Your Laravel team ships fast locally. In production, nginx stays mysterious, Supervisor is forgotten, and .env diverges. Forge promises "one-click deploy on DigitalOcean". Laravel Cloud or Vapor promises "serverless". Clever Cloud promises "French PaaS".
All "handle details" — not the same ones, nor at the same price. The question is not "which is best" but who answers at 3 a.m. when deploy fails.
Three abstraction levels
| Layer | Forge + VPS | PaaS (Clever, Platform.sh) | Vapor (serverless) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Server | You (via Forge) | Provider | AWS Lambda |
| nginx / PHP-FPM | Forge | PaaS | AWS managed |
| Deploy | Forge Git hook | Git push | Vapor CLI |
| Queues | VPS worker | Worker dyno | SQS |
| Billing | Fixed VPS | Plan + usage | AWS usage |
Forge is sysadmin automation on infrastructure you rent. PaaS is a managed runtime. Vapor is event-driven scaling.
Production details Forge handles well
Forge manages nginx sites with Let's Encrypt SSL, atomic deploy with release directories, Horizon and Supervisor workers, Laravel cron scheduler, and Meilisearch or Redis via recipes. What Forge does not solve alone: database HA, tested backups, application firewall, multi-region.
When to choose what
Forge + Hetzner/OVH/DigitalOcean: stable-load B2B SaaS, team of two to five developers, occasional SSH need.
European PaaS: EU data compliance, no sysadmin, documented workers and cron.
Vapor: spiky Laravel API, SQS queue acceptable, team comfortable with AWS billing.
Neither Forge nor PaaS: home-grown Kubernetes — only with dedicated ops team.
The climax: "production details" include hidden AWS bill
List what happens at 3 a.m. — that is your real comparison.
Decide and move forward without blind spots
First map workers, cron jobs, upload storage, and WebSockets. Then estimate twelve-month cost across VPS+Forge, PaaS, and simulated Vapor. Test deploy on staging identical to production. Compare Forge-compatible hosts in the directory and comparator.
Frequently asked questions
Does Forge replace a DevOps engineer?
It automates provisioning, zero-downtime deploy, queues, and SSL — not multi-region architecture, cloud cost control, or deep application incidents. It multiplies a small team, it does not replace one.
Laravel Vapor vs Forge + VPS?
Vapor runs on AWS serverless (Lambda, SQS, RDS) — elastic scale, usage billing, cold starts and Lambda limits to model. Forge + VPS = classic control, predictable price, you manage the underlying server.
Which European PaaS for Laravel?
Clever Cloud, Platform.sh, sometimes Heroku-like offers — verify PHP 8.x support, long-running workers, cron, and persistent storage for logs and uploads.
What remains my responsibility with Forge?
VPS host choice, snapshots, manual scaling, OS security, compliance, and database tuning — Forge configures, you own the machine.
Forge or PaaS: the right choice is where you still know what is running when deploy fails.