Heroku
Experience fully managed app hosting that just works. Build, deploy, and scale on the battle-tested platform that defines the industry.
Heroku is commercial paas and app hosting software made by Salesforce, Inc. Its English Wikipedia article has about 603 readers a month on phones.
- Made by
- Salesforce, Inc.
- Wikipedia readers on phones
- 603 a month
- Source code
- Closed
Judgement
- What it is
- Complete system
- What it does
- A platform-as-a-service that builds and runs apps from a git push, with managed Postgres, Redis and add-ons.
- Adopt it when
- You want the simplest managed hosting for a standard web app and value stability over price.
- Watch out
- 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
- Runs as
- Cloud service
- What the license allows
- Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
Judged on 2026-11-03 from the maker's description and Wikipedia. The license and age lines are worked out directly.
Compare Heroku
Open-source alternatives to Heroku
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Complete system Production-ready You want push-to-deploy convenience on your own VPS fleet without Kubernetes.
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Dokku dokku
A docker-powered PaaS that helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications
Complete system Production-ready You want Heroku-like git push deployments on your own cheap VPS for small apps.
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Framework or platform Usable A platform team wants to give developers a simpler application abstraction over multiple Kubernetes clusters.
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Tsuru tsuru
Open source and extensible Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Framework or platform Usable A platform team wants to offer an internal Heroku-like experience on top of Kubernetes.
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Kubero kubero-dev
A free and self-hosted PaaS alternative to Heroku / Netlify / Coolify / Vercel / Dokku / Portainer running on Kubernetes
Complete system Usable You already have a Kubernetes cluster and want developers to deploy Heroku-style without learning Kubernetes.
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Other commercial PaaS and app hosting platforms
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Vercel Vercel Inc.
The autonomous stack for every app and agent.
Complete system Production-ready You build with Next.js or another modern frontend framework and want preview deploys and a global edge with no ops work.
5.5k readers a month Since 2015 Commercial -
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Netlify Netlify
American cloud computing company
Complete system Production-ready You run static or framework-built sites and want simple deploys with built-in forms and previews.
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Render Render
Deploy and scale any app or agent from your first user to your billionth. Build faster on intuitive cloud infrastructure for the modern web.
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Fly.io Fly.io
Deploy apps, agents, and databases on fast, hardware-isolated VMs. Pay only for the seconds they run. Sign up free.
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Whisk Whisk
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Under it
Every program, Heroku included, runs on a microchip.
The description is the maker's own, quoted as written. Facts come from Wikipedia and refresh weekly. Readers are counted on Wikipedia's mobile site only, because automated traffic that Wikimedia does not flag inflates desktop counts.