Scalingo

What Is Scalingo?

The European cloud market has long been caught between two uncomfortable choices: use an American hyperscaler and accept the sovereignty trade-offs, or run your own infrastructure and accept the operational burden. Scalingo occupies a deliberate middle ground. Founded in Strasbourg in 2015 by Yann Klis and Leo Unbekandt, it is a Platform-as-a-Service that gives development teams the deployment simplicity of Heroku while keeping every byte of data on French soil.

That positioning is not just marketing. Scalingo is ISO 27001:2022 certified and holds HDS (Hébergeur de Données de Santé) accreditation — making it the first and, at the time of writing, only European PaaS certified to host health data under French regulations. Its infrastructure runs on 3DS Outscale data centres in the Paris region, with a SecNumCloud-qualified region available for organisations that need France's highest cloud security standard.

The company raised €3.5 million in Series A funding in 2024 from French investors including BPI France, BNP Paribas, and Caisse d'Epargne. With around 40 employees, it is small by cloud platform standards — but that scale has a practical upside. Support queries go to actual engineers, and the median response time sits at roughly 10 minutes.

Key Features

Git-Push Deployments

Scalingo follows the Heroku model faithfully. You push code via git (or connect GitHub/GitLab for automatic deploys), and the platform handles build, containerisation, and deployment. It supports over 50 languages and frameworks through Heroku-compatible buildpacks — Ruby, Node.js, Python, PHP, Java, Go, Scala, Elixir, and anything else you can package into a buildpack. The deployment pipeline includes zero-downtime rolling restarts and automatic rollback on failure.

Managed Databases

This is where Scalingo punches above its weight. The platform offers managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis (branded as "Scalingo for Caching"), OpenSearch, InfluxDB, and Elasticsearch. Each database runs on its own dedicated instance with isolated data, automated daily backups, and point-in-time recovery. High-availability configurations with multi-node replication are available on business-tier database plans, delivering up to 99.99% SLA for enterprise workloads.

Review Apps

When a developer opens a pull request or merge request, Scalingo can automatically spin up a full copy of the application — code, database, environment variables — as a temporary review app. This is a workflow feature that mid-sized teams rely on heavily, and Scalingo implements it cleanly with both GitHub and GitLab (including self-hosted instances and GitHub Enterprise).

CLI and API

The Scalingo CLI is consistently praised in user reviews as fast, intuitive, and genuinely useful rather than an afterthought. It covers the full platform lifecycle: deployment, scaling, log streaming, database management, and add-on provisioning. The REST API (v1) exposes all platform operations programmatically, enabling infrastructure-as-code workflows and CI/CD integration.

Autoscaling

Scalingo supports both manual and automatic scaling. Horizontal scaling adds container instances; vertical scaling moves containers up through size tiers (S through 2XL). Autoscaling can be configured against custom metrics, though the implementation is less sophisticated than what you would find on a hyperscaler — there is no equivalent of AWS's target-tracking policies or predictive scaling.

Pricing

Scalingo bills per minute with monthly invoicing, which means you pay for actual usage rather than reserved capacity. There is no free tier, but a 30-day trial requires no credit card and provides up to 5 containers (S or M size) plus one instance each of PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis.

Container pricing starts at €7.20 per month for an S container (256 MB RAM) and scales linearly: M at €14.40 (512 MB), L at €28.80 (1 GB), XL at €57.60 (2 GB), and 2XL at €115.20 (4 GB). Database add-ons are billed separately and follow a similar tiered structure.

For a typical production application running two M containers and a managed PostgreSQL instance, you are looking at roughly €50-70 per month — reasonable for a managed PaaS, though not cheap compared to running your own VPS on Hetzner or OVHcloud. The premium buys you managed infrastructure, compliance certifications, and operational simplicity. Whether that trade-off works depends on whether your team's time is more expensive than the platform markup.

Enterprise pricing with dedicated resources and enhanced SLAs is available on request.

EU Compliance & Privacy

Compliance is Scalingo's strongest card, and the company plays it well. As a French SAS headquartered in Strasbourg, it falls under EU jurisdiction by default. All infrastructure runs on 3DS Outscale data centres in France — no data leaves the country, let alone the EU.

The certification stack is genuinely impressive for a company of this size. ISO 27001:2022 covers information security management. HDS certification permits hosting of health data under French law — a requirement for any application processing patient records, clinical data, or health-related personal information. The SecNumCloud-qualified region (osc-secnum-fr1) meets ANSSI's most demanding cloud security framework, positioning Scalingo for public sector and defence-adjacent workloads.

For GDPR purposes, Scalingo acts as a data processor with a standard DPA. There are no sub-processors outside the EU, no transatlantic data transfers, and no ambiguity about which jurisdiction governs your data. For organisations that have spent painful months negotiating SCCs or assessing US cloud providers under Schrems II, Scalingo's compliance posture is refreshingly straightforward.

Who It's Best For

Regulated industries in France and the EU — healthcare, fintech, public sector. The HDS and SecNumCloud credentials are not nice-to-haves; they are hard requirements for many procurement processes. Scalingo is one of very few PaaS options that can clear these bars.

Small to mid-sized development teams that want Heroku-style simplicity without the sovereignty concerns. If your team is 3-20 developers shipping a web application or API, Scalingo removes the infrastructure management burden while keeping data in Europe.

Agencies and consultancies delivering client projects with compliance requirements. The Review Apps feature, git-based deployment workflow, and per-minute billing make it practical for managing multiple client applications on a single platform.

Teams migrating from Heroku after Salesforce's 2022 free tier removal and ongoing pricing increases. Scalingo's buildpack compatibility means many Heroku applications can migrate with minimal code changes.

The Verdict

Scalingo is not trying to be AWS. It is a focused, well-executed PaaS that does one thing — deploy and run web applications — with a level of EU compliance that no American platform can match and few European ones attempt. The developer experience is genuinely good, the managed database offering is comprehensive, and the support is responsive in a way that large cloud providers simply are not.

The trade-offs are real. The ecosystem is small. There are no global regions. The web dashboard could use more polish. And the lack of a free tier means there is a cost barrier for hobby projects and early-stage exploration. For teams that need object storage, a CDN, or a WAF, you will need to look elsewhere and integrate separately.

But for its target audience — European development teams building web applications under regulatory constraints — Scalingo delivers exactly what it promises. The compliance certifications are genuine, the infrastructure is sovereign, and the platform stays out of your way. In a market where "EU-hosted" often means "we rent AWS Frankfurt," Scalingo's commitment to French-only infrastructure on a qualified cloud provider is a meaningful differentiator.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Scalingo suitable for production workloads?

Yes. Scalingo offers high-availability database configurations with up to 99.99% SLA, zero-downtime deployments, and automated backups with point-in-time recovery. It is used in production by healthcare organisations, fintechs, and public sector bodies in France.

Can I migrate from Heroku to Scalingo easily?

In most cases, yes. Scalingo uses Heroku-compatible buildpacks, so applications built for Heroku typically deploy with minimal changes. The main adjustments involve environment variable naming, add-on provisioning, and any Heroku-specific features like Heroku Postgres extensions.

Does Scalingo support Docker containers?

Scalingo primarily uses buildpacks for deployment, not raw Docker containers. However, you can use custom buildpacks to deploy virtually any technology that runs on Linux. If your workflow requires full Docker control, a container-native platform like Scaleway Kubernetes or OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes may be a better fit.

What databases does Scalingo manage?

Scalingo offers managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis (as "Scalingo for Caching"), OpenSearch, InfluxDB, and Elasticsearch. Each runs on a dedicated instance with automated backups, encryption at rest, and optional high-availability replication.

How does Scalingo's pricing compare to Clever Cloud?

Both are French PaaS providers with similar deployment models. Scalingo's per-minute billing and container-based pricing tend to be slightly more transparent. Clever Cloud offers more runtime options and global regions. Scalingo has stronger compliance certifications (HDS, SecNumCloud path). The choice typically comes down to whether compliance credentials or geographic flexibility matters more to your use case.