Best Heroku Alternatives in 2026: How to Keep Salesforce and Postgres in Sync

Heroku Connect users got some unwelcome news in February 2026: Salesforce put Heroku into sustaining mode, which means the sync tool sitting in your revenue path is no longer being actively developed. This guide walks through what to move to, how the main alternatives actually compare, and how to migrate without dropping a single write.

TL;DR: What is the best Heroku Connect alternative in 2026?The best Heroku Connect alternative for most teams is DBSync Cloud Replication, which provides bi-directional Salesforce and Postgres sync on an actively engineered platform, plus targets beyond Postgres such as Snowflake, SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle.Other strong sync-layer options: Stacksync (real-time, flat pricing) and Skyvia (no-code ELT with a free tier).If you also need to replace Heroku’s app hosting, that is a separate decision: Render, Northflank, and Fly.io lead there. This guide separates the two so you do not turn one migration into three.

What actually changed with Heroku

In February 2026, Salesforce announced that Heroku is shifting to what it calls a sustaining engineering model. In plain terms, the lights stay on. Heroku will keep patching security holes and keeping things stable, but the feature roadmap has stopped and new Enterprise contracts are not being signed. Existing customers can stay and renew.

So Heroku is not dying, and nothing on your account breaks this quarter. The problem is narrower than that, and also more specific: anything you were counting on Heroku to build over the next few years now is not coming. If Heroku Connect is the backbone of your Salesforce pipeline, that frozen roadmap is the part that should worry you, not the hosting. The timeline here comes from Heroku’s own “An Update on Heroku” announcement (Feb 6, 2026).

First, separate the three things called “Heroku”

Three separate products get bundled under the word “Heroku.” Teams that treat them as one decision end up with a six-month program instead of three manageable projects. They have different urgency, different owners, and completely different replacement options.

Layer	What it is	Urgency	Replace with
Managed Postgres	The database add-on	Medium	Neon, Supabase, Crunchy Bridge, AWS RDS/Aurora
Heroku Connect	Bi-directional Salesforce ⇄ Postgres sync	High (revenue path)	DBSync, Stacksync, Skyvia (this guide’s focus)

Your Rails app on two Standard dynos has almost no urgency. Your Heroku Connect instance sitting in the revenue path has quite a lot. This guide focuses on the third layer, the Salesforce sync, because it is the piece under the most active risk and the one the general Heroku app-platform alternative guides barely cover.

Heroku Connect alternatives: comparison table

If you are weighing a Heroku Connect alternative for your Salesforce and Postgres sync, here is how the main options compare on the factors that decide it. Heroku Connect is included as the baseline.

Tool	Sync method	Targets	Bi-directional	Roadmap	Starting point
DBSync Cloud Replication	Near real-time / CDC	Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, Snowflake, Oracle, Redshift, S3	Yes	Actively developed	Free trial
Stacksync	Real-time/event-driven	Postgres (any host) + 200+ apps	Yes	Active	From ~$1,000/mo
Skyvia	Scheduled ELT (to 1 min)	Postgres, many cloud apps	Partial (sync tool)	Active	Freemium
Heroku Connect (baseline)	Polling (10 min min.)	Heroku Postgres only	Yes	Sustaining only	~$4,000/mo add-on
Custom / DIY (CDC)	You build it	Anything	Build it	You maintain	Engineering time

Heroku Connect list pricing is not public, but reported figures for bi-directional sync start around $4,000/month and scale by synced rows, per published Heroku Connect pricing breakdowns. It also polls on a minimum ten-minute interval rather than syncing in real time, and only ever targets Heroku Postgres.

Heroku Postgres alternatives: the database layer

If you are also moving the database off Heroku Postgres, that is the second decision. Keep it separate from the sync choice. A short view of the main options (see our Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS migration guide for the full walkthrough):

Option	Category	Best for	Starting price
Render Postgres	App-adjacent	Like-for-like Heroku feel	From $7/mo
Neon	Dedicated managed	Branching, scale-to-zero	Freemium
Supabase	Dedicated managed	App builders, auth + DB	Freemium
AWS RDS / Aurora	Hyperscaler-native	VPC, compliance, control	Pay-as-you-go
Crunchy Bridge	Dedicated managed	Postgres-first teams	Pay-as-you-go

One due-diligence noteThis category consolidated in 2025 and 2026: Databricks acquired Neon, and Snowflake acquired Crunchy Data. That is a normal sign of a maturing market, but if you are signing a three-year commitment, “who owns this and what is their roadmap” is a fair question, the same one you are asking about Heroku. Always check pricing on the vendor’s own page the day you decide.

The best Heroku Connect alternatives, ranked

Each option below is scored on how well it replaces the Salesforce and Postgres sync that Heroku Connect provides, not on app hosting.

1. DBSync Cloud Replication

This is where we land for most teams leaving Heroku Connect. DBSync Cloud Replication gives you the same pattern Connect did, bi-directional and near real-time Salesforce to Postgres, but on a platform that is still being built, and it is not locked to a single Postgres the way Connect was.

Setup is straightforward. It connects to your Salesforce org and your Postgres database over ordinary connections and runs the sync from there, either cloud-hosted or on your own infrastructure. One detail that matters more than it sounds: it does not need elevated database privileges. Heroku Postgres withholds the replication role, which quietly breaks a lot of migration tools, and DBSync sidesteps that entirely.

