Amazon AWS vs Heroku comparison

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Amazon AWS

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Amazon AWS and Heroku are competing in the cloud services category. Amazon AWS has the upper hand due to its extensive deployment capabilities, high performance, and wide range of features.

Features: Amazon AWS includes comprehensive deployment features, exceptional load balancing, and robust security integrations, offering an extensive range of connectors. It supports numerous operating systems and programming models, providing flexibility and scalability for various applications. Heroku is recognized for its ease of use, fast deployment, and scalable solutions, supporting quick application development without needing infrastructure management.

Room for Improvement: Amazon AWS could improve its integration with other platforms, streamline its sorting model for simplicity, and reduce licensing costs. Enhancements in security features and cost transparency are also needed. Heroku users express concerns about pricing, limited free service options, and the requirement for more scalability. The platform lacks Docker CI integration, and daily restarts can be an issue for some users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon AWS is known for its powerful deployment options and wide support across hybrid and public cloud models. Customer service is generally positive, though response times can be slower than some competitors. Heroku excels in deployment ease, offering rapid application implementation with minimal maintenance, focusing on public cloud functionality. Its support is good but could benefit from faster response times.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon AWS features a competitive pay-as-you-go model, noted for scalability, though transparency in cost predictions requires attention. Some users consider it expensive yet beneficial due to the lack of initial investments. Heroku's pricing is perceived as high at scale, although the free tier appeals to small-scale projects. AWS targets large-scale global infrastructure, while Heroku provides cost-effective options for swift deployments with minimal infrastructure management.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon AWS vs. Heroku Report (Updated: September 2026).

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Amazon AWS vs. Heroku

September 2026

Helped 912,069 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon AWS

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

260

Ranking in other categories

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)

Heroku

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

12th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.7%, up from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heroku is 2.8%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon AWS	13.7%
Heroku	2.8%
Other	83.5%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Asif Meem

Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet

Managed cloud services have helped accelerate experiments with flexible configuration options

Sometimes the costs associated with spinning up a service, especially managed services, have implications. For example, if I create a Glue job, that will create S3 buckets and other resources that have cost implications, but once I clean up a Glue job, it does not delete the other accessory resources. Sometimes, I have to go hunting for what resources Amazon AWS might have provisioned and how it is costing behind the scenes. It can be complex depending on your level of expertise. It is not as easy to get started, especially when it comes to secure practices. Amazon AWS is more hands-on than other platforms.

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Cristian-Molina

Senior Developer at Go Coeupas

Has a quick development cycle and continuous integration

The initial setup is straightforward. Heroku integrates well. You only have to push the code, and it automatically deploys the new version. Whether you have permission depends on the application. Currently, I have one application that I deploy myself. I rate the initial setup a nine out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"AWS's containerization is the most useful feature for us."

"The flexibility of the solution is excellent."

"They integrate well with various other solutions."

"I like that all of the features are complimentary."

"We are using it for moving all the banking and insurance domains from on-premises systems to the cloud platform, which is managed by services, right from data integration and data inception to data processing, to advanced visualization and analytics, and we are also using the AI and machine learning aspects as well."

"Easy to access and secure, two important features."

"The product is reliable and quite stable."

"Auto Scaling and CloudWatch Logs are the most valuable features."

More Amazon AWS pros

"I like the tool's scalability, CLI, and dashboards."

"I have been a great fan of Heroku as it simplified my work for many years."

"Lots of integrations"

"Valuable for us was the fast deployment. This means the time to market is improved without pain for developers."

"They solve most of our problems and we don't experience many issues with them."

"The platform is very Node.js-friendly, which is something that is important to us."

"The most valuable feature of Heroku is the continuous integration and applications it provides."

"We, as a startup, can use Heroku and the plenty of possible configurations to scale from the very beginning to a medium-sized company."

More Heroku pros

Cons

"It just needs to be improved from the security perspective."

"It works very well with open-source solutions like Java, but not with .NET technologies."

"The networking is overly complex."

"They currently have fewer regions in Asia, especially in India, China, and other places. They can maybe put more data centers in this region."

"The pricing could be better. It's a bit expensive."

"We would like the system documentation for configuring this solution to be improved, in order to provide better process clarity."

"AWS could use better integration with other products and clouds."

"We had some problems with bandwidth because of high usage."

More Amazon AWS cons

"Their support is good, but they can improve their response time."

"Heroku is pretty stable. We experience the occasional outages."

"Slow restart on servers"

"I improved the application performance by monitoring and adjusting the cleaner configuration to help set better lightweight limits on containers that run the app instances."

"The pricing could be improved because scaling the database becomes costly."

"It's pricing is a little high and could be lowered."

"I think this solution would be improved if free demos were available indefinitely."

"I had an issue recently where my site was down intermittently for unknown reasons. I posted a ticket and 5 days have gone by without any resolution."

More Heroku cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The prices are a bit high."

"From a cost perspective, Amazon AWS is excellent. You need to pay for a license to use AWS, and the license could be cheaper, but in each of the cases and instances I've used AWS, there has been a good chance to save money."

"With Amazon AWS, you pay as you go."

