The Complete List of Heroku Alternatives
Heroku has been a popular platform for deploying applications for small and medium businesses because it has a lot of features that larger businesses need, but it is also cheaper to use. In addition, Heroku allows you to deploy your applications quickly and easily, which is great for businesses that need to be up and running quickly. Heroku provides free compute, Managed Database and Redis cache in single platform which simplified the application development. However, Heroku is shutting down its free tier, which means that small businesses will need to find an alternative platform.
On August 25th, Heroku GM and Salesforce EVP Bob Wise revealed that Heroku’s free tier will be phased out in the following months. According to Wise’s blog post announcement:
Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services. We will be sending out a series of email communications to affected users.
I have collected list of Heroku alternative platform options and listed below. I will keep adding more platforms as I discover them.
Note
All the platforms listed below may not provide all the resources Heroku used to provide. Depending on your application needs, you may need to select the alternative option.
Order of the platforms has no significance
Netlify – https://www.netlify.com
You can try Netlify for deploying Static Websites and Serverless backends ( Node JS).You can deploy JavaScript based FullStack applications on the platform.
I have already covered step by step guide to deploy static websites on Netlify in one of my previous blog post
Free Resources
- 1 Free Member
- 1 Free Concurrent builds
- 100GB /month Bandwidth
- 300 minutes /month build minutes
- 500 sites
- 125k per site /month Serverless function Invocations
- 100 per site /month Forms with Netlify Admin Panel
- 1k per site /month Create and authenticate users
Please visit the pricing page for complete list of free resources
CloudFlare – https://pages.cloudflare.com
You can try CloudFlare pages for deploying Static Websites. The main advantage with CloudFlare is Unlimited sites,requests and bandwidth compared to any other service.
Mogenius – https://mogenius.com
Mogenius is a all in one cloud service to build, deploy and manage cloud applications and services.
It provides a simple UI to manage application.
Free Resources
- Auto-deploy on Kubernetes
- SSL management
- Cloudflare security
- CI/CD pipeline
- 0.5 CPU Core
- 1 GB RAM
- 5 GB traffic
- 2 GB SSD persistent storage
- Autodeploy from Github
- Deploy from container files
Please visit the pricing page for complete list of free resources.
Cyclic – https://www.cyclic.sh
On Cyclic platform, you can deploy full stack applications based on JavaScript and NodeJS. Cyclic makes use of Serverless cloud infrastructure. So there are no servers, no containers, no images, no hours to count.
Even with free tier. Apps do not have to sleep, wake up, spin up or recycle. All front-ends and back-ends are ready on-demand, immediately and at all times.
1GB of AWS S3 file object storage as well as a 1GB AWS DynamoDB NoSQL database are available for all apps on free tier.
Free Resources
- 3 apps
- 100,000 API requests
- 1GB runtime memory
- 512MB /tmp storage
- 1GB Object Storage (AWS S3)
- 1GB Database Storage (AWS DynamoDB)
- Unlimited blazing fast builds
- Public GitHub repositories
- Hosted close to you
- 3 Cron tasks per app
- 7 day log retention
Koyeb – https://www.koyeb.com
You can deploy web applications , Backend API , serverless functions and also run Docker containers on Koyeb platform. Koyeb platform is language agnostic so you could deploy applications based on any language like PHP, Ruby, Python ,Java, Rust and many more.
It provides GUI and CLI options to deploy applications.
With Koyeb, you get $5 of monthly usage credit for free which you can use with any container size up to 2.5 Gb, 256 MB of RAM and 100GB of bandwidth. This is equivalent to 1388 hours of nano usage so around 2 full-time nano services or even more services if you activate scale-to-zero.
You also get one custom domain free.
No credit card required for Signup.
Adaptable – https://adaptable.io
on Adaptable platform, you can deploy full stack application based on Node, Python, Nest and Flask applications. You will also get Managed DB instance ( Mongo and PostgreSQL) up to 1GB storage in free tier.
Deta Cloud – https://www.deta.sh
At the moment all the services in Deta are free. You can deploy full stack apps based on NodeJS and Python. You can also use Deta base which is NoSQL database for free and you will also get 10GB of free storage space.
Railway – https://railway.app
on Railway platform, you can deploy full stack application based on Node, Python, Java, .NET and many other language ( For full list visit the page) applications.
