Heroku vs Piku
Heroku and Piku are both paas and app hosting software. Heroku is a commercial product from Salesforce, Inc. Piku is open source under MIT, with 6.6k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Heroku when
- You want the simplest managed hosting for a standard web app and value stability over price.
- Pick Piku when
- You deploy small apps to a low-powered machine such as a Raspberry Pi or small VPS where Docker is too heavy.
Side by side
A platform-as-a-service that builds and runs apps from a git push, with managed Postgres, Redis and add-ons.
A tiny PaaS that enables git push deployments of Python, Node, Go and other apps to your own server, using a Procfile, without Docker.
Expensive for the resources you get, there is no free tier any more, and it has seen little new development under Salesforce.
Minimal feature set and a small maintainer team; no container isolation between apps.
Production-ready
Usable
Cloud service
Self-hosted server
Not published
Python, uWSGI and nginx
Closed source, sold by Salesforce, Inc.
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
603 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
6.6k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 10 years ago, latest release v1.0.0.
Other comparisons
More PaaS and app hosting platforms
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.