Heroku alternatives in 2026: an honest comparison

The short answer

• Closest to Heroku: Render. Git push deploys, managed Postgres, a free tier, and fixed monthly prices per service.
• Pay only for what runs: Railway. Usage-based billing on top of a small plan fee, with a polished dashboard.
• Apps close to users worldwide: Fly.io. Small VMs in 17 regions, billed by the second.
• Predictable and cheap: DigitalOcean App Platform. Containers from $5 a month.
• Your own cloud account: Northflank or Porter, which run your apps in AWS, GCP or Azure.
• Your own servers, no platform fee: Coolify, open source and self-hosted.
• A separate environment for each of your customers: Staxa, which we build. More on what that means, and when it's the wrong pick, below.

Prices below were checked on each provider's pricing page on October 27, 2026.

Should you leave Heroku?

Not in a hurry. On February 6, 2026, Heroku announced it is moving to a "sustaining engineering" model: it will prioritise stability, security and support over new features, and it no longer sells Enterprise contracts to new customers. Heroku says nothing changes for existing customers, and that self-serve customers paying by card keep the same pricing and service. There is no shutdown date.

What it does mean is that Heroku has stopped competing on features. If you're starting something new, or you need something Heroku doesn't do today, there's little reason to expect it later. If your app runs fine and you're happy with the bill, leaving is a project you can schedule rather than an emergency.

For reference, Heroku's current prices: Eco dynos are $5 a month and sleep after 30 minutes idle, Basic is $7 and always on, Standard-1X is $25, and Heroku Postgres starts at $5 (Essential-0). There is no free tier.

Heroku alternatives compared

Platform	Best for	Free option	Always-on web service from	Postgres from	Runs on
Render	A like-for-like Heroku move	Web service that sleeps after 15 min; Postgres for 30 days	$7/mo (512 MB)	$6/mo	Render's cloud
Railway	Usage-based billing	Free plan with $1/mo of usage, after a 30-day trial	$5/mo plan incl. $5 of usage	Usage-based	Railway's cloud
Fly.io	Multi-region apps	None listed for new accounts	About $2/mo (256 MB)	$38/mo (managed)	Fly's cloud, 17 regions
DigitalOcean App Platform	Simple, predictable pricing	3 static-site apps	$5/mo (512 MiB)	$7/mo (dev database)	DigitalOcean
Northflank	Teams that may move to their own cloud	Sandbox: 2 services, 1 database, always on	$12/mo (0.5 vCPU, 1 GB)	Usage-based	Northflank's cloud or yours
Porter	Running in your own AWS, GCP or Azure	None listed	$13/vCPU + $6/GB per month, plus your cloud bill	Your cloud's	Your cloud account
Coolify	Self-hosting on your own servers	Free and open source (self-hosted)	Your server's cost	Self-managed	Your servers
Staxa	One isolated environment per customer	2 tenants, sleep after a day idle	$49/mo for 5 tenants	One per tenant, in its namespace	Staxa's cluster on Hetzner, EU

The columns compare the cheapest way to keep one small web service and a database running. They don't capture bandwidth, build minutes or seat fees, which the sections below mention where they matter.

Render

Good at: being Heroku without the surprises. You connect a repository, Render builds it with native runtimes or your Dockerfile, and each service has a fixed monthly price. Managed Postgres and Redis-compatible Key Value, cron jobs, background workers, private networking, preview environments and autoscaling are all there.

Watch out for: the Free web service spins down after 15 minutes without traffic and takes about a minute to wake, and a Free Postgres database expires after 30 days. Teams need the Pro workspace ($25 a month plus compute) for more than one seat, full-stack preview environments and autoscaling. Bandwidth beyond the included amount (5 GB on Hobby, 25 GB on Pro) costs $0.15 per GB.

Pricing: web services from $7 a month (512 MB, 0.5 CPU), $25 for 2 GB. Postgres from $6 a month (256 MB) or $19 (1 GB).

Railway

Good at: fast setup and a dashboard many developers love. Billing is per second for the CPU and memory you actually use, so services that are idle most of the day cost little.

Watch out for: usage-based bills are harder to predict than a fixed instance price, and always-on services add up: Railway lists memory at about $10 per GB per month and CPU at about $20 per vCPU per month. The Free plan, after a 30-day trial with $5 of credit, includes $1 of usage a month, one project and no custom domains.

Pricing: Hobby is $5 a month including $5 of usage. Pro is $20 a month per workspace including $20 of usage, with unlimited seats.

Fly.io

Good at: running small VMs ("Machines") close to your users, in 17 regions across six continents. It suits apps that benefit from being in many places at once, and anything that needs a full VM rather than a container platform's constraints.

Watch out for: more of the operational work is yours than on Render or Railway. Managed Postgres starts at $38 a month, and paid support is separate ($29 a month for Standard). The pricing page lists no free allowance for new accounts.

Pricing: the smallest Machine (shared CPU, 256 MB) is $2.19 a month in Ashburn; other regions cost up to 1.6 times that. Egress is $0.02 per GB in North America and Europe.

DigitalOcean App Platform

Good at: simple, fixed prices from a large cloud provider. If you already use DigitalOcean droplets, Spaces or managed databases, the app sits next to them.

Watch out for: autoscaling needs dedicated-CPU instances, which cost more than the shared ones.

Pricing: containers from $5 a month (1 shared vCPU, 512 MiB, 50 GiB transfer). A development database is $7 a month; production managed databases are priced separately.

