Open-source alternatives to Heroku

The thing people loved about Heroku was never the compute. It was that git push heroku main turned source code into a running, TLS-terminated, auto-restarting app with a managed Postgres one command away, and nobody had to be the ops person. The projects below can all give you the first part. The part they cannot give you is the second: when you self-host a PaaS, you are the platform team now. That trade — predictable cheap infrastructure in exchange for owning the substrate — is the whole decision.

Coolify — the closest thing to “Heroku on your own VPS”

Coolify (55.6k stars, PHP, Apache-2.0) is where I would start, and it is the most complete of the four. Git-push (or Git-webhook) deploys, automatic Let’s Encrypt SSL, and a one-click catalog of 280+ services — Postgres, Redis, MySQL, and so on — provisioned onto servers you own. Apache-2.0 is a clean license. It is the option that most faithfully recreates the Heroku feeling for a small team: a dashboard, push to deploy, databases a click away. The honest asterisk is that “managed Postgres” here means “Coolify ran a Postgres container for you” — backups, HA, and point-in-time recovery are still your responsibility to configure, not a checkbox SLA the way Heroku Postgres was.

Dokku — the minimalist’s Heroku, literally built on buildpacks

Dokku (31.9k stars, Shell, MIT) is the oldest idea here and still the leanest: it is essentially “Heroku-in-a-box” built directly on Docker and Heroku buildpacks, which means an app that deployed to Heroku will very often deploy to Dokku with minimal changes. MIT licensed. It is a single-host tool at heart (clustering is possible but not its strength), driven by the CLI rather than a polished web UI. Pick Dokku when you want the smallest, most transparent system, you are comfortable on the command line, and one beefy VPS is enough.

CapRover — the GUI-first middle ground

CapRover (15k stars, TypeScript) is the pick if you want a real web UI and one-click apps but on a Docker Swarm foundation that can grow to multiple nodes. Its card license reads NOASSERTION (Apache-2.0 in the repo, just not cleanly detected by GitHub). It sits between Dokku’s CLI minimalism and Coolify’s broad service catalog. Reasonable choice if you specifically want Swarm-based multi-node scaling with a GUI.

The Railway CLI is not a self-hosting option — ignore it for this purpose

The fourth entry (Railway’s CLI, 530 stars, Rust, MIT) is the open-source command-line client for Railway’s hosted platform — it is not a self-hostable PaaS you run on your own servers. It is below our star bar and, more importantly, off-topic for “replace Heroku with something I host.” If you liked Heroku and just want another managed PaaS without the ops, Railway (or Render/Fly) is a fair answer — but that is switching SaaS, not self-hosting.

What you are signing up to own

Heroku’s review apps (a fresh environment per pull request) are not a first-class feature in any of these, and its managed-Postgres SLA — automated backups, failover, point-in-time restore, all behind a checkbox — is exactly the part you are taking on yourself. For a small team that wants control and a flat bill, Coolify on a $20–40/month VPS is a genuinely good trade. For a team without anyone willing to be on call for the database, staying on a managed platform is the honest answer.