Heroku pioneered the shape of what a small team expects from a hosting platform. Push code to Git, get a running app, add a Postgres or a Redis with one command, worry about the product rather than the infrastructure. That shape has since become the industry default, but the platform that invented it has been steadily losing teams since the 2022 when the free-tier was removed, by 2026 much of the ecosystem seems to have moved on.
This post walks through several platforms that are worth considering for a Heroku migration, and describes what a team gains from each one rather than treating them as interchangeable options.
Choosing between them well means understanding which parts of the Heroku experience you want to keep and which parts you were happy to leave behind.
What migrating teams usually bring with them
A team leaving Heroku typically has some combination of:
