PortBayvsLaravel Herd
Laravel HerdHerd is the polished Laravel-first answer to local PHP development on macOS, built by the team behind Expose and Tinkerwell. PortBay is the open-source, polyglot answer — one app that runs your PHP, Node, databases, mail and public tunnels without a Pro tier in front of every useful feature.
Which one is right for you
You want the full stack, open source.
You want databases, Mailpit, Cloudflare tunnels and Node version management without an upgrade prompt. You'd like to read the source, file an issue, or fork it. You run PHP and Node side by side and want both treated as first-class.
It already fits your workflow.
You live inside the Laravel ecosystem and want the tooling that ships under laravel.com, with Tinker, Dumps, the profiler and Forge integration built in. Herd Basic also has no site cap, so if you keep more than six projects around and don't need managed services, its free tier goes further than PortBay's. You're happy paying $99/year for the Services dashboard, or $299 for ten team seats — and you're on Windows today and need a mature, well-tested build.
Where PortBay and Herd actually differ
The table below has the row-by-row detail. These are the three shapes it cannot draw: the job you already use one of them for, the job only one of them does, and what survives the move.
PortBay and Herd overlap on the everyday job: a local site on a real domain, over HTTPS, with the services it needs. If that is all you need, either will do it.
Claude Code
Codex
CursorMove a card to To Do and PortBay launches Claude Code, Codex or Cursor against a project that is already running. Herd has no board to dispatch from.
Point PortBay at the folders you already have. They stay where they are, .test domains are re-issued on the first run, and databases are imported rather than rebuilt.
Feature by feature
Herd rows come from Herd’s own site and docs, on the date below. PortBay rows come from the app’s source. We mark partial support honestly — including where the other side wins.
Herd facts on this page were last checked against herd.laravel.com on . Pricing and limits change — check their site before you decide.
Coming from Laravel Herd
PortBay reads Herd's site list, PHP versions and isolated-site mappings on first launch, then offers to bring them across with a single click. Your existing nginx blocks, .test domains and certificates keep working — PortBay re-issues fresh mkcert certificates so HTTPS stays trusted, and provisions per-project databases for any site that was using Herd's shared services.
Install PortBay and open it once. It detects Herd and lists every site.
Pick the projects to import. Site paths, PHP versions and tunnels carry over.
Start any project — Herd can keep running or be uninstalled at your pace.
PortBay vs Herd, in plain terms
Don’t see your question answered here? The docs go deeper — every feature, flag and failure mode.
Read the docsYes. PortBay is free and open source for up to 6 local projects, with no time limit. The optional Pro plan is $10/month and removes the project limit; databases, Mailpit, Cloudflare tunnels, Node version management and the log viewer are all in the free tier.
Yes. PortBay imports your Herd site list and PHP isolation settings, then re-issues trusted mkcert HTTPS certificates for each .test domain so browsers continue to treat your local sites as secure with no warnings.
Not yet. PortBay ships a signed, notarized macOS build for Apple Silicon and Intel (macOS 11+) and a Linux x86_64 build (AppImage, deb and rpm). There is no Windows build yet. If you need Windows, Herd has a mature Windows build.
Herd Pro's Services dashboard covers a wider engine list than PortBay — MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis and Valkey, alongside Typesense, Meilisearch, MinIO, RustFS and Laravel Reverb — but they are shared instances across all your sites, and the whole dashboard sits behind the $99/year Pro licence. PortBay provisions a dedicated database per project in the free tier, across 7 engines (MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Memcached, SQLite), with connection strings injected into the project's environment and clean teardown when you remove the project.
PortBay includes Cloudflare tunnels in the app — one click opens a public HTTPS URL for your local site, with no third-party account. Herd's `herd share` hands off to Expose, which needs a free Expose account of its own; Herd's docs also note Expose "may not be available in all geographical regions due to regulatory reasons" and document ngrok as the alternative, which brings its own account and plan.
Give your projects and your agents a real local home.
Download for macOSFree & open source · macOS 11+ on Apple Silicon · Pro from $10/mo