What you get:

• Bi-directional sync: database back to Salesforce as well as Salesforce to database
• Targets beyond Postgres: MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Db2, plus Snowflake, Redshift, S3, and Azure Synapse
• Native support for custom objects and Big Objects that Heroku Connect handles poorly
• Multi-org consolidation into a single target database
• Sync-health dashboards and error queues instead of manual health checks

The real difference from Heroku Connect comes down to two things. Connect only ever synced to Heroku Postgres and polled on a schedule; DBSync runs near real-time replication to a range of databases and warehouses, and it does not care where your app or database is hosted. That last point lets you keep the hosting decision separate from the sync decision, which is the whole argument of this guide. Pricing starts with a free trial, with current tiers on the DBSync pricing page.

The honest caveat: DBSync replaces the sync layer, not Heroku’s app hosting. If you are also moving the app off dynos, that is a separate call, and the section above on database alternatives is where to start.

2. Stacksync

Stacksync is the most direct challenger to Heroku Connect, and it does not hide it. Their whole pitch is aimed at teams walking away from Connect. You get real-time, two-way sync between Salesforce and any Postgres (not just Heroku’s), plus a couple hundred other connectors if you need them. They position the product openly as a Heroku Connect alternative.

Pricing is the part people notice. Instead of charging per row, which is what makes Heroku Connect bills climb as your data grows, Stacksync uses flat pricing, reported at roughly $1,000 a month depending on how many syncs and records you run. The trade-off is maturity: it is a younger product, so the ecosystem around it is thinner than what you would get from an integration vendor that has been around for years.

3. Skyvia

Skyvia is the pragmatic pick if what you actually need is Salesforce data landing in Postgres for reporting, not a heavy two-way operational sync. It is no-code, there is a genuine free tier to test with, and it will replicate on a schedule down to about once a minute. It works with Postgres anywhere, Heroku Postgres included.

Worth knowing before you commit: the basic replication is one-directional. Full bi-directional sync lives in a separate Skyvia tool, so if two-way is a hard requirement, price that in from the start.

4. Build it yourself

There is always the option of rolling your own pipeline: pull Salesforce changes through the Bulk and Streaming APIs and land them in Postgres with your own change-data-capture setup. Teams with real data-engineering depth and genuinely odd requirements sometimes go this route.

Just go in clear-eyed about what you are signing up for. Retries, schema drift, error handling, and the 2am pages when a sync silently stalls all become yours to own. For most teams, once you add up the maintenance hours, a managed tool comes out cheaper than the free build.

How to migrate off Heroku Connect with near-zero downtime

The detail every comparison article leaves outHeroku Postgres does not grant the superuser or replication role, and Heroku does not support logical replication for its Postgres instances. That is why tools like AWS DMS cannot replicate a Heroku Postgres database to a non-Heroku target. Almost every target platform’s migration guide assumes exactly the mechanism Heroku withholds. A replication tool that connects over an ordinary database connection, without elevated privileges, avoids this entirely.

A four-step sequence that de-risks the whole thing by running the new pipeline in parallel:

1. Map your current sync. Inventory every Heroku Connect object, field mapping, and trigger you run today, plus every config var.
2. Rebuild in parallel. Stand up the new replication pipeline (for example, DBSync Cloud Replication) syncing to a staging target while Heroku Connect keeps running. No shared downtime.
3. Validate parity. Run row-level reconciliation, source against target, and confirm the new pipeline matches Heroku Connect output before go-live. Point read-only workloads at it for two weeks.
4. Cut over on your schedule. Once verified, disable the Heroku Connect mappings. Because the target has already been running your data, most of the risk was spent quietly in advance.

Five questions that decide your choice

Skip the feature matrix. These narrow the field fastest:

• Where does your compute run? If the app is moving to Render or AWS, favor a database and sync setup that sits close to it.
• Do you need real-time, or is scheduled fine? Reporting can tolerate scheduled ELT; operational two-way sync usually cannot.
• One target or many? If you will also feed Snowflake, SQL Server, or a second org, pick a tool that targets more than Postgres.
• Can your bill be variable? Per-row pricing scales unpredictably with data growth; flat or tiered pricing is easier to forecast.
• Who is on call for the sync? If the answer is “nobody, really,” choose a managed tool whose support is part of the product.

Frequently asked questions

Is Heroku shutting down?

No. In February 2026 Salesforce moved Heroku to a sustaining engineering model, so it is still supported and patched, it just is not getting new features anymore. Your apps keep running; the roadmap is what stopped.

Is there a Heroku Connect alternative?

Yes. DBSync Cloud Replication, Stacksync, and Skyvia all provide Salesforce and Postgres sync. DBSync and Stacksync offer bi-directional, near real-time sync on actively engineered platforms; Skyvia offers no-code ELT with a free tier.

What replaces Heroku Connect for Salesforce sync?

A dedicated replication tool. DBSync Cloud Replication reproduces the Heroku Connect pattern (bi-directional Salesforce to Postgres) and adds targets beyond Postgres such as Snowflake, SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle, running independently of your hosting.

Can I migrate Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS?

Yes, but note that Heroku Postgres does not support logical replication, so tools that rely on it cannot replicate directly. A privilege-light replication tool that connects over a standard database connection is the most practical path.

Does Heroku Postgres support logical replication?

No. Heroku’s support documentation states it does not support logical replication for Heroku Postgres instances, and does not grant the replication role to customer users.

What are the best alternatives to Heroku Postgres?

For the database layer specifically: Render Postgres for a like-for-like feel, Neon or Supabase for dedicated managed Postgres, and AWS RDS or Aurora for hyperscaler-native control and compliance.

Evaluating where your Heroku Connect sync should land?DBSync Cloud Replication gives you bi-directional Salesforce and Postgres sync on an actively engineered platform, with parallel-run migration so there is no gap in your data. Start a free trial or book a migration assessment of your current Heroku Connect setup. Also see our Salesforce to Heroku Postgres sync page.