Scalingo the European alternative to Heroku

June 28, 2021 - 15 min read
Scalingo the European alternative to Heroku

Looking for a European alternative to Heroku? You’re in the right place!

Meet Scalingo, the leading European Platform as a Service (PaaS). For over 10 years, we’ve been helping hundreds of teams host their applications and data entirely in Europe, without the headaches of managing servers or infrastructure.

Here’s why developers choose Scalingo:

🚀 As easy to use as Heroku

🔁 Heroku compatible: Migrate from Heroku to Scalingo in just minutes

🇪🇺 Data hosted in Europe (in France 🇫🇷 with Outscale, a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes)

💬 Responsive and human customer support

🔒 Certified security: We were the first European PaaS ISO 27001 and HDS (Health Data Hosting) certified

🎁 30-day free trial for all new users

Find everything you like about Heroku on Scalingo...

Deploy your application in 2 minutes

Like Heroku, Scalingo lets you deploy any application in seconds. Simple, fast, and powerful.

A simple git push is enough:

$ git push scalingo master
Enumerating objects: 11, done.
Counting objects: 100% (11/11), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (7/7), done.
Writing objects: 100% (9/9), 2.79 KiB | 2.79 MiB/s, done.
Total 9 (delta 4), reused 0 (delta 0)

Your deployment has been queued and is going to start...
<-- Start deployment of my-app -->
Fetching source code
Build complete, shipping your container...
Waiting for your application to boot... 
<-- https://my-app.osc-fr1.scalingo.io -->
To ssh.osc-en1.scalingo.com:my-app.git
 + 6a7365f...72c6c36 master -> master

The advantage of a Platform as a Service like Scalingo is that you don't have to manage servers and you can focus 100% on the development of your application.

No servers to configure, no infrastructure to maintain — we take care of everything. You focus entirely on building and improving your application.

Heroku Compatibility

The great news is, Scalingo is fully compatible with Heroku’s buildpacks, allowing you to migrate your applications seamlessly — usually in under five minutes, with no changes to your code or configuration. In other words:

If your code works on Heroku, it will work on Scalingo.

Migration from Heroku is quick and straightforward. You can follow our step-by-step guide on how to migrate from Heroku to Scalingo).

Moreover Scalingo also supports Procfile. If you are a Heroku user, you probably know that the Procfile is a file that explains how the platform should start your containers.

To better understand how Scalingo supports the Procfile, we have written a full documentation article here.

In addition, Scalingo integrates directly with GitHub and GitLab. This means your projects can be automatically deployed with every new commit — and you can even enable Review Apps for instant preview environments.

Scaling quickly and easily

With Scalingo, you can launch your MVP in minutes and scale effortlessly as your application grows.

Even better — consumption is billed by the minute, so you only pay for what you actually use. Start small with a prototype, then scale up instantly as traffic or demand increases.

Whether you’re handling peak loads or preparing to launch your next big idea, scaling your app is just a few clicks away.

And deploying your application to the world? It’s as simple as a git push.

Plus, with our built-in autoscaling feature, your application can automatically scale based on the performance metrics and thresholds you define — ensuring optimal resources at all times without manual intervention.

Autoscalingo Scalingo PaaS

Moreover, you can even do Function as a Service from the Scalingo platform as Studo does.

Finally Scalingo is also integrated with GitHub and GitLab.

50+ hosted technologies

Scalingo offers a hosting solution for every programmation languages and framework. Whether you prefer Node.js hosting, Python hosting, Ruby on Rails hosting or any other technology, the platform adapts and hosts over 50 different technologies.

You can see the list of officially supported technologies on Scalingo here.

Available technology on Scalingo

Moreover with the Buildpacks (see next part) or the One-click deploy you can deploy any kind of application on Scalingo.

If you have some time, you can have a look at this Awesome Scalingo which is a list of resources you can use with Scalingo. This list was written entirely by our community.

Even better: Buildpacks

A buildpack is a set of scripts that has three purposes:

  • Detect the language of your application
  • Install the dependencies of a project
  • Define how the application should start

Moreover, there are different types of buildpacks: - Officially supported buildpacks (Ruby, Node.js, PHP, Python...) - Buildpacks available for specific uses - Custom buildpacks.

You can find open source buildpacks or create your own buildpack. We explain in detail how to do this in our documentation: How to use and create a Custom Buildpack?

As you can see, this means that almost any technology can be hosted on Scalingo.

The complete list of official buildpacks is available in our documentation.

Review Apps

Scalingo also offers a collaboration tool for developers for free called Review Apps.

As the name suggests, Review Apps are ephemeral applications that you can share to get feedback from your collaborators.

Review Apps are deployed automatically each time you open a Pull Request (GitHub) or Merge Request (GitLab).

This is very useful when you want to develop a new application.

Review app Scalingo

Database and high availability

Scalingo hosts the most popular databases on the market and offers a high availability cloud platform (99.96% SLA).