"We need to pay for everything. If someone is a personal user, they get one year free. But if you are using this as a professional or enterprise solution, then your company has to pay. The license pricing is comparable to that of competitors'."

"The solution's pricing depends on your traffic since they charge you based on the traffic, not the servers. The price can go into many, many thousands depending on the traffic."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"Monthly licensing fee."

"The license for Amazon AWS is expensive. I am currently using the free version."

More Amazon AWS pricing and cost advice

"There is a standard fee for a processing unit, they call them "dynos," and then you pay for add-ons."

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."

"I rate the tool's pricing a three out of ten."

"Its price is very good."

"The tool is free."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which PaaS Clouds solutions are best for your needs.

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Comparison Review

it_user8586

Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Aug 14, 2013

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Outsourcing Company

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

10%

Construction Company

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	131
Midsize Enterprise	48
Large Enterprise	120

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	23
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	3

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?

Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...

How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?

How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...

Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure

We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...

What needs improvement with Heroku?

I don't like that the web server crashes every day, every 24 hours. The pricing could be improved because scaling the database becomes costly. The Docker features are not great. You cannot use any ...

What is your primary use case for Heroku?

We use the solution for web applications and web APIs.

What advice do you have for others considering Heroku?

The integration capabilities are great because of the quick integration and the management features. We don't need a lot of expertise and all external DevOps people. Heroku is the easiest platform ...

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Amazon AWS

Comparisons

Compared 20% of the time

SAP Business Technology Platform vs Amazon AWS

Compared 7% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Amazon AWS

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS

Compared 4% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Amazon AWS

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon AWS Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 10% of the time

Google App Engine vs Heroku

Compared 9% of the time

Render vs Heroku

Compared 8% of the time

Engine Yard Cloud vs Heroku

Compared 8% of the time

Virtuozzo Application Platform vs Heroku

Compared 6% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Product Reports

Download Amazon AWS product report

Amazon AWS

September 2026

Download Heroku product report

August 2026

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS

No data available

Overview

Amazon AWS offers cloud services known for ease of use, scalability, and diverse services such as EC2, S3, and Lambda. Its pay-as-you-go pricing and robust security features make it a preferred choice for businesses managing growing demands efficiently.

Amazon AWS provides a comprehensive ecosystem with services like EC2 for computing, S3 for storage, and Lambda for serverless computing. It emphasizes scalability and quick resource provisioning, allowing businesses to handle IT workloads, host websites, and manage analytics seamlessly. AWS integrates a wide range of services, enhancing flexibility and reliability while offering robust security and automated management to streamline operations.

What are the most important features of Amazon AWS?

EC2: Offers scalable computing capacity in the cloud to manage business applications efficiently.
S3: Provides highly secure, durable, and scalable cloud storage solutions for data archiving and backup.
Lambda: Enables running code without provisioning or managing servers, improving application deployment.
Pricing: Employs a pay-as-you-go model, allowing cost-effective resource usage.
Security: Implements comprehensive security protocols to ensure data protection across services.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Scalability: Supports business growth by easily scaling resources according to demand.
Integration: Offers seamless integration capabilities with numerous services, enhancing operational flexibility.
Performance: Provides stable and reliable performance for critical IT workloads and applications.
Management: Features automated management tools that reduce overhead and improve deployment efficiency.

Amazon AWS is widely implemented across industries for cloud computing, infrastructure hosting, and data storage. Businesses in finance, healthcare, and technology sectors leverage AWS for running applications, hosting analytics databases, and deploying scalable solutions. By utilizing tools like EC2, S3, and Lambda, they ensure flexibility and security in infrastructure management and data applications, meeting diverse operational needs effectively.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Heroku offers fast deployment with ease of use and seamless integration capabilities, making it a preferred platform for developers needing reliable continuous integration and scalability.

Heroku is known for handling server-related tasks, allowing developers to concentrate on building application functionality. Its automatic database maintenance and powerful performance are key for projects using Node.js and Ruby on Rails. Users appreciate its simple application deployment and maintenance, supported by a diverse range of plugins. Beyond efficiency, its CLI and dashboards enable a straightforward user experience, essential for developers focused on production, staging, and development environments.

What are Heroku's key features?

Fast Deployment: Offers rapid application deployment with minimal setup.
Continuous Integration: Supports streamlined integration processes for development cycles.
Scalability: Easily scales applications to meet growing demand.
High Availability: Ensures applications remain online and responsive.
Automatic Database Maintenance: Provides hands-off management of database tasks.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Ease of Use: Simplifies complex tasks, allowing developers to focus on coding.
Integration Capabilities: Connects seamlessly with tools like GitHub for updates.
Performance: Delivers consistent, reliable application performance.
Development Flexibility: Supports Node.js, Ruby on Rails, and Docker environments.

Organizations use Heroku to deploy production servers and stage development environments. Educational apps and offsite backends benefit from its Docker support. E-commerce, mobile app development, and web apps leverage Heroku's ability to maintain rapid development cycles and manage server deployment efficiently.

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.

Facebook, UrbanDictionary, Code for America, Mailchimp, Rapportive, GitHub, TED, and Lyft.