Open source alternatives to Heroku

What Heroku does

Heroku is a fully managed application platform owned by Salesforce. Apps run in dynos, Heroku’s managed containers, and are built with buildpacks when you push code with Git or connect a GitHub repository. Heroku Postgres and Heroku Key-Value Store provide managed data services, and a marketplace of third-party add-ons covers email, monitoring, search and much more. Heroku Flow adds pipelines and review apps that spin up a temporary copy of the app for each pull request. Heroku handles the operating system, runtimes and scaling, which is the main reason teams choose it.

Why people look for an alternative

• The end of free plans. Heroku stopped offering free dynos, free Heroku Postgres and free Heroku Data for Redis from 28 November 2022, and began deleting accounts inactive for more than a year from 26 October 2022. Many hobby projects and demos moved elsewhere at that point.
• Limits of the cheapest tier. Eco dynos are a paid, pooled plan; they sleep after a period of inactivity and are only available for personal apps, not for apps owned by a Heroku Team.
• Data location. Dynos and databases stay in the region you pick, but Heroku states that it makes no guarantee about where its control-plane APIs physically run, builds outside Fir Private Spaces happen in a shared space, and add-on providers decide where they store data. The Common Runtime offers only United States and Europe regions; others require Private Spaces.
• Cost at scale. Running many small apps or larger dynos on a managed platform costs more than renting servers, at the price of doing the operations work yourself.
• Control. A self-hosted platform lets you choose the provider, the hardware and the software versions, and keeps working if a vendor changes its plans.

What to compare in an alternative

1. Workflow compatibility. Support for Procfiles, buildpacks and config:set-style configuration decides how much an app has to change. Dokku is the closest match, and Canine and Epinio also build with buildpacks.
2. Add-on equivalents. Managed databases, Redis, scheduled jobs and, above all, automated backups to storage you control.
3. Review apps and pipelines. Pull-request environments and staging-to-production promotion.
4. Scaling. Whether apps can run on several servers with load balancing and zero-downtime deploys.
5. Operating effort. One Docker host, a Docker Swarm, or a Kubernetes cluster, and who patches the servers.

Which one to choose

For the most familiar experience on one server, Dokku keeps Heroku’s git push, buildpacks and Procfile habits, and Piku does the same on very small machines without Docker. If you want a web dashboard with databases and one-click services, Coolify has no paid-only features, Dokploy adds Docker Swarm clustering and Compose, CapRover is a long-standing option with a large app catalogue, and ZaneOps brings preview environments and request logs. Kamal and Uncloud suit teams that deploy Docker images from CI and do not want a control plane. On Kubernetes, Kubero offers pipelines and review apps closest to Heroku Flow, Canine and Epinio give developers a simple deploy interface, and Tsuru is built for internal platforms shared by many teams. See the deployment platforms guide for how they differ.