Last week, Salesforce announced that Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering and won’t introduce new feature or accept new enterprise contracts ( An Update on Heroku ).
While it seems it’s going to be maintained and no change for current customers are expected, I would imagine a lot of users are going to go look for other options (If they haven’t already)
Considering this, what other PAAS offerings are you currently using?
Is there a preferred choice you would you recommend for setting up a Ruby app?
Or maybe you’re a happy Heroku user and are not planning to do any changes, but would be good to get your perspective too.
I am using Railway (railway.app) for some of my apps, they offer git push deploy that is similar to Heroku, and their pricing is significantly lower than Heroku (for similar specs). Downside is that they don’t have a free tier, which might deter beginner / people who just started learning Ruby and want to try out deployment.
I am a - perhaps not happy, but at least content - Heroku user for the majority of our Rails customers apps. The service they do provide is still solid and worthwhile. However, the linked update from Salesforce is definitely giving me second thoughts.
We’re also happy users of Hatchbox, with servers on Hetzer or Linode, so that’s probably going to be our escape hatch. Although, to be honest, these days I suspect many of our customers would prefer to opt for something entirely EU based.
Thanks for your input @eayurt . I tested render for a small app but ended up with Heroku because it was cheaper
@PikachuEXE Interesting setup! I haven’t tried self-hosting and I’m more inclined to use PAAS providers to avoid having to deal with issues and maintenance. Have you faced any challenges with that?
@mentalizer Makes sense. I do have a small couple of apps still on Heroku and don’t have any complains on the service too. I’ve heard good things about Hatchbox, thanks for sharing.
I worked on a Heroku-like experience that wraps on Dokku during 2025. It’s pretty feature-complete but it is still missing some love, might be too rough around the edges still, but it does allow you to grab a Rails app from a repo and deploy it to a server somewhere, manage db’s, domains, ports, firewall, etc…
That’s an interesting approach @nels . I just recently learned about Dokku. Is the wrapper that you made similar to what they offer in the Dokku Pro plan? Or more like a full PAAS on top of it?
I got the feeling (without having seen their implementation), that mine sits somewhere in the middle. I do not think I am as feature-complete as they are, since they probably implemented all the ins and outs, while I focused on delivering the most Heroku-like experience I could, in-bang-and-out…
My implementation does include automated vulnerability checks via OSV Scanner, UFW management, server status checks with alerts, and a few other things… You can of course deploy pure JS, PHP or anything that you could deploy with a buildpack…
So yeah, I probably have more features, but they have a more complete wrapper around Dokku (I would imagine)
This is what a traditional Rails deployment would look like and some of the features that can be managed from the product:
Love dokku! I shoved it onto a VPS in DigitalOcean like a decade ago and that one server still runs all of my side projects years later. It really just feels like interacting with Heroku once its up and running
I like Heroku as a PaaS a lot still but their pricing has never felt overly competitive.
I ended up moving all of my own pet projects onto a Caprover instance I manage on Hetzner and have been really enjoying that. I also run an instance on my home server as a sort of staging environment. This setup wouldn’t really scale to any sort of enterprise need but is good for personal stuff.
For enterprise I find it very hard to beat Heroku in terms of simplicity and as an “all in one” package.
I recently tried out https://hatchbox.io/ It’s a really clever service where you pay for a VPS from any provider, and Hatchbox does all the hard work of configuring it and making database/cron/app hosting easy.
You pay per server so if you have several small projects they can all fit on one VPS. It’s made by the https://gorails.com/ folks, too, so they really understand the ecosystem.
I’ve been thinking about trying Dokku, but I’ve done everything I can to avoid using Docker to date. It does seem to have the feature set I’d want, if we are eventually forced off of Heroku.
I found this blog post recently ( Heroku Is Not Dead — Things ) and it would seem like there is still plenty of time before everyone is “forced” to move, but I think they’ll eventually be left behind when the alternatives get better over time.
