Teams look past Heroku because the vendor moved it to a sustaining engineering model in February 2026, because dyno prices climb in steps with databases billed on top, and because the Common Runtime offers only two regions. Most go to Render or Scalingo for a like-for-like git-push platform, and to Railway, Fly.io or Sevalla for usage-priced hosting.
Visibility in our rankings can be paid for. Payment moves a vendor's position within
the shortlist; it never adds a vendor, and it never changes a word of the review or of this page. The first three alternatives
go to challengers, vendors outside the best-known brands in a category, wherever the category has them; the
established names follow in their ranked order. How it works:
placement disclosure · editorial process.
What each alternative does differently
1. Render
Full-stack app hosting with flat instance prices · United States
Maps a Procfile onto separate web services, background workers and cron jobs, with the release phase becoming a pre-deploy command. Its Heroku guide offers migration help for large databases, and the pricing page advertises up to $10,000 of credits for switching teams. Bandwidth beyond the plan is metered.
Switch from Heroku if you want the closest workflow to Heroku with a published price for every instance size.
Pricing: Workspace plans of Hobby at $0, Pro at $25 and Scale at $499 a month plus compute; instances run from $7 a month for 512 MB of RAM, with a free tier for web services. (free plan)
Full review: #1 of 12 in our ranking ·
Visit Render →
2. Scalingo
French PaaS and managed databases, billed in euros · France
States an aim of full Heroku compatibility: Procfile, most buildpacks and app.json (as scalingo.json) carry over, and git push still deploys. The Procfile release entry does not run, so a postdeploy hook replaces it. Containers never sleep, and a certified region exists for regulated data.
Switch from Heroku if you want Heroku conventions with a euro bill and a French contract.
Pricing: Containers from EUR 7.20 a month (256 MB), EUR 14.40 (512 MB) and EUR 28.80 (1 GB), VAT excluded, plus a 20 percent premium in the SecNumCloud region; databases from EUR 7.20. (none)
Full review: #6 of 12 in our ranking ·
Visit Scalingo →
3. Railway
Usage-priced app and database hosting · United States
Bills memory, CPU, volumes and egress by the second instead of per dyno. Its Heroku guide imports config vars straight from a Heroku account and supports Procfiles, though the guide notes only one process per service. Databases are moved by a separate, more involved procedure.
Switch from Heroku if you want per-second billing and a project canvas for services and databases.
Pricing: Hobby at a $5 monthly minimum with $5 of credits, Pro at $20 with $20 of credits and unlimited seats; memory costs $0.00000386 per GB per second and egress $0.05 per GB. (free plan)
Full review: #3 of 12 in our ranking ·
Visit Railway →
4. Sevalla
App, database and static hosting from Kinsta · United States
Run by Kinsta, and its Heroku comparison page lists process types, pipelines, buildpacks and preview apps as supported. It also hosts S3-compatible object storage and static sites, which Heroku does not sell natively. Outbound bandwidth is metered separately, and the community around it is smaller.
Switch from Heroku if you rely on pipelines and process types and want object storage in the same account.
Pricing: Runtime pods from $5 a month (0.3 CPU, 0.3 GB), $10 for 0.5 CPU and 1 GB, build pods at $0.02 a minute, external bandwidth $0.1 per GB; static sites free with 100 GB bandwidth. (free plan)
Full review: #10 of 12 in our ranking ·
Visit Sevalla →
5. Fly.io
Containers as global Machines, billed by the second · United States
Runs your app as Machines built from a Dockerfile, which fly launch can generate. The migration guide maps Procfile entries to Fly processes and the release line to a release_command. Postgres is a managed cluster sold apart from compute, and there is no free tier beyond a trial.
Switch from Heroku if you are comfortable with containers and want to choose regions yourself.
Pricing: Pay As You Go with no platform fee: a shared-cpu-1x Machine with 256 MB is $2.19 a month, 512 MB is $3.69, Managed Postgres Basic is $38; no free tier, only a 2-hour or 7-day trial. (free trial)
Full review: #8 of 12 in our ranking ·
Visit Fly.io →
6. DigitalOcean App Platform
App hosting inside the DigitalOcean cloud · United States
Turns a Procfile into an App Spec in YAML, a release phase into a PRE_DEPLOY job and the scheduler into scheduled jobs. Its guide says pipelines, review apps and Private Spaces equivalents are not covered by the migration prompt and need manual work or a call to sales.
Switch from Heroku if your servers, spaces or databases already live in a DigitalOcean account.
Pricing: Up to three static-site apps free with 1 GiB of transfer each; paid container instances from $5 a month for a shared 1 vCPU and 512 MiB, outbound overage at $0.02 per GiB. (free plan)
Full review: #7 of 12 in our ranking ·
Visit DigitalOcean App Platform →
7. Northflank
Container platform for your cloud or theirs · United Kingdom
Treats each Heroku dyno type as a deployment service and each repository as a build service. It can run in your own AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle or CoreWeave account, which Heroku cannot. The Sandbox tier is free, and the concept count is higher than on a Procfile platform.