Among the databases we host we propose MySQL hosting, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB and MongoDB.

We also offer these databases in high availability when you choose the "business" type plans. This means that we offer a 99,96% SLA.

By the way, if you want to know how we manage your database data, its replication and backups, you can read our article on Scalingo data resilience.

Databases Scalingo

Support for all your projects

On Scalingo you can host your APIs, your web applications, your cron jobs, and your workers.

Scalingo is a versatile Platform as a Service that supports all your use cases.

... And also what differentiates Scalingo

Scalingo the European PaaS

Data sovereignty (business secrecy, economic intelligence, American protectionism) is of growing importance for all European companies.

Since our creation, we have been committed to offer a Sovereign European Cloud that offers an alternative to the web giants and protects your data within the framework of the laws in presence.

Our vision is not only to offer a Sovereign Cloud but also to offer a product that combines operational excellence, product excellence and support excellence.

Scalingo has the mission to deliver this sovereignty to as many people as possible thanks to its easy-to-use and RGPD compliant Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Database as a Service (DBaaS). Scalingo became the first European PaaS HDS certified (Health Data Hoster) and ISO 27001 since September 2022.

Your data is hosted in datacenters located in France by 3DS Outscale, a strategic subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes.

This datacenters are fully certified to the highest standards (ISO 27001-2013, 27017 and 27018). Also 3DS Outscale is a responsible and transparent player recognised by the LUCIE ISO 26000 label.

Finally, choosing a French hosting company also means supporting the French and European ecosystem to make it prosper and become competitive.

Therefore, with Scalingo, the whole IaaS and PaaS chain is sovereign through 3DS Outscale. Many of our tools were entirely developed in-house such as our orchestrator.

A human and accessible quality customer support composed of DevOps experts

At Scalingo, we support you throughout your journey on the platform. Our team of experts answers all your questions as quickly as possible.

At Scalingo we have developers available on the support to answer your questions. You can contact us by e-mail or directly on our chat!

Scalingo support has always been invaluable to us. It's amazing to go through real humans via the dashboard chat without having to go through a ticketing system. Jérémie Loosfelt, CTO agency 9troisquarts

  • Thanks to the expertise of our teams, the support also provides you with advice and analysis to make you more autonomous in the future on similar problems.
  • Documentation. Because good support starts with good documentation, Scalingo makes sure that it meets all your needs and that it is regularly updated.

A changelog is also available to keep you up to date with the latest software updates.

The serenity of hosting your projects with Scalingo

  • Scalingo offers the possibility to be hosted in SecNumCloud certified datacenters: Scalingo also offers you the possibility to host your web projects with a SecNumCloud certified host (3DS Outscale, subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes).

Moreover, Scalingo is now ISO 27001 and HDS certified and preparing and aiming for SecNumCloud certification from 2022.

  • Stability.

Scalingo is a high availability cloud platform with up to 99.96% SLA. We host market leading databases in high availability (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch)

  • Longevity.

Scalingo exists as a fully self-financed and profitable company. We have been around for almost 10 years now.

Your data is in good hands with Scalingo. By the way, we are fully transparent about the hosting of your data and you can have a look at our article on data resilience.

State of the art continuous deployment platform

  • Integration with your preferred tools: From the beginning at Scalingo, we have been working hard to develop a state-of-the-art platform. To achieve this, we have integrated all your favourite tools: GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, hosted GitLab and custom GitLab.
  • GitLab integration: we are one of the only PaaS that offers GitLab integration.
  • Let's Encrypt certificate included. When you host an application on Scalingo, the Let's Encrypt certificate is automatically included.

In fact, we were the first to implement the Let's Encrypt certificate (long before Heroku!)

  • Recording one-off traces:

A one-off container is a copy of your production environment. This environment is automatically destroyed once you have executed your task.

If you want to find out what you can do with a one-off container, we prepared a video for you.

Above all, Scalingo offers an extra feature: the recording of one-off traces.

This allows you to find the audit logs in your app's timeline and find out which commands were executed.

By the way, we have written a complete article on the subject: One-off container audit logs.

  • A platform at the cutting edge of technology!

We were the first PaaS to offer application and data hosting in a SecNumCloud compliant datacentre.

In addition, we share our latest technological innovations on our blog.

Conclusion

You have understood: Scalingo is a complete alternative to Heroku.

Our ambition has always been to offer an alternative to the American giants for European developers.

We offer the possibility to host projects in Europe with a solution that combines operational excellence and sovereignty.

If you want to know more, we offer a 30-day free trial of our platform. You can also get a sales contact if you wish.

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Luca Fancello
Luca Fancello
Luca Fancello is the Head of growth at Scalingo. That means that he is responsible for the blog you are currently reading among many other tasks. Apart from that Luca is also a blogger on personal projects to pursue his passion of SEO.

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