Compare
Ancla vs Heroku
One platform is shipping features. The other entered maintenance mode.
In February 2026, Salesforce announced that Heroku has shifted to sustaining engineering — maintenance only, no new features planned. Here is how the platforms compare today.
At a glance
Two platforms, two trajectories
- $19/mo for 1 vCPU + 2 GB No egress fees, no cold starts
- Standard OCI containers Portable to any K8s cluster
- Sub-second rollbacks Immutable releases, full audit trail
- Active feature development New capabilities shipping weekly
- Free Hobby tier No credit card required
- ~$50/mo for Standard-2X Only 1 GB RAM; Performance-M at $250/mo for 2.5 GB
- Legacy Cedar uses proprietary slugs Fir supports OCI, but migration required
- 5-15s+ cold starts on Eco Eco dynos sleep after 30 min inactivity
- Sustaining mode (Feb 2026) No new features, maintenance only
- Free tier removed Nov 2022 Lowest entry: $5/mo Eco (shared, sleeps)
Feature by feature
The full comparison
Every cell is sourced from public pricing pages and documentation, as of February 2026.
| Ancla Active | Heroku Sustaining | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | Free (Hobby tier) | $5/mo Eco (shared, sleeps after 30 min) |
| 1 vCPU + 2 GB Equivalent | $19/mo (Pro) | ~$50/mo (Standard-2X gives only 1 GB) |
| Cold Starts | None on Pro | 5-15s+ on Eco dynos |
| Deploy Speed | OCI build + rolling update | Buildpack compile + slug deploy |
| Zero-Downtime Deploys | ✓ All plans | ✓ Paid plans only |
| Rollback Speed | Sub-second (immutable releases) | ✓ Rollback available |
| Managed Postgres | ✓ | ✓ Essential $5/mo+ |
| Egress / Bandwidth | None | None |
| Container Format | Standard OCI | Cedar: proprietary slugs; Fir: OCI |
| Custom Domains | ✓ All plans | ✓ All plans |
| BYOC (Your Own Cloud) | ✓ Enterprise | ✗ Not available |
| Active Development | ✓ Actively developed | ✗ Sustaining mode (Feb 2026) |
Heroku pricing from their public pricing page. Ancla pricing from /pricing. Data verified as of February 2026.
Heroku Standard-2X ($50/mo) provides 1 GB RAM. Performance-M ($250/mo) is the closest match at 2.5 GB. Heroku Eco at $5/mo is shared compute and sleeps after 30 min. Prices as of February 2026.
Context
Why teams are moving on
Heroku pioneered the modern PaaS. For over a decade, git push heroku main was
the gold standard for simple deployments. But the platform's trajectory changed after Salesforce's
acquisition in 2011. The free tier was eliminated in November 2022. GitHub integration was disabled
for weeks following a security incident the same year. And in February 2026, Salesforce announced
the shift to sustaining engineering mode -- maintenance only, with no new features planned.
For teams still on Heroku, this raises a practical question: do you keep building on a platform that has publicly stated it will not evolve, or do you invest the migration effort now while you can plan it on your own timeline? The longer you wait, the wider the gap grows between what the platform offers and what modern applications require.
Heroku's legacy Cedar platform uses a proprietary slug format, which creates portability concerns. The newer Fir generation supports Cloud Native Buildpacks that produce OCI images, but migrating from Cedar to Fir requires rebuilding your deployment pipeline. Ancla deploys standard OCI containers from day one -- the same images that run on any Kubernetes cluster, AWS ECS, Google Cloud Run, or your own laptop. If you ever outgrow Ancla, your images go with you. No lock-in.
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