Yes. Kamal is open source. Serversinc costs £5 a month for three servers and includes backups, monitoring and a dashboard you'd otherwise add yourself.

Kamal vs Serversinc

Kamal ships containers from your terminal over SSH. Serversinc ships them too, then keeps watching the servers they run on.

Get started Kamal alternative

Checked against Kamal's public pricing and docs on 2026-09-27.

The Serversinc dashboard with servers, applications and recent deployments

What Kamal is, and what Serversinc is

Both get your apps running. Here is how each one does it.

Kamal is an open-source deploy tool from 37signals. You describe servers, roles and accessories in a YAML file, and Kamal builds your image, pushes it and swaps containers behind kamal-proxy over SSH. It's free, and everything past the deploy is yours to build.

Serversinc is a hosted control plane. It deploys containers with health-checked rollouts too, and adds the parts around the deploy: databases, scheduled backups to your bucket, server metrics, alerts, a team dashboard, a REST API and MCP. You pay £5 a month for three servers and £2 for each after.

What the bill looks like

Kamal is free and open source. You pay for your servers and any registry, monitoring or backup tools you add.

Software: Kamal $0 Serversinc £5/mo for three servers, £2 per server after
Dashboard: Kamal None; a CLI and a YAML file Serversinc Included
Backups and alerts: Kamal Bring your own tools Serversinc Included
Where it runs: Kamal On the machine that runs the deploy command Serversinc Hosted; deploy from the dashboard, API, CI or MCP

Feature	Kamal	Serversinc
Software	$0	£5/mo for three servers, £2 per server after
Dashboard	None; a CLI and a YAML file	Included
Backups and alerts	Bring your own tools	Included
Where it runs	On the machine that runs the deploy command	Hosted; deploy from the dashboard, API, CI or MCP

List prices in each vendor's own currency. Server costs from your cloud provider are billed separately on both sides unless stated.

Side by side

Deploys, databases, backups, alerts and automation.

Interface: Kamal CLI and config/deploy.yml Serversinc Dashboard, REST API and MCP server
Deploys: Kamal kamal-proxy zero-downtime swap with a health check Serversinc Rolling or recreate, gated on a health check, with rollback when it fails
Builds: Kamal Builds locally or on a remote builder, pushes to a registry Serversinc Builds from GitHub on the server, or pulls an image from any registry
Multi-server: Kamal One app across many hosts and roles in one command Serversinc Each application runs on one server you choose
Databases: Kamal Accessories: containers you define and manage Serversinc Postgres, MySQL or MariaDB with users, schemas, grants and password rotation
Backups: Kamal Not included Serversinc Scheduled database and volume backups to S3, R2, B2 or Spaces
Monitoring: Kamal Not included Serversinc Server metrics and disk insights, to email, Slack or a webhook
Team access: Kamal Whoever has SSH keys and the secrets file Serversinc Organisation members, 2FA, session control and an activity log

Feature	Kamal	Serversinc
Interface	CLI and config/deploy.yml	Dashboard, REST API and MCP server
Deploys	kamal-proxy zero-downtime swap with a health check	Rolling or recreate, gated on a health check, with rollback when it fails
Builds	Builds locally or on a remote builder, pushes to a registry	Builds from GitHub on the server, or pulls an image from any registry
Multi-server	One app across many hosts and roles in one command	Each application runs on one server you choose
Databases	Accessories: containers you define and manage	Postgres, MySQL or MariaDB with users, schemas, grants and password rotation
Backups	Not included	Scheduled database and volume backups to S3, R2, B2 or Spaces
Monitoring	Not included	Server metrics and disk insights, to email, Slack or a webhook
Team access	Whoever has SSH keys and the secrets file	Organisation members, 2FA, session control and an activity log

Both are good tools. Pick the one that fits.

Where each one is the stronger choice, stated plainly.

Pick Kamal if

You want a free tool with no hosted service in the loop.
You deploy one app across many hosts and roles at once.
You like config in the repo and deploys from your terminal.
You already have monitoring and backups you trust.

Pick Serversinc if

You want a dashboard your whole team can use, not only whoever has the keys.
You want backups, metrics and alerts without wiring more tools.
You want to deploy from CI with a scoped trigger, not an SSH key.
You want AI agents to operate the fleet through MCP.