Short answer
Ploi if your job is deploying sites — PHP, Laravel, WordPress — onto servers it creates and configures for you. Servor if your job is operating servers: watching them continuously, getting alerted when they break, and stepping in from anywhere, whatever the stack. Ploi puts the application online; Servor keeps an eye on the machine running it.
What Ploi is
Ploi is a server management panel that came out of the Laravel ecosystem in 2018. It creates servers at DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS, Vultr, Scaleway and others, installs a web stack on them, then deploys your sites from Git — atomic, zero-downtime deployments, scheduled deployments, staging to production. Around that: database and file backups with one-click restore, one-click apps (WordPress, Statamic, Craft, Nextcloud), dedicated server types (database, Redis, mail, load balancer), server and site monitoring from the Pro plan up, and a free white-label panel, Ploi Core, for reselling hosting to your own customers.
To do all that, Ploi connects to your servers over SSH, as root, with its own key placed in authorized_keys — the usual model for management panels that work over SSH.
What Servor is
Servor is a hosted console with an agent on every server. The agent runs on the machine at all times and connects outbound: monitoring carries on while your laptop is off, scheduled tasks run locally, and you reach the server from any browser without opening a port. Around that: eleven monitor types, alerts on twenty channels and on your phone, public status pages, incidents, a web terminal, live logs, container and service actions, a file explorer, 150+ recipes — and an AI copilot to help diagnose.
Every command is signed in your browser and verified by the agent: Servor's backend cannot run anything on your machines by itself.
Side by side
| Capability | Ploi | Servor |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Provision servers and deploy sites | Monitor and operate existing servers |
| Servers it accepts | Ubuntu 24.04/26.04 LTS, Debian 12/13, with Ploi's stack installed | Any existing machine, Linux and Windows, no reinstall |
| How it connects | Inbound SSH as root, with Ploi's key | The agent's tunnel, outbound only; no inbound port |
| Application deployment | Yes — the core of the product | No, by choice |
| Monitoring | Server and sites (uptime, response time, SSL) from Pro | From the free plan: 11 monitor types including heartbeat, DNS, process and script, thresholds on the agent's metrics |
| Alerts | Email, Slack, Discord, Telegram | 20 channels, phone push, on-call escalation, quiet hours |
| Status pages & incidents | Status pages on the Unlimited plan | From €9: custom domains, subscribers, scheduled maintenance, auto-detected incidents |
| Working on the machine | SSH access, file explorer (Pro) | Web terminal, live logs, container and systemd actions, firewall, package updates, file explorer |
| Backups | Databases and files to S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, one-click restore | Through scheduled commands and recipes; no dedicated module |
| Team | Team management and per-server permissions (Unlimited) | Roles, per-server visibility, hash-chained audit log, recorded terminal sessions |
| API | Full REST API with writes, MCP server | Read + incident automation; running commands with a token is impossible |
| Price | Free (1 server), Basic €8, Pro €13, Unlimited €30 per month | Free (2 servers), Operations €9, AI €29 per month |
Ploi pricing and features taken from ploi.io in September 2026.
Where Ploi wins
- Getting a site live. Git push, atomic deployments, scheduled deployments, staging to production. If that is your day, Ploi does it very well and Servor does not do it at all.
- Starting from nothing. Ploi creates the machine at the provider and hands it over configured. Servor assumes the server already exists.
- Backups. Database and file dumps to external storage, restored in one click. Servor has no equivalent module yet.
- Reselling hosting. Ploi Core gives an agency its own branded panel, for free.
- Very large fleets. Unlimited servers for €30 a month. Servor caps its highest plan at 50 servers before moving to a quote.
Where Servor wins
- Something is actually watching the server. Eleven monitor types on the free plan, including the heartbeat that catches a cron job that stopped running, and an alert that lands on your phone. With Ploi, monitoring starts on Pro and status pages on the €30 plan.
- The whole stack, not just the web. Docker, Node, Python, databases, Kubernetes, Windows: the agent installs onto what is already running, without reinstalling the machine or changing its configuration.
- No port to open. The agent calls out. Port 22 can stay closed to the internet, and a machine behind NAT or a bastion is managed like any other.
- Nobody holds a root key on our side.A tool that connects over SSH as root keeps, by design, access to its customers' whole fleet. With Servor, a command exists only if you signed it in your browser; a compromise on our side does not hand anyone a shell on yours.
- The full operations loop. Alert, incident, a status page your customers read, a terminal to fix it, a signed history of what was run — in one console, for €9.
- A copilot to diagnose.On top of the rest, an assistant that reads the machine's state and proposes the fix, without running anything you have not approved.
Using both
This is the most common setup in agencies. Ploi deploys the customers' Laravel and WordPress sites; Servor watches the whole fleet — including the servers Ploi manages, the ones it does not, and the machines that do not serve the web — and publishes a status page per customer. Nothing stops you from installing the Servor agent on a server Ploi provisioned: it does not touch Nginx, PHP or deployments.
Who should pick what
- You deploy PHP or Laravel sites onto fresh servers: Ploi.
- You already have servers running mixed stacks, and nobody is alerted when one goes down: Servor.
- Your customers want a status page and you would rather not pay €30 for it: Servor.
- You deploy with Ploi and want to sleep at night: both — Ploi for deployment, Servor for monitoring.
Two servers, free
Install the agent on two of your servers, one of them managed by Ploi if you like. Add a monitor and an alert channel. The next time a machine goes down, you will know before your customer does.