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PortBayvsLaravel Valet

Valet is the terminal purist's local dev tool — MIT-licensed, around 7 MB of RAM, nginx + dnsmasq + PHP-FPM bound to .test domains. PortBay keeps the same fundamentals and adds the things Valet leaves to other tools: a GUI, per-project databases, Mailpit, Node, public tunnels and one-click imports — without giving up open source.

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PortBay vs Valet comparison page.
The short answer

Which one is right for you

Pick PortBay if

You want the full stack, open source.

You want the .test/HTTPS Valet feel without assembling four other tools around it. You'd rather hit play than `composer global require` after every macOS update. You run Node alongside PHP and don't want a separate app for databases.

Stick with Valet if

It already fits your workflow.

You're a pure-CLI Laravel developer, you want 7 MB of RAM and no GUI, and you're comfortable composing Valet + Homebrew PHP + DBngin + ngrok yourself. You contribute to drivers or hack on Valet itself.

Where PortBay and Valet 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.

Both run your sites

PortBay and Valet 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.

Only one dispatches agents

Move a card to To Do and PortBay launches Claude Code, Codex or Cursor against a project that is already running. Valet has no board to dispatch from.

Switching keeps your projects

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.

The detail

Feature by feature

Valet rows come from Valet’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.

Feature
PortBay
Valet
Pricing & licensing
Free tier
Up to 6 projects
Unlimited, free forever
Paid tier
$10/mo Pro
None
Open source
Yes — AGPL-3.0
Yes — MIT
Memory footprint
App + managed services
~7 MB of RAM
Valet's own docs: "Valet is a blazing fast Laravel development environment that uses roughly 7 MB of RAM." PortBay is a desktop app that also supervises your runtimes, databases and web server, so it costs more memory by design. If RAM is the constraint, Valet wins this outright.
Install
Download the app
brew + composer + valet install
Languages & runtimes
PHP versions
Multiple, per-project
Per-site via `valet isolate`
Node.js
Built-in, all versions
Not supported
Static sites
First-class
Via static driver
Mobile (Flutter, Expo)
Yes
No
Services in one app
Databases
MySQL & Postgres, per-project
Use DBngin separately
Mail capture
Mailpit, built in
Not supported
Public tunnels
Cloudflare, built in
`valet share`, BYO account
`valet share` drives ngrok, Expose or cloudflared, and Valet's docs note that ngrok and Expose "require you to authenticate your ngrok or Expose account before you can start sharing sites". PortBay's bundled Cloudflare tunnel needs no account.
GUI & logs
Built in
CLI only
HTTPS & domains
Real .test domains
Automatic
Automatic via dnsmasq
Trusted local HTTPS
mkcert, auto-renewed
Per-site `valet secure`
Custom domain suffix
Yes
Yes, via `valet tld`
On-device AI
Managed local AI server
Ollama, built in
No
PortBay installs and supervises a local Ollama server and shares one on-device endpoint with its features and your own tools.
On-device Speech-to-Text
Whisper / Parakeet, local
No
Hold Fn and talk; an on-device model (Whisper or Parakeet) transcribes and a local AI cleans it up — in any app on your Mac.
Migration & control
Import from competitors
Herd, ServBay, MAMP, Valet
No
CLI
Yes — `portbay`
CLI is the product
Operating systems
macOS (ARM + Intel), Linux
macOS only
Valet's docs are explicit: "Valet requires macOS and Homebrew." Linux ports exist as separate third-party projects, not as Valet itself.
Docker required
Never
Never (port 80 conflicts)

Valet facts on this page were last checked against laravel.com/framework/docs/valet on . Pricing and limits change — check their site before you decide.

Migration

Coming from Valet

If you've built up a Valet park of .test sites with per-site PHP isolation, PortBay reads the same nginx site definitions and PHP map on first launch and brings them in as-is. Valet keeps running until you uninstall it; PortBay re-issues mkcert certificates so HTTPS keeps working under both tools. Anything you used DBngin or ad-hoc Postgres for moves into PortBay's per-project database panel.

Valet
1

Install PortBay and open it once. It picks up your Valet site list.

2

Choose the sites to bring across. PHP isolation, TLD and certs carry over.

3

Add databases inline as you need them — no separate DBngin process.

PortBay
Common questions

PortBay vs Valet, in plain terms

Don’t see your question answered here? The docs go deeper — every feature, flag and failure mode.

Read the docs

Yes. PortBay keeps Valet's foundation — real .test domains, trusted local HTTPS, native processes, no Docker — and adds a GUI, per-project MySQL/Postgres databases, Mailpit, Node version management and Cloudflare tunnels in one app.

Yes. Every PortBay project gets a .test hostname automatically, and PortBay issues a trusted mkcert HTTPS certificate so browsers treat your site as secure with no warnings — the same end-state as `valet secure`, with no per-site command to run.

Yes during migration. PortBay and Valet can coexist while you move sites across, though both bind to port 80, so only one should serve a given hostname at a time. Once you've imported, you can keep Valet for legacy projects or uninstall it.

PortBay's free tier covers 6 projects with the full feature set — databases, Mailpit, Cloudflare tunnels, Node and mobile. The $10/month Pro plan removes the project cap for people running many sites. Valet is MIT-licensed and free with no project cap; its documented scope is parking and serving PHP sites, so there is no database, mail or tunnel layer to pay for.

You trade Valet's minimalism (≈7 MB RAM, no GUI) for an integrated environment. If your workflow is purely terminal and you've already automated everything around Valet, the trade is genuine — Valet is still the right answer for that audience.

PortBay mascot — a friendly blue tugboat

Give your projects and your agents a real local home.

Download for macOS

Free & open source · macOS 11+ on Apple Silicon · Pro from $10/mo