When should I choose Dokku?

You want Heroku-like git push deployments on your own cheap VPS for small apps.

When should I choose Heroku?

You want the simplest managed hosting for a standard web app and value stability over price.

Dokku vs Heroku

Q: What is the difference between Dokku and Heroku?

Dokku: A Heroku-style PaaS on a single server: git push an app and Dokku builds it with buildpacks or a Dockerfile and runs it in containers, with plugins for databases and TLS. Heroku: A platform-as-a-service that builds and runs apps from a git push, with managed Postgres, Redis and add-ons.

Dokku and Heroku are both paas and app hosting software. Dokku is open source under MIT, with 32k GitHub stars. Heroku is a commercial product from Salesforce, Inc.

Which to pick

Pick Dokku when: You want Heroku-like git push deployments on your own cheap VPS for small apps.
Pick Heroku when: You want the simplest managed hosting for a standard web app and value stability over price.

Side by side

Dokku Heroku

What it does

A Heroku-style PaaS on a single server: git push an app and Dokku builds it with buildpacks or a Dockerfile and runs it in containers, with plugins for databases and TLS.

A platform-as-a-service that builds and runs apps from a git push, with managed Postgres, Redis and add-ons.

Watch out

Designed mainly for one host, so high availability and multi-server scaling need extra work.

Expensive for the resources you get, there is no free tier any more, and it has seen little new development under Salesforce.

Ready for

Production-ready (both)

Runs as

Self-hosted server and command line

Cloud service

Built with

Shell, Go and Docker

Not published

Source code

Open source, MIT (permissive)

Closed source, sold by Salesforce, Inc.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.

How widely known

32k GitHub stars

603 Wikipedia readers a month on phones

How established

Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v0.38.34.

Not known

Other comparisons

Heroku vs Vercel Dokku vs Vercel Heroku vs Netlify Dokku vs Netlify Coolify vs Heroku Heroku vs Piku Coolify vs Dokku Dokku vs Piku

More PaaS and app hosting platforms

Every paas and app hosting product and project, ranked

Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.