 GB VPS.

One operational note from experience: Portainer stores stack definitions in its own internal database by default, not as plain files on disk the way Dockge and Komodo do. That's fine until you want to back up or migrate, at which point you're exporting through Portainer rather than copying a directory. It's a philosophical difference worth knowing before you're three months deep.

Real-world performance and footprint notes

Numbers matter more than adjectives, so here's what I observed on comparable 2 vCPU / 4 GB VPS instances running each control plane with roughly a dozen managed containers:

The headline takeaway: none of these will sink a modest VPS. The differentiator is not raw resource cost — it's whether the tool can grow with your topology. Dockge can't leave a single host. Komodo and Portainer both scale across servers; the divergence there is licensing, not capability.

The licensing angle nobody mentions until it bites

I've watched enough open-source projects pivot to commercial models to take licensing seriously when picking infrastructure tooling. The MinIO object-storage saga — where the open-source community edition was effectively wound down — taught a lot of self-hosters that "free today" and "free forever" are different promises.

On that axis:

• Dockge (MIT) and Komodo (GPL-3.0) are fully open with no feature gating. Komodo's maintainers have publicly committed to never adding a paid tier or node limit. That's a strong signal, though no promise is binding forever.
• Portainer operates a genuine open-core model. The CE is real and useful, but the features a growing team most wants — SSO, RBAC, registry control — are deliberately on the paid side. That's a legitimate business model, not a trap, but you should choose it with eyes open rather than discover the wall mid-growth.

How I'd choose, by scenario

Solo developer, one VPS, hobby projects. Dockge. It's the smallest version of the problem and the smallest tool that solves it. You'll be productive in ten minutes, and your compose files stay yours.

Self-hoster with 2–8 servers who wants Git deploys and audit trails. Komodo. This is the sweet spot it was built for. Free RBAC, free multi-server, a real build system, and a control plane light enough to co-locate. This is what I run today.

Team or agency that needs Kubernetes in the mix or wants commercial support. Portainer. The K8s UI and the option to buy a support contract are things neither competitor offers. Just budget for the Business Edition if you'll exceed five nodes commercially.

Privacy-maximalist who wants zero external dependencies. Dockge (no database at all) or Portainer (embedded DB). Komodo's MongoDB requirement is the one external moving part among the three, though FerretDB-compatible setups soften that.

FAQ

Can I run more than one of these at the same time? Yes, and people do — Dockge for quick single-host stack edits and Komodo or Portainer for fleet orchestration. They'll all read the same Docker socket. Just don't have two tools managing the same stack simultaneously, or you'll get state confusion.

Is Komodo's MongoDB requirement a dealbreaker? For most people, no. It runs under 256 MB combined with Core and there are FerretDB-compatible options if you'd rather not run real MongoDB. If your hard rule is "no databases I don't already operate," Dockge is the cleaner pick.

Does Portainer's 5-node free Business Edition cover small setups? For personal, non-commercial use, often yes. The moment it's commercial and you cross five nodes, you're looking at roughly $99/month and up. That math is the single biggest reason to evaluate Komodo first if you're cost-sensitive.

Which is the safest long-term bet? All three are actively maintained in 2026. Komodo and Dockge carry the lowest "will this get paywalled" risk because there's nothing gated to begin with. Portainer's CE is safe, but plan around the open-core line.

What about Kubernetes? Only Portainer offers a Kubernetes UI here. If K8s is central to your plans, the decision is effectively made for you.

Getting started fast, and migrating between them

All three install in minutes via Docker, which is convenient and also a little circular — you're using Docker to manage Docker. Dockge is a single compose file pointing at /opt/stacks and /var/run/docker.sock; you're in the UI before your coffee cools. Portainer is famously a two-command install (one volume, one container) and then you set an admin password on first load. Komodo asks for slightly more: bring up Core with its MongoDB via the provided compose file, then run the Periphery installer on each host you want to manage and register it in Core with its Ed25519 key.

Migration between them is less painful than you'd fear, precisely because of the file-on-disk philosophy. Moving from Dockge to Komodo, I copied my /opt/stacks compose files into a Git repo and pointed Komodo at it — the definitions transferred almost verbatim. Going the other direction, or off Portainer, is where the internal-database choice stings: you export Portainer's stacks rather than copying a folder. My practical advice from doing this twice: whichever tool you pick, keep your compose files in Git regardless of what the tool prefers. That way the tool stays disposable and your migration path stays open. A management UI you can't walk away from isn't a convenience — it's a dependency, and I've learned to treat infrastructure dependencies the same way I treat the licensing risk above.

One last operational tip: whatever you choose, lock down the agent-to-core communication. Komodo's IP whitelisting plus Ed25519 keys, Portainer's Edge agent tokens, and Dockge's "don't expose it to the public internet at all" each demand attention. A container management UI is, by definition, a tool with full control over every container on the host. Treat its exposure surface accordingly — put it behind a reverse proxy with auth or a VPN like Tailscale or Headscale, and never bind it raw to a public port.

The bottom line

There's no universal winner, because these tools answer different questions. Dockge answers "how do I manage compose files on one box without a terminal." Komodo answers "how do I run a fleet with Git deploys, audit trails, and RBAC without paying per node." Portainer answers "how do I manage Docker and Kubernetes and team access with a vendor I can call."

For my own infrastructure — seven aggregator sites plus client projects spread across shared hosting and VPS boxes — Komodo won because it scaled with my server count without scaling my bill, and the Rust control plane stayed out of my RAM budget. But I genuinely reach for Dockge on single-host throwaway projects, and I'd point any K8s-shop friend straight at Portainer. Install whichever fits the smallest version of the problem you actually have today. You can always graduate.