Heroku alternatives (2026): 6 platforms compared

The best Heroku alternative depends on what you liked about Heroku in the first place. If it was git push and a running app, Render and Railway feel the most familiar. If you want containers close to your users, look at Fly.io. If you want a simple monthly price, DigitalOcean App Platform. If you would rather own the servers, Coolify. Every price and free tier below comes from each platform's own pricing page or docs, checked on 29 October 2026, and they are prices at the time of writing.

The short list

Where Heroku stands today

Heroku still sells the same model it made famous: dynos, add-ons and a managed Postgres. On its pricing page the Eco dyno is $5 a month and sleeps after 30 minutes without traffic, Basic is $7 a month and always on, and Standard-1X and Standard-2X are $25 and $50 a month. Heroku Postgres starts at $5 a month with Essential-0. Its newer Fir generation runs on Kubernetes, but Fir plans need a Private Space. We did not find a free plan listed.

That is not expensive for one small app. People start looking around when they run several apps, each with a worker and a database, and the per-dyno prices add up, or when they want things Heroku does not focus on, such as running close to users in many regions or on hardware they control.

Render: the closest to Heroku

Render works much like Heroku did: you connect a repo and it builds and deploys web services and static sites, and it hosts Postgres too.

Its free tier is useful for tests and demos, with limits you should know before you rely on it. A free web service spins down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic, and the next request waits about a minute while it starts again. Each workspace gets 750 free instance hours a month. A free Render Postgres database expires 30 days after it is created. Static sites are free. On 12 November 2026 paid web services started at $7 a month for 512 MB, on a Hobby workspace at $0 plus compute.

Pick Render if you want the Heroku workflow with as little change as possible.

Railway: everything in one project

Railway deploys from a repo or a Dockerfile and keeps your app, databases and workers in one project. It bills by the second for what your services use, rather than per dyno.

New accounts get a free trial with a one-time $5 credit for 30 days, and no card. After that there is a free plan with $1 of usage a month, Hobby at $5 a month with $5 of usage included, and Pro at $20 a month per workspace with $20 of usage included. On Hobby, if your usage stays at $5 or less, you pay nothing extra. Railway lists its rates per second: memory works out to about $10 per GB a month and CPU to about $20 per vCPU a month.

Pick Railway if your app is a web service plus a Postgres, a Redis and a worker, and you want all of them on one bill. We cover it next to Vercel in Vercel alternatives.

Fly.io: containers close to users

Fly.io runs your container as small virtual machines in the regions you choose. Machines are billed by the second while they run, and a stopped machine is billed for its root file system storage. The smallest listed machine, shared-cpu-1x with 256 MB, is $2.19 a month in one region at the time of writing.

There is no free tier for new organisations. New accounts get $1 of free credit for 7 days or until it runs out, whichever comes first, with no card needed (checked 12 November 2026), and trial Machines stop on their own after 5 minutes of running. Fly.io asks more of you than Heroku did: you will meet regions, volumes and scaling settings early. In return you get apps that hold connections open and sit near your users.

DigitalOcean App Platform: a plain monthly price

App Platform is DigitalOcean's managed platform for apps, with a free tier that covers 3 static site apps. Containers start at $5 a month for a shared vCPU with 512 MiB of memory and 50 GiB of transfer. If you liked knowing what Heroku would cost before the month started, this is the most similar pricing model on the list.

Coolify: run it on your own servers

Coolify describes itself as an open source, self-hostable alternative to Vercel, Heroku, Netlify and Railway. You install it on a server you rent, and it gives you Git deploys, databases and SSL through a web dashboard. Self-hosted Coolify is free. Coolify Cloud, where they run the dashboard and you still bring the servers, is $5 a month for 2 servers plus $3 a month for each extra server.

The trade is the usual one: the server is yours, so updates, disk space and tested backups are yours too. Pick it when someone on the team is happy to do that work.

Kedge: a new one to watch

Kedge is a newer cloud platform for websites, apps and databases, listed on TeaserTrack. Its most unusual idea is the deploy: ssh kedge.dev publish puts something online, and your SSH key is your account. It also takes a Git push, a Dockerfile or a container image.

Kedge is in public preview with a limited free trial. Its pricing page lists rates per vCPU, memory, storage and egress, but says they are estimates for future paid service and may change, so treat them as a guide only.

How to choose

• You want the least change from Heroku: Render.
• You run several services and want one bill: Railway.
• Latency or long-lived connections matter: Fly.io.
• You want a fixed monthly price: DigitalOcean App Platform.
• You want to own everything: Coolify on a server you rent.

What to test before you move

Move one small app first, not the main one. Check three things that catch people out when they leave Heroku. First, add-ons: list every Heroku add-on you use and find where each one lives on the new platform, or which service replaces it. Second, the database: if your data is in Heroku Postgres, plan the pg_dump and restore, and decide whether the new platform's Postgres or a separate service such as Neon or Supabase suits you better (Neon vs Supabase compares the two). Third, cold starts and sleeping: free tiers on most of these platforms stop idle apps, just as Heroku's Eco dynos do.

The DevOps category lists newer deploy platforms as they appear on TeaserTrack, many of them still in beta, and the databases category covers where to put the data.