Heroku vs Vylara
Heroku alternative on your own AWS or Azure account
Heroku invented modern PaaS, but its pricing and capability ceiling have pushed many teams to AWS. Vylara maps the Heroku model — dynos, Postgres, add-ons — onto a real AWS or Azure account: delivery config in Git pull requests, infrastructure reviewed in Vylara and provisioned on deploy.
When Heroku is still the right call
- Long-running Heroku apps that nobody wants to touch
- Tiny apps where Heroku's hobby tier is still good enough
When Vylara is the better fit
- Heroku Postgres bills are getting uncomfortable
- You need add-on capabilities Heroku no longer offers competitively
- Compliance asks for infrastructure in your own account
- You want modern observability and repo-grounded config, not config-vars-in-a-dashboard
Heroku vs Vylara, side by side
| Heroku | Vylara | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the app runs | Heroku dynos | ECS on EC2 / Container Apps in your account |
| Postgres | Heroku Postgres | RDS / Aurora / Azure Database for PostgreSQL |
| Add-ons | Heroku marketplace | Native AWS/Azure services (Redis, S3, queues) |
| Config | Config vars in dashboard | Secrets Manager / Key Vault, delivery config in Git |
| Buildpacks | Heroku buildpacks | Container build (Dockerfile or buildpacks) |
| Lock-in | High | Low |
What a typical migration looks like
- Connect your repo and AWS or Azure account
- Vylara reads your Procfile, app.json, and config to map dynos to container services
- A PR proposes Docker, CI, and deployment config. Review the cloud plan in Vylara, merge, then deploy
- Migrate Postgres via logical replication or dump/restore
- Cut DNS over and shut Heroku down
Try Vylara on your repo
Connect a repo, review your cloud plan in Vylara, merge delivery changes as Git PRs, and deploy into your own AWS or Azure account when you’re ready.
Start freeFrequently asked questions
- Does Vylara understand Procfile and buildpacks?
- Yes. The agent reads your Procfile and app.json to determine the process types you're running, and proposes either container builds via Dockerfile or Cloud Native Buildpacks where appropriate.
- What happens to Heroku add-ons?
- Each add-on maps to a native AWS or Azure equivalent: Heroku Postgres → RDS/Aurora/Azure DB for PostgreSQL, Heroku Redis → ElastiCache or Azure Cache for Redis. Mailgun and others continue as third-party services. The mapping is documented in your Vylara cloud plan.
- How long does a typical Heroku-to-AWS migration take with Vylara?
- Days to a couple of weeks for a typical Rails or Node app, depending on add-on count and database size. The actual cutover is a single DNS change.