---
layout: docs
page_title: Waypoint vs. PaaS (Heroku, Vercel, etc.)
description: |-
  Waypoint vs. PaaS systems such as Heroku, Vercel, etc.
---

# Waypoint vs. PaaS (Heroku, Vercel, etc.)

PaaS systems are full platforms that typically provide deployment, URL/DNS
management, configuration, networking, and more. They enable you to
quickly and easily deploy applications, get a public URL, scale up, scale
down, etc.
Heroku, Vercel, OpenShift, and Cloud Foundry are examples of
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings.

PaaS systems typically constrain the type of applications they can run.
These constraints allow them to provide the rich featureset they advertise.
Common constraints imposed by PaaS systems are listed below. Note that
the specific constraints vary by service.

- By language - restricting only certain language runtimes such as Ruby,
  JavaScript, Go, etc.

- By networking technology - restricting only HTTP services, not supporting gRPC,
  HTTP/2, UDP, or other protocols. You often cannot put your own load balancer
  or networking rules in place, either.

- By services - restricting to only certain types of databases or other
  supporting services. You often do not have efficient access to cloud services.

- By infrastructure - PaaS systems are typically closed-source, fully managed
  systems. They may offer different regions for deployment, but you may not
  be able to run them on your own infrastructure.

Waypoint is a tool that can be used to deploy to a platform such as Vercel.
Due to the richness of features of platforms, the build, deploy, and release
steps for Waypoint are typically completely deferred to the platform. Features
such as Waypoint logs, exec, configuration continue to work.

Waypoint allows you to have platform-like features without the constraints
of a traditional PaaS. However, Waypoint is _not_ attempting to replace
PaaS systems. Instead, the goal of Waypoint is to make it a more consistent
experience to use a PaaS alongside other technologies such as Kubernetes.
