Heroku vs Fly.io
A side-by-side, data-driven comparison of Heroku and Fly.io — pricing, free tiers and capabilities.
Fly runs your app as containers close to users across many regions — a better fit for latency-sensitive or global apps — while Heroku keeps everything in a couple of US/EU regions with a simpler, less configurable model.
At a glance
- At a medium always-on instance, Heroku is ~$50/mo vs Fly.io ~$10.7/mo — Fly.io is the cheaper estimate.
Specs side by side
Estimated cost
Estimated monthly cost of a single always-on service — estimates, not quotes. Try the calculator for your own traffic. “—” means no verified price for that tier.
| Heroku | Fly.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Small (~0.5 vCPU / 512MB–1GB) | $25 | $5.7 (lower) |
| Medium (~1 vCPU / 2GB) | $50 | $10.7 (lower) |
| Large (~2 vCPU / 4GB) | $250 | $21.4 (lower) |
| Egress ($/GB) | — | $0.02 |
Pros & cons
Our editorial assessment — not vendor-stated facts. Last reviewed 2026-07-16.
Heroku
Pros
- Low operational overhead: deploy with a single git push, no servers to manage
- Mature, well-documented workflow with pipelines, review apps, and one-click add-ons
- Broad first-class language support through buildpacks
- Integrated managed Postgres and key-value store reduce the need to wire up external services
- Backed by Salesforce, with a large ecosystem and deep community knowledge base
Cons
- No free tier since November 2022; the cheapest Eco dynos also sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity
- Costs scale up quickly at higher tiers compared to raw IaaS or cheaper PaaS alternatives
- Common Runtime region availability is limited (primarily US and Europe); broader regions require Private Spaces
- In February 2026 Salesforce moved Heroku to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability and maintenance rather than new features, and stopped offering Enterprise contracts to new customers, signaling slower innovation (existing credit-card pricing and billing are unaffected)
Fly.io
Pros
- Runs full Docker containers globally, not just functions, so it fits stateful and long-running apps
- CLI- and config-driven workflow makes provisioning multi-region deployments straightforward
- Usage-based billing charged per second, with no required monthly plan commitment
- Places compute close to users, which suits latency-sensitive applications
- Includes stateful primitives (volumes, managed Postgres, private networking) that many edge/PaaS platforms lack
Cons
- Has had publicized reliability incidents in recent years (some community reports attribute past outages to internal service-discovery systems); check Fly's status page and recent incident history before committing
- Uptime SLA is offered only to Enterprise-plan customers; standard pay-as-you-go usage carries no contractual uptime guarantee
- Billing can be hard to predict once you scale across instances and regions, and some users report unexpected charges
- CLI- and config-first, region-centric model has a steeper learning curve than conventional click-to-deploy PaaS
Bottom line
Pick Heroku for legacy apps and teams that want zero-ops dynos. Pick Fly.io for latency-sensitive apps that need multi-region by default.
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Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between Heroku and Fly.io?
- Heroku: Widely credited with popularizing "git push to deploy". As of 2026 it is in a sustaining-engineering mode with no new features, pushing many teams to evaluate alternatives. Fly.io: Runs full-stack apps and Docker containers as lightweight VMs in many regions, with a focus on low-latency, globally-distributed deployments.
- Is Heroku or Fly.io cheaper?
- For a medium always-on instance, Heroku is about $50/mo and Fly.io about $10.7/mo, so Fly.io is the cheaper estimate. Actual cost depends on your usage — try the calculator.
- Does Heroku have a free tier?
- No.
- Does Fly.io have a free tier?
- No.
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