Note
For account verification purpose, you need to have credit card. You won’t be charged unless you opt for paid plan.
In free tier, you get $5 free credit or 500 hours of usage which can be used to run the 512 MB container, 1GB Disk space free.
Railway also provides developer tier which lets you use up to 8 GB RAM , 100Gb Disk space. Developer does not have execution time limit. In this plan you will be charged if usage goes beyond $5.You can also opt for pre paid plan under this tier.
Fly – https://fly.io
On Fly.io, you can deploy Rails, Rust, Go and Any application which runs in docker container can be deployed.
Fly.io is a Docker-based platform that enables you to run full-stack applications (and databases) at the Edge, or farther from your users, without the need for operations.
Fly.io services are billed per organization. Each organization starts on the Hobby plan, which is a straightforward pay-as-you-go option and provides following free resources.
- Up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256mb VMs
- 3GB persistent volume storage (total)
- 160GB outbound data transfer
Additional resources are billed at the usage-based pricing . You can find more details on pricing page
NorthFlank – https://northflank.com
NorthFlank is a comprehensive developer platform to build and scale microservices, jobs and managed databases with a powerful UI, API & CLI.
As NorthFlank uses Docker containers for deployment, You can deploy any language that can run in Docker container.
Free Resources
- 2 services
- 2 Jobs
- 1 database
Render – https://render.com
On Render platform, you can deploy static website and full stack apps.Render also provide managed PostgreSQl database and Redis cache service.
The free plan allows for 750 hours of running time per month across all free Web Services in your account and 100 GB of egress bandwidth for each free service.
Web Services on the free plan are automatically spun down after 15 minutes of inactivity. When a new request for a free service comes in, Render spins it up again so it can process the request.
This can cause a response delay of up to 30 seconds for the first request that comes in after a period of inactivity.
When you exceed your free usage limits (i.e., usage hours and/or bandwidth), free services in your account are automatically suspended and can no longer serve traffic until they are upgraded to a paid plan or when free usage is reset at the end of the calendar month, whichever is sooner.
Free usage is reset on the 1st of every month, and all free services suspended for usage limits are automatically resumed.
Render’s free database plan allows you to run a PostgreSQL database that automatically expires 90 days after creation. You can continue to create free PostgreSQL databases but only one free database can be active at a time.
Qoddi – https://qoddi.com
Qoddi is a fully managed App Hosting Platform and can be used to deploy application from many languages like PHP, NodeJS, Java, Laravel, Go. Qoddi supports all current languages and frameworks. Postgres, Mysql, MongoDB, Redis and all popular tools are available.
Free Resources
- 512MB RAM
- Shared CPU
- Unlimited Traffic
- 3 Free Apps
Fathym – https://www.fathym.com
On Falthym, you can JavaScript based application based on React,Angulat,Vue and Svelte.
Fathym makes the deployment of your next JAMStack, legacy, and single page applications straightforward.
Fleek.co – https://fleek.co
Fleek makes it easy to build on Open Web protocols and a base layer infrastructure powered by them. Build and host your sites, apps, Dapps, and other services on trustless, permissionless, and open technologies focused on creating user-controlled, encrypted, private, p2p experiences easily. Build on the New Internet, and take the road to Web 3.0.
Fleek supports major JavaScript frameworks like NuxtJS, Angular,React, Gatsby. Completelist of supported frameworks ,please visit the link
Microtica – https://microtica.com
Microtica is a self-service DevOps automation platform that enables companies and individuals to adopt cloud much faster.
If you migrating from Heroku to AWS, Microtica helps you to migrate smoothly providing template based solution. Microtica deploys application to AWS Kubernetes cluster.
You can follow the step by step guide to migrate your applications from Heroku to AWS.
Free Resources
- 1 shared Kubernetes Cluster
- 2 Kubernetes Services
- 100 build minutes per month
- 20 deployments per month
Surge – https://surge.sh
Surge platform provide platform to deploy the static websites.Surge provides a CLI to deploy any directory to the web with just one command.
Free Resources
- Unlimited Publishing
- Custom Domain
- Free Basic SSL
Self Hosting Alternatives
- Dokku – https://dokku.com
- Caprover – https://caprover.com
- Coolify – https://coolify.io
- Piku – https://github.com/piku/piku