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Comparison · DevOps
Heroku vs Rivet
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Heroku and Rivet — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Heroku vs Rivet: at a glance
| Feature | Heroku | Rivet |
|---|---|---|
| Sector | DevOps, Infra & APIs | DevOps |
| Velocity score | 5.0 | 7.5 |
| Sparks · 30d | 0 | 3 |
| Top themes | managed postgres, runtime upkeep, deprecation cadence, buildpacks | actors, ai agents, sqlite, forking |
| Last editorial update | 3mo ago | 2d ago |
| Website | Visit → | — |
What is Heroku?
Runtime bumps fill the changelog; the managed Postgres line is where Heroku actually moves.
Day to day, Heroku's changelog is language-runtime upkeep: Python, Node, Ruby, Go, PHP, JRuby and .NET point releases, buildpack refreshes for Pipenv and uv, and periodic rebuilds of the Heroku-22, Heroku-24 and Heroku-26 stacks now maintained in parallel. The exception is the managed database. Postgres 18 entered beta on 14 July and reached general availability on 4 August, and Heroku deprecated Postgres 15 on the same day.
What is Rivet?
Rivet Actors can now fork in 20 ms, SQLite database included, without copying data.
Rivet builds infrastructure for long-lived actors and AI agents: BYOC, OpenTelemetry tracing, actor-scoped JWTs and agentOS Hosted VMs. The 3.0 Preview made Rivet a single stateless binary on S3, and the Rust SDK reached general availability on 6 November. On 11 November Rivet added actor forking: a fork starts in 20 ms with the original actor's state and SQLite database and costs nothing until it writes.
Heroku vs Rivet: editorial side-by-side
Heroku
5.0DEVOPSINFRA · APIS
Runtime bumps fill the changelog; the managed Postgres line is where Heroku actually moves.
◆ Current state
Day to day, Heroku's changelog is language-runtime upkeep: Python, Node, Ruby, Go, PHP, JRuby and .NET point releases, buildpack refreshes for Pipenv and uv, and periodic rebuilds of the Heroku-22, Heroku-24 and Heroku-26 stacks now maintained in parallel. The exception is the managed database. Postgres 18 entered beta on 14 July and reached general availability on 4 August, and Heroku deprecated Postgres 15 on the same day.
◆ Where it's heading
The platform is running two clocks at once. One is a near-daily maintenance cadence that keeps supported runtimes current and rarely changes behaviour. The other is a deliberate, publicly staged lifecycle for the data services, where a major version is walked from beta to GA and the version three releases behind is retired in the same announcement. Kafka is on the same track, with 2.8 and 3.7 deprecations and a revised version-support policy posted in late July.
◆ Prediction
Given that Postgres 15's deprecation was announced alongside 18's general availability, the next concrete step is a published end-of-life date and forced-upgrade window for Postgres 15. The runtime bumps will continue at their current weekly rhythm.
Rivet
7.5DEVOPS
Rivet Actors can now fork in 20 ms, SQLite database included, without copying data.
◆ Current state
Rivet builds infrastructure for long-lived actors and AI agents: BYOC, OpenTelemetry tracing, actor-scoped JWTs and agentOS Hosted VMs. The 3.0 Preview made Rivet a single stateless binary on S3, and the Rust SDK reached general availability on 6 November. On 11 November Rivet added actor forking: a fork starts in 20 ms with the original actor's state and SQLite database and costs nothing until it writes.
◆ Where it's heading
Rivet keeps turning its S3-backed storage engine into features for agent workloads. Copy-on-write forking follows from the 3.0 storage design and gives agents a cheap way to branch a session, try something and discard it. The SDK and auth work of the past two months points to Rivet positioning actors as the runtime for agent backends.
◆ Prediction
Forking is likely to show up next in agentOS and the Pi integrations as a way to branch agent runs; the entries do not say when 3.0 leaves preview.
Alternatives to Heroku and Rivet
Other DevOps products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Heroku or Rivet.
Appsmith
Appsmith 2.7 makes its MCP agent ask before deleting widgets and blocks stale edits.
Apache Arrow Rust
Arrow Rust cuts release candidates on three older lines at once.
Sanity
Sanity's MCP server now explains failed validations and stops skipping them.
GitHub
GitHub sets a December 8 cutoff for ARM32 Actions runners and opens AI Scan to the API.
Manticore Search
Manticore keeps patching 31.x, now fixing a FREEZE crash and a DocID ordering bug.
See all Heroku alternatives → · See all Rivet alternatives →
Recent activity from Heroku and Rivet
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 2d agoRivetIntroducing OpenOrange: Run Cloudflare Workers Anywhere ⚡
- 3d agoRivetIntroducing Actor Forking for SQLite ⚡
- 8d agoRivetRust SDK for Rivet Actors Is Now Generally Available
- 19d agoRivetIntroducing Rivet 3.0 Preview ⚡
- 1mo agoRivetIntroducing agentOS 0.4 & Hosted VMs
- 1mo agoRivetIntroducing Pi Durable for Rivet
- 3mo agoHerokuPostgres 18 GA and Postgres 15 deprecation; Python 3.14.7 and 3.13.15
- 4mo agoHeroku.NET SDK updates across the 8.0, 9.0 and 10.0 lines
- 4mo agoHerokuPostgres 18 enters beta; sbt 2 supported for Scala apps
- 4mo agoHerokuHeroku-22, Heroku-24 and Heroku-26 stacks updated
- 4mo agoHerokuPython buildpacks updated to Pipenv 2026.6.2 and uv 0.11.28
- 4mo agoHerokuNode.js 26.5.0 now available
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Heroku and Rivet?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Rivet is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 7.5 vs 5.0), with 3 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Heroku better than Rivet?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Rivet is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 7.5 vs 5.0), with 3 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other DevOps products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Heroku?
Top Heroku alternatives in DevOps are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Heroku alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/heroku for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Rivet?
Top Rivet alternatives in DevOps are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Rivet alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/rivet for the full list with editorial commentary on each.