Scalingo the European alternative to Heroku

Looking for the best European alternative to Heroku?

You’re in the right place!

Scalingo is a French cloud platform (PaaS, or Platform as a Service) designed to make application hosting simple, secure, and entirely European.

For more than ten years, we’ve been helping thousands of teams deploy and run their applications without worrying about servers or infrastructure.

Our goal is simple: to offer the same ease of use as Heroku, but with the data sovereignty, security, and compliance expected from a European provider.

Here’s a quick overview of why developers choose Scalingo:

🚀 As easy to use as Heroku

🔁 Heroku compatible: You can migrate from Heroku to Scalingo in just minutes

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

💬 Responsive and human customer support

🔒 Certified security: We were the first ISO 27001 and HDS (Health Data Hosting) certified European PaaS. And we also now offer infrastructure built on a SecNumCloud 3.2–qualified IaaS.

🎁 We offer a 30-day free trial for all new users

Ready to see what that looks like in practice? Here’s how Scalingo brings the Heroku experience to Europe.

Find everything you like about Heroku on Scalingo...

Scalingo brings the familiar Heroku experience to a European cloud environment. Same commands, same workflow, fast deployments, with transparent pricing and full data sovereignty on top.

Deploy your application in minutes

With Scalingo, deploying an app is as simple and fast as on Heroku: no setup, no configuration, no wasted time.

A single git push is all it takes:

$ 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

That’s it: your application is live!

This is the power of a Platform as a Service like Scalingo: no servers to configure, no infrastructure to maintain, no distractions. You focus on building and improving your apps. We take care of the rest.

Fully compatible with Heroku

Scalingo is fully compatible with Heroku’s buildpacks, allowing you to easily migrate your applications — 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.

You’ll also find full support for the Procfile, the configuration file that defines how your app’s processes start. If you’ve used Heroku before, everything will feel instantly familiar — same commands, same workflow, just hosted in Europe.

To make things even smoother, Scalingo integrates directly with GitHub and GitLab, enabling continuous deployment with every new commit.

And if you want to preview new features before merging, you can enable Review Apps, which automatically create temporary test environments for each pull or merge request.

Migrating from Heroku is quick and effortless — just follow our step-by-step guide to get started.

Scaling quickly and easily

With Scalingo, you can launch an MVP in minutes and scale your application effortlessly as it grows — whether you’re building a startup prototype or running a large production system.

Our European cloud platform is designed for flexibility. Resources adjust instantly to your needs, so you can start small and scale up seamlessly as traffic or demand increases.

Even better, billing is calculated by the minute — you only pay for what you actually use. It’s perfect for experimenting, testing, or handling unpredictable workloads without overpaying for idle resources.

Need to handle peak traffic or prepare for a major launch?

Thanks to our built-in autoscaling feature, your applications automatically adjust resources based on the performance metrics and thresholds you define. This ensures optimal performance and availability at all times — no manual intervention required.

50+ hosted technologies

Reliable data infrastructure is just as essential as scalable applications. That’s why Scalingo hosts all the most popular managed databases.

Whether you prefer Node.js hosting, Python hosting, Ruby on Rails hosting or another stack, Scalingo adapts effortlessly and supports over 50 languages, frameworks, and runtimes.

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

Thanks to Buildpacks (see next section) and https://doc.scalingo.com/platform/deployment/one-click-deploy, you can launch virtually any kind of application on Scalingo.

And if you want to go further, check out Awesome Scalingo — a community-curated list of tools, resources, and integrations built by developers who use the platform every day.

Buildpacks

A buildpack is a collection of scripts that prepares your application for deployment. It serves three main purposes:

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

Scalingo supports several types of buildpacks: - Official buildpacks for popular languages such as Ruby, Node.js, PHP, and Python - Specialized buildpacks for specific use cases - Custom buildpacks that you can create and configure to suit your own needs

You can find open source buildpacks or create your own. 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

As the name suggests, Review Apps are temporary preview environments that you can share with teammates to get feedback before merging new code. Each time you open a Pull Request on GitHub or a Merge Request on GitLab, Scalingo automatically deploys a dedicated Review App so your collaborators can test and validate changes in real time.

This feature makes it easier to review, test, and iterate on new features without disrupting your production environment — a simple, efficient workflow for continuous delivery on Scalingo.

Databases and high availability

Scalingo hosts the most popular managed databases on the market and provides a high-availability cloud platform.

Among the databases, we offer MySQL hosting, PostgreSQL, Redis, Opensearch, InfluxDB and MongoDB.

For production workloads, our Business plans include high-availability clusters, ensuring continuous uptime and reliability backed by a 99.96% Service Level Agreement.

If you’d like to learn more about how we manage data replication, failover, and backups, check out our detailed article on data resilience at Scalingo.

Host any project

With Scalingo, you can host all types of applications — from APIs and web apps to cron jobs and background workers — on a single platform.

As a versatile Platform as a Service (PaaS), Scalingo adapts to every use case, making it easy to deploy, manage, and scale all your projects in one place.

... And also what differentiates Scalingo

Scalingo the European PaaS

Data sovereignty is more than a buzzword — it’s become a real need for European companies.

European organizations need clarity on where and how their data is hosted — to protect business confidentiality, independence, and compliance. That’s why, since day one, Scalingo has built a sovereign cloud platform: a trusted alternative to global providers, keeping your data secure under European law.

Our mission: make cloud sovereignty accessible to everyone through a GDPR-compliant Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Database as a Service (DBaaS).

All data is hosted in France within 3DS Outscale datacenters — a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes — which meet the highest international standards (ISO 27001, SecNumCloud 3.2 …).

This partnership ensures that the entire cloud stack, from IaaS to PaaS, remains fully sovereign and operated under European jurisdiction.

Human, developer-first support

At Scalingo, you’re never left on your own. Our support team, made up of DevOps experts and developers, is here to help you at every stage of your journey on the platform.

You can reach us directly by email or through the chat — no ticketing maze, no bots, just real people ready to help.

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 at 9troisquarts

Beyond troubleshooting, our support team shares practical advice and analysis to help you become more autonomous when facing similar challenges in the future.

Because good support starts with good resources, we also maintain clear, regularly updated documentation that answers the most common questions and guides you through the platform step by step.

And to keep you informed, our changelog highlights the latest improvements, features, and updates — so you always know what’s new on Scalingo.

State of the art continuous deployment platform

At Scalingo, continuous deployment is built into the heart of the platform. Connect your GitHub or GitLab repository, push your code, and your application is automatically built, deployed, and secured — with a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate included by default.

For maintenance or quick tasks, one-off containers let you run commands in an isolated copy of your production environment.

Each container is automatically destroyed after use, and with one-off trace recording, you can view audit logs in your app’s timeline to see exactly which commands were executed.

This seamless workflow — from code to production — makes Scalingo a state-of-the-art continuous deployment platform trusted by developers who value simplicity, transparency, and full control.

Conclusion

You’ve got it: Scalingo is the perfect European alternative to Heroku.

Our ambition has always been to provide a reliable European alternative to the major cloud providers — built for developers who care about simplicity, performance, and sovereignty.

With Scalingo, you can host and scale your projects entirely in Europe, through a platform that combines operational excellence, data security, and compliance — all without the complexity of managing infrastructure.

Ready to see for yourself? Start your 30-day free trial, or get in touch with our team