Portainer vs Dockge: which one to choose on your VPS?

Portainer has existed since 2017 and was built around a central idea: a single control panel for your entire Docker infrastructure, whether it is a single VPS, a Swarm cluster, or a fleet of remote nodes. It offers a complete interface — image management, volumes, networks, team-based RBAC, REST API and remote agents — with a free Community Edition and a paid Business Edition.

Dockge appeared in late 2023, developed by Louis Lam (the author of Uptime Kuma). Its angle is radically different: focus on Docker Compose stacks, and only those. No remote agents in the base version, no RBAC, no on-demand image management. In return, it installs quickly, is lightweight on memory, and is designed so that your compose.yml files remain readable and accessible on the file system.

This is the criterion most often underestimated when choosing. On a 2 or 4 GB RAM VPS, every megabyte counts.

Dockge consumes approximately 80 MB of RAM at rest — application container included. This is the order of magnitude measured on a 2 GB VPS running about ten active stacks.

Portainer CE in its standard configuration — interface + local agent — consumes approximately 256 MB of RAM. The difference comes from the agent, which runs continuously to monitor the Docker socket and synchronize state with the interface, as well as the integrated database (BoltDB).

On a 2 GB VPS dedicated to multiple services, a 176 MB gap can make the difference between a stack that holds or a swap that activates. On an 8 GB or larger VPS, this gap is negligible.

Portainer is not arbitrarily too heavy: its additional features meet real needs, which you may not have — but which exist.

Multi-host management. Portainer can connect remote agents installed on other VPS servers and control them from a central interface. If you manage half a dozen servers, this is a structural feature.

Docker Swarm. Portainer CE includes native Swarm support: service deployment, node visualization, replica management. No equivalent in Dockge.

RBAC and teams. The Business Edition adds fine-grained user rights — useful in a corporate or agency context with multiple people working on the same server.

Complete REST API. Portainer exposes a documented API that allows automating deployments from a CI/CD pipeline. This is the most common use case in teams integrating Portainer with a GitLab or GitHub Actions pipeline.

Image and registry management. From the interface, you can pull, tag and manage images directly, as well as connect a private registry.

Dockge is built around a principle that Portainer sacrificed for completeness: your compose.yml files are normal files, on your file system, that you can read and edit without going through the interface.

No lock-in. Dockge stacks live in /opt/stacks/<stack-name>/compose.yml. If you uninstall Dockge tomorrow, a docker compose up -d in that directory is enough to restart your service. No proprietary database to rebuild, no export required.

Integrated Compose editor. Dockge offers an online editor with syntax highlighting to edit your compose.yml files directly from the browser — without opening a terminal and a text editor.

Clean, frictionless interface. The dashboard shows the state of your stacks, their uptime, their containers and their logs. No secondary menus, no administrative panels you never open.

Multi-instance since v1.4. Dockge introduced a remote agent mechanism in recent versions, allowing you to manage multiple servers from one central interface. This feature is newer and less mature than the Portainer equivalent, but it reduces the latter's multi-host advantage for simple use cases.

Starting from a clean VPS with Docker installed, Dockge deploys in three commands:

mkdir -p /opt/stacks /opt/dockge
curl https://dockge.kuma.pet/compose.yaml --output /opt/dockge/compose.yaml
cd /opt/dockge && docker compose up -d

The interface is available on port 5001. Your stacks will go in /opt/stacks/ — one subdirectory per stack, with a compose.yml file readable directly.

To expose Dockge behind a reverse proxy (nginx or Caddy), point to 127.0.0.1:5001. There is no TLS certificate to manage inside the container itself.

Portainer CE installs via Docker by first creating a persistent volume, then launching the container:

docker volume create portainer_data
docker run -d \
  -p 8000:8000 -p 9443:9443 \
  --name portainer \
  --restart=always \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  -v portainer_data:/data \
  portainer/portainer-ce:latest

The interface is available over HTTPS on port 9443. Port 8000 is used by the Portainer agent for multi-host connections.

For complete steps — initial setup, first user creation and remote agent connection — the article deploying Portainer on a VPS covers installation from A to Z.

Choose Dockge if: you manage one or two VPS servers, your services run in Compose stacks, you want to keep control of your compose.yml files without depending on a third-party tool to read them, and you do not need team-based access control. Lightness and transparency are its two main assets.

Choose Portainer if: you administer multiple Docker hosts or a Swarm cluster, you want an API to automate your deployments from a CI/CD pipeline, or you work in a team with different access levels. Portainer is also the right choice if you plan to migrate to Kubernetes in the Business Edition.

If you are starting with Docker on a single VPS: start with Dockge. You can migrate to Portainer later without losing your stacks — your compose.yml files in /opt/stacks/ remain usable as-is.

Since its release, Dockge has gained rapid adoption in the self-hosting community. Discussions on r/selfhosted and selfh.st during the summer of 2026 place Dockge among the most recommended tools for individual VPS use cases — its lightness and Compose file readability explain the enthusiasm.

Portainer remains the reference in team environments and contexts where multi-host or Swarm management is required. Both tools target different use cases, and Dockge's rise does not mean Portainer is outdated — it simply reflects that simple use cases do not need all of Portainer's complexity.

If your current use case is 'start, stop and read logs of ten Compose stacks on one VPS,' Dockge covers that need with a fraction of the complexity. If your infrastructure grows tomorrow, migrating to Portainer is a configuration question, not a rewrite.