Switch from Heroku if you need the platform to run inside your own cloud account.
Pricing: Sandbox tier with 2 free services, 1 free database and 2 free cron jobs; pay-as-you-go compute from $2.70 a month for 0.1 shared vCPU and 256 MB, or $24 for 1 dedicated vCPU and 2 GB. (free plan)
Full review: #11 of 12 in our ranking ·
Visit Northflank →
8. Upsun
Multi-cloud application platform billed per resource · France
Replaces the Procfile with a .upsun/config.yaml file that declares runtimes, services and routes, so the move is a rewrite, not an import. Billing is per provisioned resource per hour in five currencies, and a 15-day trial needs no card. Every branch can get a full environment.
Switch from Heroku if you run several services per app and want a clone of production per branch.
Pricing: No plans: you pay for provisioned resources, such as shared CPU at EUR 0.033 an hour, guaranteed CPU at EUR 0.100 and 1 GB of memory at EUR 0.013, with a 15-day free trial and no card. (free trial)
Full review: #12 of 12 in our ranking ·
Visit Upsun →
9. Netlify
Front-end hosting with previews and credit billing · United States
Hosts front ends and serverless functions, including background and scheduled functions, rather than always-on dynos. Pro adds unlimited members, and usage is metered in credits. A Rails or Django app with workers and Postgres does not map onto it, but the web layer of a split app does.
Switch from Heroku if your Heroku app is mostly a front end or static site with a few functions.
Pricing: Free at $0 with 300 credits a month, Personal at $9, Pro at $20 a month with unlimited members; credits meter production deploys, compute, bandwidth and requests. (free plan)
Full review: #2 of 12 in our ranking ·
Visit Netlify →
10. Vercel
Front-end cloud built around Next.js · United States
Built around Next.js and serverless functions, with a default maximum duration of 300 seconds on Hobby and Pro. The Hobby plan is for non-commercial use only, so a company app needs Pro. There is no persistent worker process, so queue consumers have to live elsewhere.
Switch from Heroku if your Heroku app is a Next.js front end and its API can run as functions.
Pricing: Hobby at $0 for non-commercial use, Pro from $20 a month with $20 of usage credit, Enterprise on quote; compute, transfer, image and storage meters are billed on top. (free plan)
Full review: #4 of 12 in our ranking ·
Visit Vercel →
11. Cloudflare Pages
Git-based front-end hosting on Cloudflare's network · United States
Serves static assets and runs server code through Pages Functions, but its own docs advise starting new projects on Workers, which Cloudflare calls its primary platform. There is no dyno-style container. Choose it for edge delivery, and keep long-running processes and the database elsewhere.
Switch from Heroku if you only need to host a front end and are happy to run it on Cloudflare Workers.
Pricing: Free plan with 500 builds a month and one build at a time; Pro raises it to 5,000 builds and Business to 20,000; static asset requests are free and unlimited, Functions bill as Workers requests. (free plan)
Full review: #9 of 12 in our ranking ·
Visit Cloudflare Pages →
Questions and answers
Can I export my Heroku Postgres data?
Yes, the Heroku CLI downloads a backup with heroku pg:backups:download, and the dump can be restored into another Postgres. Heroku's docs say snapshots from pg:backups are stored in the U.S., and point to logical backups if you need a copy captured in another region.
Is Heroku shutting down?
Heroku says it remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, and the page we read announces no end date. Since 6 February 2026 it runs a sustaining engineering model, with no new Enterprise Account contracts for new customers and no change to card billing for existing ones.
Will my Procfile and buildpacks work elsewhere?
On some platforms. Scalingo says an app that works on Heroku should work on it, and reads the Procfile and most buildpacks unchanged. Render and DigitalOcean read the Procfile to define services. Fly.io generates a Dockerfile if you have none, and Upsun needs a new YAML file.
What happens to my Heroku add-ons?
Add-ons bought through the Heroku marketplace are billed by Heroku, so they must be replaced or re-bought. Render and DigitalOcean both note that services reached through API keys in environment variables, such as SendGrid or New Relic, can be kept by copying the variables.
Will leaving Heroku cost less?
Often on list price, but compare the whole bill. Render lists a 2 GB instance at $25 against Heroku's 0.5 GB Standard-1X at the same figure, while Render, Railway, DigitalOcean and Sevalla also meter bandwidth. The Heroku pricing page we read shows no separate bandwidth meter.
Can I keep deploying with git push?
Yes on Scalingo, whose guide uses git push scalingo master. Render, Sevalla and DigitalOcean deploy from a connected Git provider, Railway deploys with railway up or from GitHub, and Fly.io uses fly deploy from the CLI.
