The self-hosted Northflank alternative you own
AppCrane is the single-server counterpart you run entirely yourself: control plane, apps and data on one box, Docker isolation, auto-HTTPS, and an MCP server so your AI agent does the deploying. AGPL-3.0.
Northflank runs services, jobs and databases from your Git repo, on Northflank's cloud or in Kubernetes clusters it provisions and manages in your own cloud account (BYOC). Its control plane is Northflank's, unless an Enterprise customer runs it forward-deployed in their own infrastructure; billing is by the second, with no seat fees.
| AppCrane | Northflank | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | A server you own — any Ubuntu box | Northflank's cloud, or clusters it manages in your cloud account (BYOC) |
| Where code & data live | On that server; AppCrane sends one anonymous daily install check-in (counts and version, no app data), off with APPCRANE_CHECKIN=off | Northflank's cloud, or your cloud account with BYOC |
| Pricing model | Free and open source on a server you already pay for — no per-seat, per-request or bandwidth metering | Resources billed to the second, no seat fees; BYOC billed per managed node vCPU; a free Sandbox plan |
| Deploys | GitHub-native push-to-deploy, zero-downtime releases (start new, health check, swap, drain old), rollback to a kept release that restarts its image instead of rebuilding | Managed build and deploy pipeline |
| Agent-native (MCP) | 74 tools on an MCP server on your own box — your AI agent deploys, sets env, reads logs, rolls back and promotes, and each call is audited against its user | Northflank's MCP server: deploy applications, manage databases and jobs, inspect resources |
| Single sign-on | SAML 2.0, OIDC and SCIM in the AGPL-3.0 build, nothing to activate | SSO/SAML and SCIM on Enterprise |
| Isolation & TLS | Per-app Docker containers, auto-HTTPS via Caddy | Kubernetes, on Northflank's cloud or your own clusters |
| Openness | Open source (AGPL-3.0), standard Docker + Caddy — you run the control plane | Northflank's control plane; forward-deployed into your infrastructure on Enterprise |
| Audit | Per-user audit: who deployed what, which environment, when — stored on your server | Audit logs at organisation, team, project and resource scope |
Northflank is a good fit when you want someone else to own the servers. Choose AppCrane when the apps are agent-built, the agent should do the deploying, and your code, data and audit trail should stay on infrastructure you own. It’s open source — read every line.