Why Pando
Pando is for teams that solve their own problems. Right now, productivity is restricted because IT and security teams don’t have the bandwidth to review everything people make, and they shouldn’t have to. Pando gives these apps a safe place to run and a way to share them with the people who need access.
Pando is also for the hobbyist who can’t stop building apps, but is tired of hosting them, building pipelines, and trying to work out how to control access.
Our approach
No gated features
Pando doesn’t restrict any features behind a paywall. Since nothing leaves Pando, there’s no reason for us to charge for functionality. This extends to enterprise requirements like SSO, SCIM, and audit logs. We are committed to ensuring everything is free, forever.
Highly configurable
A hobbyist, a small company, and a large company have different needs and requirements. Rather than trying to target one of them, Pando makes everything configurable, with permissive defaults. This makes Pando quick to try and run for personal use, but also allows it to be locked down as needed. Things like routing, runtime, and AI features work through adapters. This means you can run Pando on a laptop and access apps via ports, or scale it and host apps behind subdomains and connect it to infrastructure you already use.
What Pando is built for
Pando was built to host small services and apps that boost productivity or solve targeted problems. It isn’t built to host business-critical systems or infrastructure.
Good fits
- Dashboards and data visualization tools
- Basic websites and prototypes
- Productivity apps
- Internal tools
- Hobby and side projects
Poor fits
- Critical infrastructure
- Services that need replication or industry-leading uptime
- Your company’s CRM
How Pando compares
| Capability | Pando | Coolify | Dokploy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identity-aware proxy | Yes | Basic auth only | Enterprise |
| Per-app access control for users and groups | Yes | No | No |
| Identity headers to the app | Yes | No | Enterprise |
| SSO (OIDC + SAML) | Yes | OIDC only | Enterprise |
| SCIM provisioning | Yes | No | Enterprise |
| Custom roles | Yes | No | Enterprise |
| Audit log | Yes | Yes | Enterprise |
| Vulnerability scanning | Yes | No | No |
| Per-app network isolation | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Egress controls | Yes | No | No |
| Interactive build detection | Yes | No | No |
| Dockerfile, Compose and Railpack builds | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Provisioned databases | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-server deployment | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Checked in October 2026 against Coolify 4.4.6 and Dokploy 0.30.8, self-hosted, using their documentation, source and issue trackers. Everything Pando does is on the features page.
Where the name comes from
Pando is a grove of ~47,000 quaking aspens in central Utah. It looks like a forest, but its trees all grow from one root system and are genetically a single organism. The name is Latin for “I spread.”