Heroku Alternatives You Probably Aren’t Using
Heroku is a cloud container-based Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) used to deploy and manage applications. It supports a wide variety of commonly used programming languages such as Java, PHP, Go, Node.js and more. A few weeks ago, developers received emails that Heroku were to discontinue their free tier.
Fortunately, there are lots of options similar to Heroku for developers to choose from which I will list below.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a managed service where you quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without worrying about the infrastructure that runs those applications. It lets you deploy an app to an AWS Elastic Beanstalk runtime and manages an EC2 cluster and related infrastructure for you. You can set up your environment to deploy from GitHub Actions as well.
Google App Engine
Google App Engine is a powerful PaaS solution for deploying and hosting web applications. You can build your application in Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Go, Python, or PHP. You can click here to view its pricing model. Google’s security is top-notch and you can define access rules with App Engine firewall and leverage managed SSL/TLS certificates by default on your custom domain at no additional cost.
Railway
With Railway, you can easily deploy your application in minutes to the cloud using their platform which supports a wide variety of languages such as Java, PHP, Deno, Python, Swift, Go among others.
Digital Ocean App Platform
This is a PaaS service designed to build, deploy, and scale apps and static sites quickly and easily. You can easily link it to your GitHub repository for quick deployment. The App Platform lets you choose how you want to scale your apps, either through the fully managed, built-in scaling mechanism, or by taking more control of your infrastructure setup.
You can deploy three static sites on the free tier plan (Starter Tier) and each additional static site will be charged $3. This tier isn’t a great fit for dynamic apps with a backend and hence you can bump up your subscription to the Basic or Professional tier. The Basic Tier starts at $5/month and the Professional Tier starts at $12/month.
Back4App
Back4App lets you quickly connect the front and backend, regardless
of what language was used in your frontend. You can check out this blog post that describes how to create and host your full stack application on their platform. Their Free Plan has a free monthly capacity of 25k requests, 250MB data storage, 1GB transfer, 1GB file storage. However, you can opt for their monthly or annual plan.
Azure App Service
Azure App Service is an HTTP-based service for hosting web applications, REST APIs, and mobile back ends. You can develop in your favorite language, be it .NET, .NET Core, Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, or Python. Applications run and scale with ease on both Windows and Linux-based environments. With Azure App Service, you pay for the Azure compute resources you use. You can easily set up continuous integration and deployment with Azure DevOps, GitHub, BitBucket, Docker Hub, or Azure Container Registry.
Render
Render is a unified cloud platform to build and run your web apps with free TLS certificates, a global CDN, DDos protection and auto-deploys from Git. It supports a variety of languages including Python, rust, PHP, Ruby among others. This post on their website clearly depicts the differences between Render and Heroku.
Cloud 66
Cloud 66 is another great option to Heroku as it offers quick deployment of apps as well as quick deployment from Git.
Microtica
Microtica is a developer self-service platform that enables developers to deploy infrastructure and applications on AWS, without being DevOps experts.
Microtica is a great alternative to migrate from Heroku to AWS.
Conclusion
There are a lot more options available at your disposal as alternative platforms to Heroku. Developers have a lot more choice to PaaS solutions to enable them deploy applications in the cloud more easily and efficiently.
