What is the closest alternative to Heroku Enterprise?

Heroku announced in February 2026 that it is moving to a sustaining engineering model. No new features. No new Enterprise contracts for new customers. The platform that pioneered git push deployments is still running, but it has stopped evolving.

For teams on Heroku Enterprise evaluating their options, the question is not only which platform feels the most like Heroku. It is which platform delivers the enterprise-grade deployment controls that Heroku Enterprise provided, at the scale and governance level that enterprise teams actually need.

The answer depends on what Heroku Enterprise actually provided. For teams that used it primarily for private networking and isolated environments, several platforms are reasonable options. For teams that relied on RBAC, SSO, HIPAA eligibility, and private dedicated runtime environments, the field narrows significantly. The closest alternative for the full Heroku Enterprise feature set is Northflank. Hundreds of teams have migrated from Heroku to Northflank in the past few months alone.

Heroku Enterprise was the tier designed for organizations that needed more than the standard Heroku offering. The key features that made it enterprise-grade:

• Heroku Private Spaces: Isolated runtime environments running in a dedicated AWS region of your choice. Private Spaces provided network isolation, stable outbound IP addresses, VPN connectivity to on-premises infrastructure, and VPC peering.
• Shield Private Spaces. The compliance tier required for HIPAA and PCI-compliant workloads. Includes encryption at rest, log draining to SIEM, enhanced security controls, and a BAA. Shield dynos, Shield Postgres, and Shield Redis are required inside Shield Spaces.
• Heroku Postgres: Fully managed database service with automatic provisioning, backups, monitoring, and scaling. Enterprise customers receive access to larger database instances, point-in-time recovery, and advanced data protection features.
• RBAC and team management. Role-based access control at the organization, app, and space level. Administrators can organize developers into teams, control deployment permissions, and establish approval workflows.
• SSO integration. SAML-based single sign-on integration with enterprise identity providers, including Okta, Entra ID, and Google Workspace.
• Enterprise support and SLAs: Guaranteed response times for critical issues, dedicated support channels, technical account managers, and service level agreements for production applications.
• Heroku Connect. Salesforce data synchronization for teams in the Salesforce ecosystem.

What Heroku Enterprise did not provide: true BYOC (workloads ran on Heroku's own AWS infrastructure), multi-cloud deployment, GPU workloads beyond managed inference add-ons, microVM sandbox isolation for AI-generated code, preview environments per pull request at scale, or self-serve access to any of these features without going through a sales process.

Northflank builds on what made Heroku successful. Where Heroku perfected the self-service developer experience for standard workloads, Northflank extends it to enterprise-grade infrastructure requirements that Heroku never covered.

Heroku Private Spaces ran in Heroku's own AWS infrastructure. You chose the region, but Heroku managed the underlying AWS account. Your workloads ran on Heroku's compute, not yours. It was isolated and private, but it was not BYOC.

Northflank BYOC deploys the platform data plane into your existing cloud account. Your workloads run inside your own VPC, on compute you own, with Northflank managing the platform layer. True BYOC into AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, CoreWeave, Civo, on-premises, and bare-metal. No markup on underlying compute. Self-serve on all plans, including free.

Heroku reserved many governance capabilities for Enterprise tiers and specific products such as Shield Spaces. Northflank applies governance consistently across the platform.

RBAC at the organisation, project, and environment levels. SAML and OIDC SSO with Okta, Entra ID, and Google Workspace with automatic provisioning and deprovisioning. Every deployment is tied to a named identity. Audit logs for every deployment, secret access, and environment change, exportable to SIEM. SOC 2 Type 2 certified across managed cloud and BYOC deployments.

Heroku had Review Apps: isolated temporary apps created for each pull request. They worked but were limited to single services, with no database forking at scale and manual teardown in some configurations.

Northflank preview environments spin up per pull request with isolated database instances, covering multiple microservices simultaneously. They run on spot capacity and tear down automatically on merge. At the PR volume AI coding tools generate, this is fully automated.

Heroku's config vars were designed for application configuration rather than centralized secrets management. They could be viewed by anyone with app access, were not scoped across services, and had no audit trail on access.

Northflank secret groups store credentials and inject them at build and runtime. Credentials never appear in source code, environment files, or build logs. A single rotation point updates credentials across all services that use them.

Heroku offered managed inference add-ons but no infrastructure for AI agents to execute, no sandbox isolation for AI-generated code, and no general-purpose GPU workload support beyond managed inference offerings.

Northflank runs GPU workloads (H100, H200, A100, L4, L40S, B200, and more) natively alongside standard services. MicroVM sandbox isolation using Kata Containers with Cloud Hypervisor, Firecracker, or gVisor provides isolated execution environments for AI-generated code. In the ComputeSDK 2026 Scale Invitational, Northflank reached 100,000 concurrent sandboxes in 24 seconds from a cold start with zero failures.

