Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroku VS Coolify

Compare Heroku VS Coolify and see what are their differences

Heroku logo Heroku

Agile deployment platform for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, and Scala. Setup takes only minutes and deploys are instant through git. Leave tedious server maintenance to Heroku and focus on your code.

Coolify logo Coolify

An open-source, hassle-free, self-hostable Heroku & Netlify alternative.
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • Coolify Landing page
    Landing page //
    2025-03-04

Heroku features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Heroku offers an extremely user-friendly interface and a high level of abstraction, making it easy for developers to deploy, manage, and scale applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
  • Quick Deployment
    One of Heroku’s strongest points is the ability to deploy applications quickly using Git. Developers can push their code to Heroku with a simple command, streamlining the entire process.
  • Scalability
    Heroku provides effortless scaling options by allowing developers to add more dynos (containers) with a single command to handle increased traffic and workload.
  • Add-Ons Ecosystem
    Heroku offers a rich ecosystem of add-ons, such as databases, caching, monitoring, and more, which can be easily integrated into applications to extend their functionality.
  • Automatic Updates
    Heroku automatically handles operating system and server updates, allowing developers to focus solely on their application code rather than maintenance tasks.
  • Free Tier
    Heroku offers a free tier with sufficient resources to host small projects and learn the platform without incurring costs, making it accessible for beginners and small-scale applications.

Possible disadvantages of Heroku

  • Cost
    While Heroku offers a free tier, the costs can quickly add up for larger applications and professional use. Paid plans and additional dynos or add-ons can become expensive.
  • Performance
    Heroku’s performance can sometimes be suboptimal compared to other cloud providers, particularly when running high-performance or resource-intensive applications.
  • Limited Control
    Heroku abstracts away a lot of infrastructure management, which can be a downside for developers who need fine-grained control over their environments and configurations.
  • Dyno Sleeping
    Applications running on Heroku’s free tier experience 'dyno sleeping,' where the application goes to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, causing a delay when it wakes up after receiving a new request.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Relying heavily on Heroku’s ecosystem and platform-specific features can lead to vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate to another platform if needed.
  • Add-On Costs
    The costs for add-ons can also become significant, as many useful features and integrations require paid add-ons, increasing the overall expense.

Coolify features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    Coolify offers a clean, intuitive, and user-friendly interface, making it accessible for both beginners and experienced developers.
  • Easy Deployment
    The platform supports easy deployment of various types of applications, including static sites, Node.js, and more, reducing the complexity of deployment.
  • Open Source
    Coolify is an open-source platform, which means users can contribute to the project, customize it to fit their needs, and benefit from community-driven improvements.
  • Self-Hosting
    The ability to self-host gives users more control over their environment and can lead to cost savings compared to other managed services.
  • Integration Capabilities
    Coolify integrates well with popular services and tools such as GitHub, GitLab, and Docker, facilitating streamlined workflows.

Possible disadvantages of Coolify

  • Complexity for Large-Scale Deployments
    While suitable for small to medium deployments, it might not have the robust features required for large-scale enterprise-level deployments.
  • Limited Hosting Provider Support
    The platform may have limited support for certain cloud hosting providers, which could restrict its flexibility.
  • Community Support Reliant
    As an open-source platform, Coolify relies heavily on community support, which might not always provide the timely assistance that a dedicated support team would.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite its user-friendly interface, there might still be a learning curve for new users unfamiliar with DevOps and deployment processes.
  • Resource Intensive
    Self-hosting Coolify can be resource-intensive, requiring significant server resources to manage and operate efficiently.

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

Coolify videos

MIRACLE Cooling Device for Las Vegas Heat? Torras Coolify Portable Air Conditioner Review

More videos:

  • Review - Unboxing 3 New Cooling Gadgets in 2021 | TORRAS Coolify Neck Fan L3 Pro, Ice Mist Cooler Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and Coolify)
Cloud Computing
82 82%
18% 18
Cloud Hosting
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
78 78%
22% 22
Website Builder
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Heroku and Coolify

Heroku Reviews

  1. mark-mercer
    Useful Cloud Platform

    Great service to build, run and manage applications entirely in the cloud!

