Competitor facts checked on November 11, 2026 on the vendor's own pages. Prices change: check them before you decide.
| Gheima | Heroku | |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest always-on app | Dev plan, 90 MAD a month, 2 GB of memory to share across services | Basic dyno, $7 a month, 0.5 GB |
| Free plan | Yes, no card. Web services sleep after 30 minutes without traffic. One Postgres database up to 512 MB, without backups | No. Eco is $5 a month for 1,000 dyno hours and sleeps after 30 minutes without traffic |
| Managed PostgreSQL | Included in the plan: 1 on Dev, more on higher plans | Essential-0, $5 a month, 1 GB, no rollback |
| Where it runs | Oracle Cloud, Casablanca region (ma-1) | United States or Europe (the city is not named). No region in Africa |
| How you pay | Bank card through a Moroccan payment gateway, or bank transfer for a yearly plan or a top-up of 1,000 MAD or more | Credit or debit card (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB) |
| Currency and invoices | MAD, with an invoice that can carry your ICE. No TVA added today | US dollars. Invoiced contracts are no longer offered to new customers |
| Git providers | GitHub and GitLab | GitHub. No first-party GitLab integration |
| Spend control | Fixed plan price. Usage beyond the allowance is paid only from a prepaid budget you set, which starts at 0 MAD | No spend limit listed |
| Support on the cheapest paid plan | Email, within 2 business days | Best effort, through the help portal |
Where Heroku is stronger
- SOC 1, 2 and 3 and ISO 27001 reports, and PCI DSS and HIPAA on Shield.
- Ten Private Spaces regions on top of the United States and Europe.
- The Elements marketplace, with add-ons for most services an app needs.
- Autoscaling on Performance, Private and Shield dynos.
- Years of production use at a scale Gheima has not reached.
Where Gheima is weaker today
- New workloads run in one region, Casablanca. There is no second region to fail over to.
- No third-party security certification (such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001) yet.
- No contractual uptime SLA yet. The status page shows how we are doing.
- Automatic PHP builds are paused while the PHP the builder installs is affected by a security flaw; PHP apps deploy from a Dockerfile in the meantime.
- Sign-up is by invite during the private beta.
What Heroku says about its own future
On 6 February 2026 Heroku wrote that it is "transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support", and that it is prioritising quality "rather than introducing new features". It also wrote that nothing changes for customers using Heroku today.
Moving a Heroku app to Gheima
- 1
Connect the repository
Create a service from the same GitHub or GitLab repository. Gheima detects the stack with Nixpacks, or you set the build and start commands yourself.
- 2
Copy the config vars
Export them to a .env file and push it with
gheima env push, or paste them into the service's environment variables. - 3
Move the database
Create a managed Postgres database, then restore a
pg_dumpof your Heroku database into it withpg_restore. - 4
Point your domain
Add your domain to the service and update its DNS. Gheima issues and renews the HTTPS certificate.