European alternatives to Heroku

Heroku is the platform that defined the category: push a Git branch, a buildpack detects the language and builds it, and the result runs in dynos that scale with a slider. Managed Postgres, Redis and Kafka are first-party, an add-on marketplace supplies the rest, and review apps spin up a disposable copy of the stack per pull request. Salesforce has owned it since the 2010 acquisition.

Heroku retired its free tier in November 2022, which pushed a generation of hobby projects elsewhere and is the single most common reason people now look for alternatives. The others are price at scale, where dyno pricing compares poorly with raw compute, and region — Heroku’s Common Runtime offers the United States and Europe, but the European option is a single region, which does not satisfy data-residency requirements that name a specific country.