The best free alternative to Heroku
Tags: heroku, webdev
Published: 2022-02-13 16:09:10

I recently discovered a new tool, I was looking for an alternative that came closest to Heroku. Personally I think Heroku is very good, but very expensive, I know it's not a simple VPS, plus $7 for me who live in Brazil is a high value, I'm referring to the hobby plan where it's possible to add a domain with SSL, and prevent the application from 'sleeping'. 

So now Caprover is my equivalent alternative to Heroku, I have full control over the infrastructure and I don't need technical knowledge to manage it. With a VPS of only $5 I can now upload my apps with the right to a custom domain with SSL without paying anything extra for it. 

Currently my VPS is 1gb of ram, it is 65% used, but it already has 5 active applications in .net core, and a Mysql server with 3 databases. In other words, there is still room for me to put more in this current structure. 

And if I need to, I can easily scale with the facilities offered by CapRover. Now I will leave here an overview talking about CapRover, remembering that I took this text from the documentation.

## What's CapRover?
CapRover is an extremely easy to use app/database deployment & web server manager for your NodeJS, Python, PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby, MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres, WordPress (and etc...) applications!

It's blazingly fast and very robust as it uses Docker, nginx, LetsEncrypt and NetData under the hood behind its simple-to-use interface.

✔ CLI for automation and scripting
✔ Web GUI for ease of access and convenience
✔ No lock-in! Remove CapRover and your apps keep working!
✔ Docker Swarm under the hood for containerization and clustering
✔ Nginx (fully customizable template) under the hood for load-balancing
✔ Let's Encrypt under the hood for free SSL (HTTPS)


![CapRover The best free alternative to Heroku](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/2r5zwc6mnzb9lfcjcu57.png)

## It's made for a developer who...
does not like spending hours and days setting up a server, build tools, sending code to server, build it, get an SSL certificate, install it, update nginx over and over again.

uses expensive services like Heroku, Microsoft Azure and etc. And is interested in reducing their cost by 4x (Heroku charges 25$/month for their 1gb instance, the same server is 5$ on DigitalOcean!!)

prefers to write more of showResults(getUserList()) and not much of apt-get install libstdc++6 > /dev/null

enjoys a platform where installing MySQL, MongoDB and etc on their server is done by selecting from a dropdown and clicking on install!

likes to enjoy the power of Docker and nginx without having to learn them or deal with their settings scripts to make things work!!

knows Docker and nginx inside out, and enjoys a platform where basic operations are done, yet allowing them to customize any specific settings if they need to

**Any Language**
Deploy apps in your own space (Node js, PHP, Python, Java literally any language!)

**SSL**
Ability to secure your services over HTTPS for FREE, ability to automatically redirect HTTP to HTTPS.

**One-Click Apps**
Deploying one-click apps is a matter of seconds! MongoDB, Parse, MySQL, WordPress, Postgres and many more.

**Easy Deploy**
Many ways to deploy: upload your source from dashboard, use command line caprover deploy, use webhooks and build upon git push

**Simple Interface**
Simple interface for many docker operations: exposing container ports to host, setting up persistent directories, instance count and etc.

**Fully Customizable**
Optionally fully customizable nginx config allowing you to enable HTTP2, specific caching logic, custom SSL certs and etc.

**Cluster Ready**
Attach more nodes and create a cluster in seconds! CapRover automatically configures nginx to load balance.

**Increase Productivity**
Focus on your apps! Not the bells and whistles just to run your apps!

## To finish
You can use CapRover with any cloud provider like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or other. But CapRover is already available too on the ocean digital store, that is, you will not even need to configure it, just choose it, inform your VPS configuration, datacenter and finally create, after that you will receive the fixed public IP of your VPS and the details to access the CapRover dashboard.

![CapRover at Digital Ocean](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/duoewxua4j4nfeloncb2.png)

I will leave here a link promoting Digital Ocean, using my link you receive $100 free to test the platform.
[Get $100 credits free to test Digital Ocean Services](https://m.do.co/c/c3019c7d99fe)

[YouTube Tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPHEXPfsvyQ)
[GitHub Repo](https://github.com/caprover/caprover)
[Docs](https://caprover.com/)