StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Platform As A Service
  5. AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Dokku vs Heroku

AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Dokku vs Heroku

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Heroku
Heroku
Stacks25.8K
Followers20.5K
Votes3.2K
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Stacks2.1K
Followers1.8K
Votes241
Dokku
Dokku
Stacks180
Followers216
Votes69
GitHub Stars31.4K
Forks2.0K

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Dokku

Alex
Alex

Oct 20, 2020

Decided

I'm transitioning to Render from heroku. The pricing scale matches my usage scale, yet it's just as easy to deploy. It's removed a lot of the devops that I don't like to deal with on setting up my own raw *nix box and makes deployment simple and easy!

Clustering I don't use clustering features at the moment but when i need to set up clustering of nodes and discoverability, render will enable that where Heroku would require that I use an external service like redis.

Restarts The restarts are annoying. I understand the reasoning, but I'd rather watch my service if its got a memory leak and work to fix it than to just assume that it has memory leaks and needs to restart.

101k views101k
Comments
Kevin
Kevin

Jun 29, 2021

Decided

The Friendliest.app started on Heroku (both app and db) like most of my projects. The db on Heroku was on the cusp of becoming prohibitively expensive for this project.

After looking at options and reading recommendations we settled on Render to host both the application and db. Render's pricing model seems to scale more linearly with the application instead of the large pricing/performance jumps experienced with Heroku.

Migration to Render was extremely easy and we were able to complete both the db and application moves within 24 hours.

The only thing we're really missing on Render is a CLI. With Heroku, we could manage everything from the command line in VSCode. With Render, you need to use the web shell they provide.

29.3k views29.3k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Heroku
Heroku
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Dokku
Dokku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

It is an extensible, open source Platform as a Service that runs on a single server of your choice. It helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications from building to scaling.

Agile deployment for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, Go and Scala.;Run and scale any type of app.;Total visibility across your entire app.;Erosion-resistant architecture. Rich control surfaces.
Elastic Beanstalk is built using familiar software stacks such as the Apache HTTP Server for Node.js, PHP and Python, Passenger for Ruby, IIS 7.5 for .NET, and Apache Tomcat for Java;There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk - you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications.;Easy to begin – Elastic Beanstalk is a quick and simple way to deploy your application to AWS. You simply use the AWS Management Console, Git deployment, or an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Eclipse or Visual Studio to upload your application;Impossible to outgrow – Elastic Beanstalk automatically scales your application up and down based on default Auto Scaling settings;Complete control – Elastic Beanstalk lets you "open the hood" and retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application;Flexible – You have the freedom to select the Amazon EC2 instance type that is optimal for your application based on CPU and memory requirements, and can choose from several available database options;Reliable – Elastic Beanstalk runs within Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters, and provides an environment where developers can run applications requiring high durability and availability.
Open source PAAS alternative to Heroku; No vendor lock-in; Getting started is extremely easy; Extensible & customizable
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
31.4K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
2.0K
Stacks
25.8K
Stacks
2.1K
Stacks
180
Followers
20.5K
Followers
1.8K
Followers
216
Votes
3.2K
Votes
241
Votes
69
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 703
    Easy deployment
  • 459
    Free for side projects
  • 374
    Huge time-saver
  • 348
    Simple scaling
  • 261
    Low devops skills required
Cons
  • 27
    Super expensive
  • 9
    Not a whole lot of flexibility
  • 7
    No usable MySQL option
  • 7
    Storage
  • 5
    Low performance on free tier
Pros
  • 77
    Integrates with other aws services
  • 65
    Simple deployment
  • 44
    Fast
  • 28
    Painless
  • 16
    Free
Cons
  • 2
    Charges appear automatically after exceeding free quota
  • 1
    Lots of moving parts and config
  • 0
    Slow deployments
Pros
  • 23
    Simple
  • 12
    Open Source
  • 11
    Built on Docker
  • 11
    Free
  • 4
    Yay, it works like a charm
Integrations
Mailgun
Mailgun
Postmark
Postmark
Loggly
Loggly
Papertrail
Papertrail
Redis Cloud
Redis Cloud
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Nitrous.IO
Nitrous.IO
Logentries
Logentries
MongoLab
MongoLab
Gemfury
Gemfury
Docker
Docker
Papertrail
Papertrail
Ubuntu
Ubuntu
Semaphore
Semaphore
Drone.io
Drone.io
CloudBees
CloudBees
Arch Linux
Arch Linux
GitLab CI
GitLab CI
Travis CI
Travis CI
CircleCI
CircleCI
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions
Debian
Debian

What are some alternatives to Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Dokku?

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

Render

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

Hasura

Hasura

An open source GraphQL engine that deploys instant, realtime GraphQL APIs on any Postgres database.

Cloud 66

Cloud 66

Cloud 66 gives you everything you need to build, deploy and maintain your applications on any cloud, without the headache of dealing with "server stuff". Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Jamstack, Laravel, GoLang, and more.

Jelastic

Jelastic

Jelastic is a Multi-Cloud DevOps PaaS for ISVs, telcos, service providers and enterprises needing to speed up development, reduce cost of IT infrastructure, improve uptime and security.

PythonAnywhere

PythonAnywhere

It's somewhat unique. A small PaaS that supports web apps (Python only) as well as scheduled jobs with shell access. It is an expensive way to tinker and run several small apps.

CapRover

CapRover

It is an extremely easy to use app/database deployment & web server manager for your NodeJS, Python, PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby, MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres, WordPress (and etc...) applications! It's blazingly fast and very robust as it uses Docker, nginx, LetsEncrypt and NetData under the hood behind its simple-to-use interface.

Deis

Deis

Deis can deploy any application or service that can run inside a Docker container. In order to be scaled horizontally, applications must follow Heroku's 12-factor methodology and store state in external backing services.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase