Overview
Caddy is a powerful, production-ready open source web server and reverse proxy written in Go. Its defining feature is automatic TLS certificate provisioning and renewal via Let's Encrypt and ZeroSSL, requiring zero manual certificate management. It supports HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, static file serving, PHP FastCGI, load balancing, and a JSON or Caddyfile configuration syntax. Plugins extend it to a full application delivery platform.
Where it falls short of Heroku
- Not a full PaaS; no git push deploy, build pipelines, or app lifecycle management
- No built-in CI/CD integration; needs to be combined with other tools for deployments
- Dashboard and metrics require third-party tools (Prometheus, Grafana) — none built-in
- No managed database provisioning or environment variable secrets management
We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.
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