Wasmer
Created
Reviewedbyfl
🧩
PHP at the WASM edge.
Wasmer runs PHP compiled to WebAssembly at the edge. fortrabbit is an alternative for hosting PHP without the WebAssembly trade-offs.
About Wasmer
Wasmer is a WebAssembly runtime with an edge platform on top. That edge product runs PHP compiled to WASM next to the visitor, and reportedly runs WordPress, Laravel, and Symfony unmodified, with opcode caching making some pages faster than a normal origin. It sits at the experimental edge of serverless. WebAssembly buys near-instant cold starts, and that is the whole pitch.
The catch is real, and current. Persistent custom filesystem volumes are still on the way. SQLite writes live in memory, not on disk. Anything stateful needs care. Running production PHP on WASM is a promising thing to watch in 2026. Also a young one. It asks the whole stack to think in WebAssembly.
Why fortrabbit
fortrabbit goes a different way, with a higher grade of abstraction aimed squarely at PHP. No compile-to-WebAssembly step and no new runtime to learn. Deploy PHP code directly.
Composer, a MySQL component, and persistent storage are native. Laravel, Symfony, and WordPress run the way they do everywhere else. Git push to deploy, no container or WASM toolchain to wrestle. For standard PHP sites, that is the straightforward path.