AppCrane gives you deployment slots' equivalent — always-on production and sandbox with one-command promote — on a server you own, driven by your AI agent over MCP, with no cloud bill.
Azure App Service runs web apps and APIs on Microsoft Azure with scaling and slots managed for you — capable, but Azure-hosted, Azure-priced, and tied into the wider Azure surface you have to administer.
| AppCrane | Azure App Service | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | A server you own — any Ubuntu box | Microsoft Azure |
| Where code & data live | On infrastructure you own; nothing phones home | On the provider’s cloud |
| Pricing model | One server you already pay for — no per-seat, per-request or bandwidth metering | Usage- or seat-metered, billed by the provider |
| Deploys | GitHub-native push-to-deploy, zero-downtime releases, instant symlink rollback | Managed build & deploy pipeline |
| Agent-native (MCP) | MCP server — your AI agent deploys, sets env, reads logs, rolls back | No MCP; dashboard, CLI or CI |
| Isolation & TLS | Per-app Docker containers, auto-HTTPS via Caddy | Managed container runtime |
| Openness / lock-in | Open source (AGPL-3.0), standard Docker + Caddy — leave anytime | Proprietary managed platform |
| Audit | Per-user audit: who deployed what, which environment, when | Provider-defined logging |
Azure App Service is a good fit when you want someone else to own the servers. Choose AppCrane when the apps are agent-built, the agent should do the deploying, and your code, data and audit trail should stay on infrastructure you own. It’s open source — read every line.