Keel vs Heroku

Keel offers a Heroku-like workflow on AWS resources in your own account. Both support buildpacks, release commands, process types, config vars, and command-line deployments; the main differences are infrastructure ownership and pricing.

Keep your workflow

Build it your way. Bring a Dockerfile and Keel builds that. Don't have one and it uses Cloud Native Buildpacks instead, so asset precompilation and dependency detection work the way they do today.

The same one-command deploy. keel deploy builds the image, runs your migrations, and rolls out every service. keel rollback puts it back in seconds.

The same release step. Migrations run before anyone sees the new version. If they fail, the deploy stops and your current version keeps serving.

The same git-driven deploy. Every deploy is one specific commit, built from the repo you already push to.

Command for command

Heroku	Keel
git push heroku main	keel deploy
heroku ps	keel ps
heroku ps:scale web=3	keel scale web 3
Autoscaling — dashboard only, Performance tier and up	keel autoscale set web --min 2 --max 10 --cpu 60
heroku logs --tail	keel logs -f
heroku run rake db:migrate	keel run -- rake db:migrate
heroku run bash	keel run -i -- bash
heroku config:set KEY=value	keel config set KEY=value
heroku releases	keel history
heroku rollback	keel rollback
heroku domains:add	keel domains add
heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql	keel services add database
Heroku Scheduler	type: scheduled with a cron
heroku pg:psql	psql "$(keel db url)"

Own the infrastructure

Your data stays in your account. Databases run in RDS inside your VPC, and logs remain in CloudWatch. Keel has no hosted control plane in the data path.

Existing AWS resources are close at hand. Bind resources such as S3 buckets or peered networks with scoped IAM and private networking where available.

AWS-native isolation. Keel supports private subnets, a security group per service, managed WAF rules, and least-privilege IAM task roles.

Independent resource sizing. Set CPU and memory for each service instead of choosing a predefined dyno size.

Pay AWS, not a platform

Keel does not add a usage margin or seat fee; you pay AWS directly.

• AWS credits and enterprise agreements apply to the resources Keel creates.
• Savings Plans can reduce eligible compute costs for steady workloads.

Price your own config before you build it:

keel cost              # monthly baseline, from keel.yml alone — no credentials needed
keel cost --all        # every environment

keel cost budget --email [email protected] then sets an AWS Budget with a forecast alert. More on cost →

See every deploy

Keel checks the working tree, branch, remote commit, and GitHub connection before building. During deployment, the dashboard shows build status and ECS rollout progress. Afterwards, use keel history to review releases and keel rollback to restore an earlier task definition. More on the dashboard →

Moving across

Heroku	Keel
Procfile process types	services: with command
Release phase	release:
Config vars	keel config set — stored in SSM, injected into tasks
Postgres / Redis add-ons	keel services add database / cache
Other add-ons	keel resources add for S3, SQS, SNS
Custom domains	keel domains add — Route 53 + ACM
Your data	Dump from Heroku Postgres, restore into RDS

Most apps leaving Heroku look like Deploying Rails: a web process, a Sidekiq worker, migrations in a release command.

Get started → · Back to comparisons