What alternatives are there to Heroku?

byBeimnet Zewduon May 20, 2022

Web Development

Heroku is a cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages and has provided Free and Hobby tiers for developers for many years.

Heroku supports several programming languages used as a web application deployment model. As one of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007. Back then, it supported only the Ruby programming language.

However, it now supports Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go. This implies that many developers may turn to Heroku as a low-cost option to scale their applications regardless of their favorite programming language.

The developer community chose and used Heroku for over a decade because it provided many developers with a basic — free tier and easy deployment platform where anyone can easily deploy their apps to reach their client or even test their web apps live.

Unfortunately, Heroku stated on August 25, 2022, that it will discontinue all free services, forcing customers to upgrade to premium subscriptions. Beginning November 28, the Salesforce-owned cloud platform as a service will discontinue free product plans and shut down free data services, and it has since October 26 begun removing dormant accounts and related storage for accounts that have been idle for more than a year.

While this was disappointing for many, perhaps the good news is that there are alternatives available.

We will see some alternatives for Heroku in this post. We will also see how to deploy your apps on some of them in the next posts in the coming days and weeks.

The order in which the alternatives are displayed in this post does not imply a specific order.

Amazon Amplify

AWS Amplify is a set of purpose-built tools and features that lets frontend web and mobile developers quickly and easily build full-stack applications on AWS, with the flexibility to leverage the breadth of AWS services as your use cases evolve.

It has decent free-tier service, but if you need more capacity than the free tier, Amplify switches over to pay-as-you-go pricing once you exceed free tier limits, with no disruption to your apps.

Its free tier includes:

a) For Backend (Get started free, then pay as you go)

b) Build a Frontend UI

c) Host an App (Free for 12 months)

d) Host an app (Pay as you go)

2. Cloudflare Pages

Cloudflare Pages is a JAMstack platform for front-end developers to collaborate and deploy websites.

What is JAMstack?

Is an architectural approach that decouples the web experience layer from data and business logic, improving flexibility, scalability, performance, and maintainability.

The free tier of Cloudflare Pages offers

1 build at a time
500 builds per month
100 custom domains per project
Unlimited sites
Unlimited requests
Unlimited bandwidth

3. Firebase Hosting

Google’s Firebase Hosting provides fast and secure hosting for your web app, static and dynamic content, and microservices. Firebase Hosting is production-grade web content hosting for developers. Users can swiftly deploy web apps and serve both static and dynamic content to a global CDN with a single command (content delivery network). To create and host microservices on Firebase, you can also combine Firebase Hosting with Cloud Functions or Cloud Run.

Storage = 10 GB
Data Transfer = 360 MB / day
Offers Custom Domain & SSL
Multiple Sites per project

4. GitHub Pages

Hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.

Since the pages are hosted directly from your GitHub repositories the pricing we will see is GitHub’s whole pricing and plans. The free tier features of GitHub for developers are as follows:

Unlimited Private/ Public repositories
Automatic security & version updates
2000 CI / CD minutes per month
500 MB of packages storage

5. Netlify

Netlify is just like Heroku. You can Instantly build and deploy your sites to our global network from Git (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and Azure DevOps). Custom domains, HTTPS, deploy previews, rollbacks, and much more.

It also has templates to help you jump-start your next project.