Rallly Cloud vs Rallly Self-Hosted
Rallly comes in two flavours built from the same codebase. Rallly Cloud is the hosted service we run. It is designed to scale horizontally across distributed infrastructure and serve a large number of users. It is the fastest way to get started and is maintained by us. Rallly Self-Hosted is optimised for simplicity of deployment. Out of the box, the application, database, object storage, and TLS termination all run on a single machine via Docker Compose — you own the data, you own the server, and updates are a single command. If you already run a managed Postgres or S3-compatible service, you can point Rallly at those instead and the bundled containers are skipped automatically.Some Cloud features (billing, metered quotas) are compiled out of the self-hosted image. Licensing for multi-user self-hosted instances is covered on the Licensing page.
Differences from Rallly Cloud
The user guides describe Rallly Cloud. On a self-hosted instance, these work differently:- Open polls: there is no open poll limit. Every account can have any number of polls collecting votes at once.
- API: the Rallly API is only served by Rallly Cloud. Self-hosted instances do not have it.
- Spaces: collaboration is always on and the setting is not shown. The instance is already the boundary of your organization, so adding someone to a space is how you work together.
What’s included
A self-hosted install is a batteries-included stack. You do not need to provision these services separately.- Traefik — reverse proxy with automatic HTTPS via Let’s Encrypt
- Rallly — the web application
- PostgreSQL — primary database
- Garage — S3-compatible object storage for file uploads
Next steps
- Installation — set up Rallly on your server.
- Configuration — environment variables reference.
- Management — update, back up, and operate your instance.
- Control Panel — manage users and instance settings.
- Licensing — when a license is needed and how to apply one.