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I don’t want to deploy to WPEngine or Flywheel. Even for a marginal fee I would happily pay to use Local app to develop locally and ship to wherever I want via SFTP or ssh.
Does anybody know of any similar great development app like Local that has this functionality?
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It’s a WP Engine product, so it does make sense in that regard.
At the moment, I have not found an alternative that even comes close to Local in this regard yet.
Not using local, but what is the problem If you upload to a different host?
I use Local in my daily development and freelance — but I don’t host on WPEngine or Flywheel. You can totally SFTP files to whatever host you’d like, or deploy in any other way, the files/db isn’t locked up at all.
Personally, at work, I work on sites by pushing theme code changes to Github, and deploying via CI/CD from Github to Cloudways, working locally through Local.
1. Use git
1. Set up Github Actions
1. When a PR is merged to a certain branch (i.e. main or master), deploy the app using an FTP GHA app
I use local for developing locally, and the above to handle automatic deployments
edit: formatting
Other than opening Local to “start” a site I’m working on I don’t ever look at the app again, unless it’s to switch to a different local site. I just use the terminal to `git push` my changed files to the repo. I even use WP Engine, but still prefer the `local > github > live` route because there might be others also working on the site at the same time.
I always develop at my host using a spare domain name that I don’t use. That way I have access to it from wherever and be able to work on it.
The git solution that some have already stated is definitely the most efficient approach, if u can manage to set it up. I was going to look into how this works with WP Engine, so I could write a step by step thingy but their popup chat annoyed the shit out of me, and had me rage quit browsing their site 
If you could provide some more information on the environment, and the access it provides etc., I might still be able to write that step by step based on that – if need be 
The easy way = use Duplicator plugin and upload installer.php and yoursiteblabla.zip to your server.
I agree that it’s a little frustrating that Local won’t deploy to other platforms. But I’ve been using desktop servers since around 2011, including a now-dead one that *kind* of had deploy-anywhere functionality. But I figured out really quickly that it only takes a few minutes to zip an archive, upload it to a client’s live site, and install it there.
Others have mentioned the Duplicator plugin. I’ve used BackupBuddy for more than 10 years. The good thing about those alternatives is that you can… well… archive your archives to storage and then spin them back up again if you need to.
To be honest, though, I typically only do the rough-outs on my local server and then deploy it (using the BackupBuddy deploy script) to a subdomain on my development server. That lets me finish the site as well as let the client review it and even do training.
Once they sign off then I’ll deploy the site to their server, either with the same BackupBuddy+install script I always use or else one of the migration plugins like All-in-One, BlogVault, or whatever proprietary migration tool hosts like WPEngine and some other “managed WordPress” companies use.
I should add that this solution works for me because I do whole-site work rather than isolated plugin or theme development where git might be a more appropriate solution.