    🏁 Competitors: Amazon AWS, Dokku on Digital Ocean, Firebase
    👍 Pros:    Easy user interface|Good customer service|Multi-language cloud application platform
    👎 Cons:    Limitation with some addons|Low network performance
  2. jamestelford
    · Full Stack Developer at OutDev ·
    🏁 Competitors: Docker, Amazon AWS
    👍 Pros:    Powerful development environments|Great value for the money|Great customer support|Paas

10 Top Firebase Alternatives to Ignite Your Development in 2024
Heroku’s focus on simplicity and developer experience makes it a perfect fit for those who want to focus on building their apps, not babysitting servers. Startups and small businesses, in particular, can benefit from Heroku’s ability to accelerate development and deployment, allowing them to get their ideas to market faster.
Source: genezio.com
2023 Firebase Alternatives: Top 10 Open-Source & Free
Heroku Postgres – Majority of businesses like Heroku because of its SQL database support. Yes, PostgreSQL as a service is an appealing product of this PaaS vendor with quick deployment approaches.
5 Free Heroku Alternatives with Free Plan for Developers
Koyeb is a decent alternative to Heroku that you can consider for hosting or deploying your web apps and APIs. It has all the features of Heroku that you will need for your projects. So far, I have not encountered an importer tool for migrating Heroku deployments but I am sure doing that manually will not be that hard. Just like Heroku it offers you an intuitive web UI as...
Choosing the best Next.js hosting platform
However, there are a few disadvantages to Heroku. First of all, despite its build pack, Heroku will run your project as a Node.js application. As a result, you will lose some of Next.js’ most interesting features, such as Incremental Static Regeneration. Analytics are replaced by metrics and measured throughput, response time, and memory usage (only on paid plans).
Top 10 Netlify Alternatives
Heroku is another alternative to Netlify that doesn’t only host static websites but has the ability to host dynamic websites. This PaaS platform was launched in 2007 and conferred highly scalable features to deploy, host and launch applications.

Coolify Reviews

5 Best Vercel Alternatives for Next.js & App Router
The main advantage of self-hosting with Coolify is control. You have complete ownership over the servers, bandwidth, and configuration. This makes it easy to optimize hosting to suit your application's specific needs. Coolify also simplifies self-hosting through its easy-to-use interface and configurations.
Source: il.ly

Social recommendations and mentions

Heroku might be a bit more popular than Coolify. We know about 73 links to it since March 2021 and only 71 links to Coolify. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Heroku mentions (73)

  • How to deploy your web application? 3 different approaches to consider (+1 bonus)
    Providers include Digital Ocean, Heroku or Render for example. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Heroku Reviews Apps prevent delivering bugs on production
    Review Apps run the code in any GitHub PR in a complete, disposable Heroku application. Review Apps each have a unique URL you can share. It’s then super easy for anyone to try the new code. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • How to keep an HTTP connection alive for 9 hours
    The app is deployed to Heroku and when it came time to switch the mode to email-on-account-creation mode, it was a very simple environment change:. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • How to Process Scheduled Queue Jobs in Node.js with BullMQ and Redis on Heroku
    Heroku is a cloud platform that makes it easy to deploy and scale web applications. It provides a number of features that make it ideal for deploying background job applications, including:. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • I made a Bot.. How do I use it?
    Once you've created it you can host it locally (this means leaving the program running on your computer) or host it through a service online. I haven't personally tried this yet, but I believe you can use a site like heroku.com or other similar services. Source: almost 2 years ago
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Coolify mentions (71)

  • Self-Hosting like it's 2025
    Does anyone have any experience with coolify? https://coolify.io/ I am considering switching the hosting of my online games to it. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • 5 Awesome Railway Alternatives
    Coolify is open-source, self-hosted, free barring server costs, or $10/month for their managed Cloud option. Works with tons of languages, Git (GitHub, GitLab, etc.), and auto-SSL. Deploy on VPS, Raspberry Pi, whatever—supports Docker Swarm, Kubernetes coming. 123,000+ instances, 12,000+ Discord users. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Moving away from US cloud services
    Didn't see Coolify [0] combined with Hetzner mentioned in the article! [0] https://coolify.io/. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • The definitive guide to using Django with SQLite in production 💡
    I have been running Django sites in production under heavy load for over 10 years at my day job. We started with a MySQL database backend but, after running into a few issues, switched to PostgreSQL which has been rock-solid. I tend to use the same stack for side projects. Especially because, initially, most of my projects were hosted on Heroku and they had stellar support for PostgreSQL. Now, having bounced from... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Weekly Indie Log #16
    With the advent of people moving away from serverless and pushing more towards self-hosted solutions around VPS from provided like Hetzner and using deployment tools like Coolify , I’ve been wanting to have a cool monitoring app which not only monitor uptime but also disk space, CPU pressure, memory pressure, networking and more and throw alerts when something looks outside of the allowable thresholds. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Heroku and Coolify, you can also consider the following products

DigitalOcean - Simplifying cloud hosting. Deploy an SSD cloud server in 55 seconds.

CapRover - Build your own PaaS in a few minutes!

Linode - We make it simple to develop, deploy, and scale cloud infrastructure at the best price-to-performance ratio in the market.

Vercel - Vercel is the platform for frontend developers, providing the speed and reliability innovators need to create at the moment of inspiration.

Amazon AWS - Amazon Web Services offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. Free to join, pay only for what you use.

Netlify - Build, deploy and host your static site or app with a drag and drop interface and automatic delpoys from GitHub or Bitbucket