Heroku alternatives: compare application platforms

Which platform fits your application?

Why teams are looking now

In February 2026 Heroku announced a move to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability and support. Heroku states that nothing changes for customers paying by credit card, and that Enterprise Account contracts are no longer offered to new customers. No end date has been announced.

Heroku will keep running, but it is no longer being built forward. If you expect your app to grow for years, choose a home that grows with it, and move while nothing is urgent.

AppHaven: when you want more included, with European sovereignty

AppHaven keeps the push-to-deploy workflow and adds what a business application needs around it: a managed PostgreSQL database declared next to the app, login for project members in front of private apps, branch previews with their own database, and automatic production backups. It gives you European sovereignty, with your app and data in EU datacenters under EU jurisdiction, and it is designed for apps built with coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.

Moving is mostly configuration. AppHaven runs standard containers: your coding agent writes the Dockerfile and a short manifest, each Procfile process becomes a service, and your config vars carry over as environment variables. Pricing is per minute, without plan tiers. Compare AppHaven and Heroku.

Render: the closest service-based model

Render’s service types map closely to Heroku’s: web services, background workers, cron jobs and managed datastores. If your goal is to change provider while keeping the architecture, evaluate it first. Check database recovery by plan and how previews are configured in a Blueprint.

Railway: when you want to compose services

Railway is worth evaluating for flexible service composition and a fast setup. Check the database responsibilities carefully: its standard database templates are user-operated, unlike Heroku Postgres. You can connect an external managed provider, or own maintenance and opt-in recovery yourself.

Fly.io: when placement becomes a product requirement

If you need direct machine lifecycle or regional placement control, evaluate Fly Machines. This is a move toward owning more infrastructure decisions than Heroku asked of you. Fly.io also offers a managed database with backups, but your team designs routing and data behaviour across the regions you choose.

Vercel: when the app is frontend-centric

A Next.js project that ran on Heroku mostly as a web frontend may benefit from Vercel’s framework integration. Vercel supports full-stack applications; check how background work fits, and the recovery and preview setup of the database provider you connect.

When to stay with Heroku

Stay if your app is built around marketplace add-ons you do not want to replace, and a platform focused on stability rather than new features fits your plans for the app.

Rehearse the whole app, not just the web process

List every Procfile process type, scheduled job, add-on and config var, and map each one to its destination before a trial. Test the worker and the nightly job as well as the page in the browser. Check records after redeployment, user permissions and recovery. Include previews, databases and additional providers in the cost comparison.

Rehearse the database export and import, including uploaded files, and time it. Keep the Heroku app available until you have verified the replacement and planned the final cutover.