envoyer.io

What It Is

Envoyer is a zero-downtime PHP deployment service under Laravel Holdings Inc., with a clear focus: helping PHP applications—especially Laravel apps—ship safely in production without users noticing downtime. Built by the creator of Laravel, it is part of the Laravel ecosystem and emphasizes “zero downtime” with minimal operations overhead.

Core Capabilities

In terms of features, Envoyer covers the key stages of PHP application deployment: source-code integrations with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, including support for self-hosted GitLab; deployment to multiple servers; seamless deployments and rollbacks; built-in application health checks, Cron Job monitoring, chat notifications, and customizable deployment workflows. It can also import Laravel Forge servers and offers first-party Forge integration, making it a good fit for teams already using Forge to manage servers.

Technical Fit and API

Envoyer explicitly supports any PHP project and is optimized for Laravel applications. For server requirements, the documentation only mentions support for Ubuntu and FreeBSD, and the server must have scp installed. Envoyer provides an API that allows programmatic server management and access to most features, which is useful for teams that want to integrate deployment capabilities into internal platforms or automation pipelines. One thing to note: the documentation states that Laravel Octane already includes zero-downtime deployment capabilities, so Envoyer may be less necessary in Octane-based scenarios.

Pricing

Pricing is subscription-based and billed monthly: Basic costs $10/month and supports 10 projects; Plus costs $20/month and supports 20 projects; Premium costs $50/month and supports unlimited projects. All plans include unlimited team members, unlimited deployments, and all features, with a free trial available. Since pricing is based on project count rather than seats, it is relatively friendly for collaborative teams.

Pros, Cons, and Best Fit

Envoyer’s strengths are its strong fit with the Laravel ecosystem, focused feature set, mature deployment and rollback capabilities, and integrations with Forge, major code-hosting platforms, and notification tools. Its limitations are a relatively narrow technology focus—mainly PHP/Laravel—limited documented server OS support, and no clear indication that Envoyer itself can be self-hosted. It is best suited to small and mid-sized Laravel/PHP teams, as well as projects that need reliable production releases and multi-server deployment.

Access from China

The collected text does not provide information about availability from mainland China, payment methods, or localization, so its China access status is unknown. If access or payment is restricted, alternatives such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Deployer, and Laravel Forge may be worth evaluating.