If you are using Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, or Cursor, Northflank Skills lets your agent deploy services, manage databases, and configure environments directly from your agent session without switching to the Northflank dashboard.

Heroku's router enforces a hard 30-second timeout on all HTTP requests. This is not configurable on standard plans and blocks AI report generation, large data exports, and any long-running server-sent event or streaming workload.

Northflank has no hard request timeout. Long-running services, streaming responses, and agent execution workloads run without hitting a platform-imposed ceiling.

What people loved most about Heroku was the experience: git push and it works. No YAML, no Kubernetes manifests, no ops overhead. Northflank keeps that and goes further: the same git push and buildpack support, plus a full CLI, API, visual pipeline builder, and Northflank Skills so AI agents can deploy and manage services directly from the agent session. The self-serve path from signup to a running application takes minutes, without a sales call or a platform engineering team.

Render and Railway are the most commonly recommended Heroku alternatives for standard tiers. Both provide a good developer experience with managed databases, git push deploys, and modern pricing. Neither is a close alternative to Heroku Enterprise specifically.

Render is SOC 2 Type 2 certified with managed PostgreSQL and Redis, private networking on all plans by default, and a good developer experience. RBAC, SAML SSO, SCIM, and audit logs are available on the Scale plan ($499/month) and above. No BYOC across any plan, no GPU workloads, no sandbox isolation for AI-generated code. Best for teams migrating off Heroku standard tiers that need a straightforward managed PaaS.

Railway provides fast deployment with managed databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB), usage-based pricing, and SOC 2 Type 2 certification. RBAC, SSO, and audit logs require the Enterprise plan at $2,000/month minimum commitment. No BYOC. No GPU workloads. Best for teams that want the fastest path to a deployed app with a database.

For Heroku Enterprise specifically, neither Render nor Railway covers the private networking isolation, compliance posture, and governance controls that the enterprise tier provided, and neither offers true self-serve BYOC.

No. Heroku is not shutting down. In February 2026, Heroku moved to a sustaining engineering model: stable, secure, and supported, but with no new features and no new Enterprise contracts for new customers. Existing Enterprise subscriptions continue to be honored.

Heroku Private Spaces are isolated runtime environments running in a dedicated AWS region on Heroku's own infrastructure. They provide private networking, stable outbound IP addresses, VPN connectivity, and VPC peering. Standard Private Spaces cap at approximately $1,000/month. Shield Private Spaces, required for HIPAA and PCI compliance, cap at $3,000/month before Shield add-on costs.

No. Heroku Private Spaces ran on Heroku's own AWS infrastructure. Customers chose the region, but Heroku managed the underlying AWS account. Northflank BYOC deploys the platform data plane into the customer's own cloud account, which is fundamentally different: your workloads run on your own compute, inside your own VPC.

Northflank does not provide native Salesforce data synchronization equivalent to Heroku Connect. Teams that rely on Heroku Connect for Salesforce integration should evaluate whether that integration needs to stay on Heroku or whether a Salesforce-native integration approach serves the need.

Yes. Northflank supports Cloud Native Buildpacks and Heroku-compatible buildpacks. Most Heroku applications deploy on Northflank without code changes. Dockerfile-based deployments are also supported.

Heroku Enterprise Private Spaces start at approximately $1,000/month per Standard Space and $3,000/month per Shield Space, before Shield add-on costs. Northflank is usage-based with a free tier: compute from $0.01667/vCPU-hr and $0.00833/GB-hr, billed per second. BYOC is self-serve with no markup on underlying compute. Use the Northflank pricing calculator to estimate your monthly spend before committing. Enterprise agreements with SLA guarantees are available.

Northflank is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and HIPAA compliant. Business Associate Agreements are available on request. Northflank BYOC provides the data residency and network isolation that HIPAA-eligible deployments require.

Heroku Enterprise provided private networking, RBAC, SSO, HIPAA eligibility, and team management controls that enterprise teams needed. It ran on Heroku's own AWS infrastructure, was limited to AWS regions, had a hard 30-second request timeout, and offered no true BYOC. It is no longer available to new customers.

Northflank is the closest alternative. The same git push, buildpack-based developer experience. Enterprise governance applied by default: RBAC, SSO, audit logging, secrets management, and preview environments. True BYOC into any cloud or on-premises. No request timeout. GPU workloads and microVM sandbox isolation for AI workloads. A forward-deployed control plane for the most stringent isolation requirements. 99.99% historical uptime with SLA guarantees on enterprise agreements.

• How to migrate from Heroku: step-by-step guide: Step-by-step guide for migrating applications, databases, and configuration from Heroku to Northflank.
• Top Heroku alternatives in 2026: A broader comparison of Heroku alternatives covering standard and enterprise migration paths.
• Most reliable cloud platforms for app hosting in 2026: How cloud platforms compare on uptime, autoscaling, zero-downtime deployments, and data residency.
• What is BYOC in cloud computing?: How the BYOC deployment model works and when it applies to enterprise platform migrations.