Alternatives to Heroku, Qovery & Vercel

Start with who owns the infrastructure. This is the decision everything else follows from. A hosted platform runs your apps on hardware it owns and bills you for compute with its margin included; a bring-your-own-cloud platform provisions into your account, so you pay AWS directly and keep the cluster when you leave. The first is simpler to start. The second is what you want if compute cost grows with usage, if data residency is a requirement, or if you need a cloud service the platform does not resell.

Then ask whether you get Kubernetes, or an app runtime. Several platforms here run containers without exposing a cluster. That is a genuine advantage when nobody on the team wants to think about Kubernetes — and a hard limit the day you need a CRD, a custom operator, a DaemonSet, or an add-on the platform has not packaged. Ask what happens when you need something the abstraction does not cover.

Check what a preview environment actually is. Most platforms offer one, and they are not the same thing. Some give you a container on shared infrastructure; some give you real infrastructure in the same account as production. The difference matters when a bug only reproduces against the real network, the real IAM roles or the real data store.

Finally, look at where the free plan ends. A free tier tells you what the vendor treats as evaluation and what it treats as revenue. Heroku removed its free dyno tier in November 2022; others gate on build minutes, seats, or the number of environments. The useful question is not whether a free plan exists but which limit you hit first, and what it costs to pass it.

Each comparison below answers these four for one platform, states where that platform is the better choice, and records the date its claims were checked.