vs.
The Heroku Killer
Deploy from Git with Dockerfiles or buildpacks. Create preview environments per PR. In our cloud or yours. Production ready.
TL;DR
What Heroku could’ve become
Developer experience
The simplicity you love, minus the limitations. Push code and get a running service in minutes. Build from a Dockerfile or buildpacks, with no Kubernetes expertise required.
Platform control
Northflank is a platform layer for any kind of workload (ephemeral, stateful, and scheduled), like microservices, databases, jobs, and AI/ML workloads, instead of only web dynos.
Infrastructure control
Run in your own AWS, GCP, Azure, Civo, OCI, CoreWeave, or any neo cloud with BYOC. On-prem and bare-metal.Why is Northflank better?
Comparison at a glance
| Feature | Northflank | Heroku |
|---|---|---|
| First-class container runtime | ||
| Preview environments that match your stack | ||
| MicroVM-based secure sandboxes | ||
| Bring-your-own-cloud | ||
| Autoscaling | ||
| GPU support | ||
| Per-second resource billing | ||
| Cron jobs and scheduled tasks built-in | ||
| Multi-region deployments | ||
| Infrastructure-as-code | ||
| Still shipping and caring about customers |
What you don’t get with Heroku
A team that cares about its users. Both big and small.
BYOC: run inside your own AWS/GCP/Azure account while keeping the platform experience.
Release strategies like blue/green and canary are explicitly supported in Northflank’s release tooling story.
Preview environments per branch or PR, with full-stack resources when you want them.
Build from Dockerfile or buildpacks.
Cost and predictability
Clear pricing without forced tier upgrades
| Feature | Northflank | Heroku |
|---|---|---|
| Network isolation | Included | Requires Private/Shield |
| Compliance features | Core platform | Higher tiers required |
| Infra cost visibility | Egress & disk shown | Abstracted |
| Private networking | No forced upgrade | Private Spaces required |
| BYOC | Yes | No |
| Cost predictability | Clear primitives | Bundled & opaque |
Migration
Keeping production stable
Step 1: Start with one service
Deploy from Git using your Dockerfile or buildpacks.
Step 2: Match your delivery workflow
Set up preview environments per PR/branch.
Step 3: Move the “hard parts” next
Add your databases and persistent services as project resources as you go.
Step 4: Decide where it should live
Stay on Northflank cloud, or move workloads into your own cloud account with BYOC.
Security and isolation
Better isolation when you need it
Heroku
Heroku’s isolation story is Private Spaces for private networking, and Shield for higher compliance features like BAAs for HIPAA.
Northflank
Northflank runs workloads using microVM isolation for secure sandbox-style execution (useful for multi-tenant and untrusted workloads).
If name-dropping helps, here you go.
