GravityKit
GravityKit ships weekly across a whole plugin suite, with an MCP server now part of the lineup.
Comparison · Infra & APIs
Incus vs Heroku
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Incus and Heroku — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Incus vs Heroku: at a glance
What is Incus?
Incus settled its 7.0 LTS, then went straight back to a monthly feature cadence.
7.0.0 LTS landed in early May and became the supported baseline, followed by 7.0.1 as its first patch. The feature branch has not paused: 7.1 in May cleaned up the issues the LTS surfaced, 7.2 in June added migration-compatible hypervisor flags for stateful migration and aligned node-specific network configuration, and 7.3 at the end of July added native Windows and macOS installers to the build workflow, a QMP command timeout, and /32 and /128 addresses for OCI containers. Underneath, QEMU capabilities like SPICE, 9p and virtio audio are increasingly gated on runtime detection rather than assumed.
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.
Incus vs Heroku: editorial side-by-side
Incus
5.0INFRA · APIS
Incus settled its 7.0 LTS, then went straight back to a monthly feature cadence.
◆ Current state
7.0.0 LTS landed in early May and became the supported baseline, followed by 7.0.1 as its first patch. The feature branch has not paused: 7.1 in May cleaned up the issues the LTS surfaced, 7.2 in June added migration-compatible hypervisor flags for stateful migration and aligned node-specific network configuration, and 7.3 at the end of July added native Windows and macOS installers to the build workflow, a QMP command timeout, and /32 and /128 addresses for OCI containers. Underneath, QEMU capabilities like SPICE, 9p and virtio audio are increasingly gated on runtime detection rather than assumed.
◆ Where it's heading
The rhythm is a monthly feature release running alongside a long-term branch, and the recent work leans toward reach rather than new primitives: clients built natively for Windows and macOS, translations updated in nearly every release, feature gating so the same daemon behaves correctly across host configurations. Stateful migration getting migration-compatible CPU flags is the most operationally significant item, since it is what makes live migration work across non-identical hosts.
◆ Prediction
The cadence in this window is a feature release roughly every four to six weeks with LTS patches interleaved, so a 7.4 is the expected next step. The entries give no indication of a headline feature queued for it.
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.
Incus alternatives
Other Infra & APIs products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Tap any card for the full editorial trajectory or compare directly with Incus.
LibreSpeed
After a two-year redesign, LibreSpeed is adding tests instead of polishing pixels.
Nautobot
A security advisory cycle forced Nautobot to break its REST API on both supported branches at once.
Gatekeeper
Gatekeeper grew a package manager for policies — and a benchmark to prove they are not too slow.
GoCD
GoCD's changelog is one maintainer keeping a 2010s CI server running on current runtimes.
Firecracker
Firecracker's microVMs can now grow and shrink devices while running.
Heroku alternatives
Other Infra & APIs products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Tap any card for the full editorial trajectory or compare directly with Heroku.
immudb
immudb made itself speak Postgres — while its announced v2 rearchitecture sits unfinished.
Sonic
Sonic is shipping tokenizer control and a dependency diet, two tags at a time.
Postgres Operator
Zalando's Postgres Operator finally shipped v2 — and had to reissue it within a day.
NebulaGraph
A graph database spending its releases on query-language parity and traversal speed.
Manticore Search
Manticore tags a GitHub release per commit, so the real news is one entry in five.
pgBackRest
PostgreSQL 19 support lands, and pgBackRest stops letting you run most commands as root.
Recent activity from Incus and Heroku
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1d agoHerokuPostgres 18 GA and Postgres 15 deprecation; Python 3.14.7 and 3.13.15
- 7d agoIncusNative Windows and macOS installers; QMP command timeouts
- 23d agoHeroku.NET SDK updates across the 8.0, 9.0 and 10.0 lines
- 24d agoHerokuPostgres 18 enters beta; sbt 2 supported for Scala apps
- 25d agoHerokuHeroku-22, Heroku-24 and Heroku-26 stacks updated
- 27d agoIncusFirst patch release on the 7.0 LTS branch
- 28d agoHerokuPython buildpacks updated to Pipenv 2026.6.2 and uv 0.11.28
- 29d agoHerokuNode.js 26.5.0 now available
- 1mo agoIncusMigration-compatible hypervisor flags for stateful migration
- 2mo agoIncusFixes for issues surfaced by the 7.0 release
- 3mo agoIncusIncus 7.0 LTS, with runtime-detected QEMU feature gating
- 4mo agoIncusVolume snapshots while attached; OVN dhcp gateway option
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Incus and Heroku?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Incus and Heroku are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 5.0 vs 5.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Incus better than Heroku?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Incus and Heroku are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 5.0 vs 5.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Incus?
Top Incus alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Incus alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/incus for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Heroku?
Top Heroku alternatives in Infra & APIs 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.