Heroku was popular among developers, but its free plan discontinuation increased demand for alternatives. devpick lists 4 tools that provide Heroku-like deployment experiences on your own VPS.
- Reduced hosting costs with PaaS environments buildable on ~$5/month VPS instances
- Git push deployment in Dokku using the original self-hosted PaaS workflow
- One-click apps in Coolify and CapRover for instantly deploying 100+ services
- Automatic SSL via Let's Encrypt certificate management across all tools
- Container management with Portainer specializing in Docker/Kubernetes GUI administration
4 tools
coolify
52,764PHPApache-2.0
An open-source, self-hostable PaaS alternative to Vercel, Heroku & Netlify that lets you easily deploy static sites, databases, full-stack applications and 280+ one-click services on your own servers.
Open Core
portainer
37,089TypeScriptZlib
Making Docker and Kubernetes management easy.
Open Core
dokku
31,938ShellMIT
A docker-powered PaaS that helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications
Free
caprover
14,960TypeScriptNOASSERTION
Scalable PaaS (automated Docker+nginx) - aka Heroku on Steroids
Free
How to Choose
For simplicity choose Dokku, for GUI management choose Coolify, for Docker administration choose Portainer, and for lightweight PaaS choose CapRover.