Dokku — open source alternative
Self-hosted mini-Heroku on a single server.
Strengths
- Deploy via git push, just like Heroku.
- Works on any Linux VPS.
- Plugin ecosystem for databases, SSL, etc.
Weaknesses
- Single-host — limited scaling story.
- Requires Linux sysadmin comfort.
- UI is CLI-first.
Dokku is used as an alternative to
Heroku
App hosting platform as a service by Salesforce.
Vercel
Frontend cloud with edge deploys for Next.js and more.
Netlify
Jamstack hosting with Git-based deploys, functions, and forms.
Render
Heroku-style PaaS for web services, workers, and databases.
Railway
Developer-friendly platform to deploy any stack from Git.
More open source in this category
Discover other projects tagged App Hosting & PaaS on the category page.
Other open source projects in App Hosting & PaaS
Recommended reading
When self-hosting goes wrong: seven failure modes and how to avoid them
An honest retrospective on the ways self-hosted setups break — not in theory, but in practice — and the small habits that prevent most of them.
Will the open source project you depend on still exist in three years?
Bus factor, maintainer burnout, funding models, and the signals that separate OSS projects that survive from those that quietly decay.
From SaaS to self-hosted: a 30-day migration playbook
A week-by-week plan to move one service off SaaS and onto your own server without breaking your team's workflow.