Scalingo vs Heroku
Scalingo is a European alternative to Heroku: same cloud & hosting use case, headquartered in France and governed by EU GDPR, while Heroku (Salesforce) is based in the United States.
By the EU Alternatives team Last updated
Deploy apps 3x faster on Europe's first HDS-certified PaaS. GDPR compliant, ISO 27001 certified, with data hosted in France and expert DevOps support.
- Jurisdiction
- EU / EEA
- Primary privacy law
- EU GDPR
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- No
- Open source
- No
- Free tier
- No
Push your code with git and it deploys, with managed Postgres and add-ons that spared a generation of small teams from ever touching a server. The free dyno tier is long gone, so the cheapest entry is now 5 dollars a month for Eco or 7 for Basic. Salesforce owns Heroku outright and runs it from San Francisco.
- Jurisdiction
- United States
- GDPR by default
- Requires DPA + TIA
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- Yes
Scalingo vs Heroku at a glance
| Scalingo | Heroku | |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | France | United States |
| Data jurisdiction | EU / EEA | United States |
| Primary privacy law | EU GDPR | Requires DPA + transfer assessment |
| US CLOUD Act exposure | No | Yes |
| Best for | Teams that need cloud & hosting built for European data-protection requirements | Teams already invested in the Salesforce ecosystem |
Choose Scalingo if…
- You want a provider governed by a European privacy regime
- GDPR or public-sector data-protection requirements apply to you
- You'd rather back the European tech ecosystem
Stick with Heroku if…
- You depend on integrations only available in the Salesforce ecosystem
- Your organisation has no EU data-residency constraints
- Migration costs outweigh the jurisdiction benefits for now
About Scalingo
Scalingo lets developers deploy at lightning speed while keeping data sovereign in Europe. It is the first European Platform as a Service certified for Health Data Hosting (HDS) and ISO 27001, with datacenters located in France and a SecNumCloud region for regulated workloads that require the highest French government assurance level.
The platform supports git-based deployments, autoscaling triggered by metrics, zero-downtime rolling releases, managed databases with point-in-time recovery, and automatic failover for high availability. Encryption at rest and in transit is on by default, and managed vector databases such as pgvector and OpenSearch KNN make Scalingo a natural fit for AI-driven applications built on PostgreSQL and MongoDB.
Key benefits:
- Git-based deploys that ship code to production in under a minute
- Autoscaling driven by CPU, memory, and request-rate metrics
- Managed databases with backups, point-in-time recovery, and HA failover
- Vector search through pgvector and OpenSearch KNN for AI workloads
- SecNumCloud region for public-sector and highly regulated applications
Scalingo is headquartered in Strasbourg, France, with all datacenters located on European soil and all data subject to European jurisdiction only. The platform holds ISO 27001 and HDS certifications, offers a SecNumCloud IaaS region, and is fully GDPR-compliant, making it a genuine sovereign alternative to US hyperscaler PaaS offerings.
Trusted by the French Ministère de l'Intérieur handling 20,000 requests per minute, Yespark with 20+ daily deployments, and healthcare AI platform Heloa Health.
Why choose Scalingo over Heroku?
The decisive argument is data jurisdiction. Heroku is headquartered in the United States, which means personal data processed through it can be subject to non-EU legal regimes: the US CLOUD Act, FISA 702, or similar laws depending on the provider. After the 2020 Schrems II ruling, EU organisations must carry out a transfer impact assessment for every such data flow.
Scalingo removes that overhead. As a France-based provider, it operates under EU GDPR, and data stays inside the EU/EEA by default. For regulated sectors such as health, public administration, and finance, that's not a nice-to-have but a requirement. For everyone else, it's concentration-risk insurance: you avoid depending on a single jurisdiction that can change the rules without warning.