Northflank

Good at: a full platform (services, jobs, databases, preview environments) that can run on Northflank's cloud or inside your own AWS, GCP or Azure account. That makes it a strong pick if a customer or compliance review may one day require your own cloud.

Watch out for: it exposes more concepts than Heroku did, so there's more to learn. Pay-as-you-go compute is billed hourly.

Pricing: a free Sandbox with 2 services, 2 jobs and 1 database, always on. Paid compute starts at $12 a month for 0.5 vCPU and 1 GB. Bring-your-own-cloud is billed per node vCPU hour, plus your cloud provider's bill.

Porter

Good at: a Heroku-like experience running inside your own cloud account, on Kubernetes it sets up for you. Your data and your cloud credits stay with you.

Watch out for: you pay twice: Porter's fee and your cloud provider's bill. It makes most sense once you have a cloud account and the spend to justify it.

Pricing: $13 per vCPU and $6 per GB of RAM per month for the resources your apps request, plus AWS, GCP or Azure.

Coolify

Good at: a self-hosted, open-source Heroku you run on your own servers, from a $5 VPS upward. There's no platform fee for the self-hosted version. Dokploy is a similar self-hosted option.

Watch out for: the servers, backups, upgrades and uptime are yours. If the box goes down at 3 a.m., so does your app.

Pricing: free when self-hosted. Coolify Cloud, which hosts the control panel for you, is $5 a month including 2 connected servers and $3 for each extra server. You still pay for the servers.

Staxa

This is our product, so weigh this section accordingly.

Good at: one specific job the others don't do out of the box: giving each of your customers their own environment. A tenant is an isolated Kubernetes namespace with its own app services, its own PostgreSQL or MySQL database, a subdomain with TLS, network policies and resource quotas, created with one API call (for example from your signup or payment webhook). If you sell to companies that ask for a dedicated environment, or you run apps for agency clients, that's the problem Staxa exists for. The single-tenant vs multi-tenant guide explains when you need it.

Watch out for: it's the wrong tool for an ordinary single app. If you're moving one Heroku app and serving every customer from it, any platform above will be simpler and cheaper. Staxa is also younger than the others. Tenants run on Staxa's shared cluster on Hetzner in the EU, separated by namespaces. That suits customers who want their data in Europe, but if most of your users are elsewhere, expect more latency than from a platform that runs near them. It also isn't the answer when a contract requires the customer's own cloud account; that's what Northflank or Porter are for. Service sizes go up to 2 CPU and 2 GB.

Pricing: Free has 2 tenants with 2 services each; idle tenants sleep after a day and wake on the next request, and custom domains aren't included. Starter is $49 a month for 5 tenants on their own domains ($8 per extra tenant), Growth $199 for 25, Scale $799 for 100.

How to choose

1. One app, minimal change: Render. It's the shortest distance from Heroku.
2. Spiky or mostly idle workloads: Railway, since you pay per second of use.
3. Users on several continents: Fly.io.
4. You want the bill to be boring: DigitalOcean App Platform or Render.
5. Compliance, cloud credits or a customer requires your own cloud: Northflank or Porter.
6. Lowest possible cost and you're happy running servers: Coolify or Dokploy on a VPS.
7. Every customer needs their own app and database: Staxa.

Moving off Heroku

Whichever platform you choose, the move has the same parts:

1. Build: most platforms detect your language like Heroku's buildpacks did, or build your Dockerfile. If your app relies on a custom buildpack, writing a Dockerfile is usually the simplest replacement. For Next.js, see the Next.js Dockerfile guide.
2. Processes: each line of your Procfile becomes a service. web becomes a web service with the same start command, and each worker becomes a background worker.
3. Config vars: export them with heroku config --shell and import them as environment variables. Don't commit the export.
4. Database: take a backup with heroku pg:backups:capture, download it, and restore it into the new database with pg_restore. Do a rehearsal first, then repeat for the real cutover with the app in maintenance mode.
5. Add-ons: list them with heroku addons and pick a replacement for each (Redis, email, logging, search). This is often the longest part.
6. Scheduled jobs: Heroku Scheduler entries become cron jobs.
7. DNS: lower your TTL a day ahead, point your domain at the new platform, and keep the Heroku app running until traffic has moved.

Frequently asked questions

Is Heroku shutting down?

No. In February 2026 Heroku moved to a "sustaining engineering" model, focused on stability and security rather than new features, and stopped selling Enterprise contracts to new customers. It says nothing changes for existing customers and has announced no end date.

Is there a free Heroku alternative?

Render has the most generous free tier for a web app, with limits: a free web service sleeps after 15 minutes idle and a free Postgres database expires after 30 days. Northflank's free Sandbox stays on but is small. Coolify is free if you self-host it, but you pay for the server. Free tiers are for trying things out; none of them is meant for production.

What's the cheapest Heroku alternative?

For an always-on app with no servers to manage, DigitalOcean App Platform ($5 a month) and Railway's Hobby plan ($5 a month including $5 of usage) are the lowest entry prices here. Self-hosting Coolify on a small VPS can be cheaper still, if you're willing to run the server.

Which alternative is most like Heroku?

Render. The workflow (connect a repository, push to deploy, add a managed database) and the fixed per-service pricing are the closest match.

Do these platforms support Docker?

All of them run Docker images or build from a Dockerfile, and most also build common languages without one.