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: March 2026).

Amazon AWS vs. Heroku

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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

7.1

Number of Reviews

258

Ranking in other categories

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

Heroku

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

13th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.6%, up from 13.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heroku is 3.5%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon AWS	13.6%
Heroku	3.5%
Other	82.9%

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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Faizan Haider

Senior Software Engineer at Aldaim Solutions

Used for server deployment and provides auto maintenance of databases

Heroku is deployed on the cloud. We can deploy our private and public projects over at Heroku. Most of the time, when we are starting any new project from scratch, we have to implement our MVP for that project or the core idea. We are unsure how our traffic flow will go or the actual production environment requirements. We don't want to spend the most on the server sites, so then we can use it with our go-to plan for Heroku, and all the resources are available in the basic plan with the minimum expenses. So, it helps us to deploy and make our features available online at the minimum cost. Once we know our needs, we can add the professional add-ons and shift it to another platform. Heroku supports any resource listed in the marketplace. We just have to deploy our AI solutions, and Heroku can also support AI projects. I would recommend the solution to other users. I advise users not to purchase extra add-ons but to make scalable resources so that they can use all the resources efficiently. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The stability of the solution is very good."

"The most valuable feature is scalability, as it is very easy to scale."

"The experience with Amazon AWS is error-free. That was also, of course, something that I really appreciate. That means it's really well-tested and, as published or as declared."

"For testing, it is a cheap alternative to having to build your own labs."

"I especially like the flexibility and scalability of the solution."

"The maturity that the solution offers is its most valuable aspect, as it was one of the first solutions to market and has a long track record, making it very mature in terms of product delivery, very stable, highly scalable, very feature-rich with a strong third-party ecosystem, and enriched with great security features and capabilities."

"It has helped reduce the cost by rationing the computing power and paying only on a per usage basis, instead of provisioning unneeded, idle, or unutilized computing power that is used only at 20% of its capacity or time."

"The solution works very quickly compared to the SQL Server on Tran, and we can access it from anywhere."

More Amazon AWS pros

"One of the best things about Heroku is that it is very easy and straightforward to deploy an application."

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

"The product is stable."

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

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

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

"My advice for anybody who is considering Heroku is that it's really simple to use, it's stable, and it is very powerful for continuous deployment."

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

More Heroku pros

Cons

"It's expensive. It costs you an arm and a leg."

"A person with no AWS experience might find it overwhelming at first."

"AWS should provide even more support and engagement to accelerate the adoption of new services and features."

"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of hybrid Kubernetes management."

"Integration with in-house applications could be simplified."

"The solution could have better security and more integration with other platforms."

"I think Amazon could improve some of the security or fine-grained access for metadata and many other things."

"In general, the cost management in Amazon is complicated. It's not too straightforward."

More Amazon AWS cons

"They could flesh out some of their analytics a little more."

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

"Slow restart on servers"

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

"Heroku should increase its slug size limits."

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

"Heroku had an authentication problem a few months ago, but they solved it."

"We don't find the pipelines intuitive. The user experience could be better. Having to set up multiple apps, then a pipeline, seems like an overkill on the amount of work to do."

More Heroku cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are not happy with the general price and find most of Amazon's products to be quite expensive."

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

"As a startup business, it's very well priced, but if a number of transactions go up, clients have voiced that they are in a situation and feel a type of pressure and desire to move out of AWS."

"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."

"The Oracle licensing is higher than it is with Amazon AWS."

"If I was going to compare the cost of Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure, they are approximately the same."

"It is very expensive, you have to be very cautious."

"Technical support is expensive."

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."

"Its price is very good."

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

"The tool is free."

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."

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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

13%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

Computer Software Company

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	131
Midsize Enterprise	48
Large Enterprise	114

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 32% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Amazon AWS

Compared 6% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Amazon AWS

Compared 6% of the time

Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon AWS Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 12% of the time

Render vs Heroku

Compared 11% of the time

Google App Engine vs Heroku

Compared 9% of the time

Engine Yard Cloud vs Heroku

Compared 7% of the time

AWS Fargate vs Heroku

Compared 7% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Product Reports

Amazon AWS

Download Amazon AWS product report

Download Heroku product report

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS

No data available

Overview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an adopted cloud platform that offers more than 200 fully featured services from data centers located across the globe. This is a scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that is utilized by thousands of businesses of different sizes around the world. The product offers a wide variety of solutions for its customers, which allows them to launch applications regardless of their industry.

The most common use cases for AWS are:

Application hosting: Clients can take advantage of on-demand infrastructure to power their applications. The product supports multiple types of apps, varying from hosted internal applications to software as a service (SaaS) offerings.
Websites: With AWS, clients can satisfy their web hosting needs through a scalable platform for their websites.
Backup and storage: AWS offers reliable data storage services, which allow clients to store their data and build dependable backups for all of their valuable information.
Enterprise IT: The product allows companies to host internal- or external-facing IT applications in a highly secure environment.
Content delivery: Users who want to distribute content to end users worldwide can do so quickly and easily through the high data transfer speeds of this solution.
Databases: AWS offers a variety of database solutions, which include hosted enterprise database software as well as non-relational database solutions.

Amazon AWS supports a global cloud infrastructure with AWS Region and Availability Zone models, which contribute to the high availability of enterprise applications running on the solution. Amazon AWS has an extensive array of products that serve different purposes, including:

Analytics
Application integration
Blockchain
Business applications
Cloud financial management
Compute
Contact center
Containers
Database
Developer tools
End-user computing
Front-end web and mobile
Games
Internet of Things (IoT)
Machine learning
Management and governance
Quantum technologies
Robotics
Satellite
Security, identity and compliance, and others

The products and services that Amazon AWS delivers to these sectors provide a large computing capacity which is quicker and cheaper compared to building a physical server farm. Among the most popular services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2," and Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as "S3."

Amazon AWS Features

The wide array of products that Amazon AWS offers consist of different functions that utilize cloud computing across different sectors. The features of this solution can be categorized in the following ways:

Data and relationship management: With Amazon AWS, companies can manage multiple hierarchies of directory data, they can define attributes for objects and relationships, set custom inheritance rules for directories, and create multiple schemas.
Schema management: This group of features allows users to extend their directory schema according to their needs. They can extend it through multiple applications that share a single directory while avoiding duplication of data.
Fully managed infrastructure: This feature decreases time and costs for administrative tasks for companies regarding scaling infrastructure and managing servers.
Searching feature: The Cloud Directory feature of AWS offers built-in search capabilities which can cover sets of highly connected data and eliminate the need of creating nested queries.
Built-in data encryption: Users can benefit from high levels of protection of their data with AWS's products. The data in the cloud is automatically encrypted at rest and in transit through 256-bit encryption keys, managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
Object policies: This feature allows Amazon AWS users to organize objects in different hierarchies by providing a framework for applications to evaluate policy assignments.

Amazon AWS Benefits

This product delivers various benefits across all industries that utilize its services. The greatest advantages of using Amazon AWS include:

High product functionality is supported by machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, data lakes, and analytics.
The solution has a high level of security, which is backed by a deep set ofmore than 100 cloud security tools.
Amazon AWS has an easy-to-use interface that makes it possible for clients to host applications.
The product is very flexible in terms of which operating system, programming language, web app platform, and database clients can use.
AWS is a scalable and highly secure global computing infrastructure, supported by the reliability of Amazon.com.
Clients can utilize the Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing tools to personally scale up or down applications, depending on their demand.
Users can choose from an array of payment options, including paying for only the services they need, as well as a free trial to select the ones most useful for them.

Reviews from Real Users

Greg G., a chief executive officer at a tech services company, ranks Amazon AWS highly, as he states that the solution is flexible, scales well, and offers good stability.

A technology manager technology at a computer software company values Amazon AWS because it is extremely cost-efficient, easy to upgrade and expand storage with greatly improved interfaces.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Established in 2007, Heroku is a cloud application platform providing a streamlined, efficient place for web app developers to create and deploy their applications. Heroku is designed to maximize developer productivity. With the entire web application development process available on the Herokucloud, creating and rolling out web apps has been made more efficient, convenient, and cost-effective than ever before.

Sample Customers

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

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

Amazon AWS vs. Heroku