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 2025).

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Amazon AWS vs. Heroku

September 2025

Helped 871,469 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

7.2

Number of Reviews

257

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 October 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.6%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heroku is 3.4%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon AWS	13.6%
Heroku	3.4%
Other	83.0%

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.

Read full review

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.

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

"There are many valuable features, I find the EMR in the platform easy to use and to learn."

"The most valuable features are how stable and easy to use Amazon AWS is."

"Amazon AWS has improved a lot on security and is very good. Additionally, You can integrate your own security into their AWS platform."

"AWS is stable."

"The most valuable features I have found are the Database Migration Service (DMS) for monitoring the host and routing, Route 53, and EC2 tools. The DMS is not available in any other solution that I am aware of. They have a very flexible and professional solution."

"One of the most valuable features is that Amazon AWS has a lot of data centers and regions where we can position our virtual machines for leverage. Amazon AWS is also easy to use. You can quickly spin up something, use Explorer, building proofs of concept, things like that. Once the proof of concept is built once and we know how things are going to look from a production perspective, we try to move everything to the data centers. These features and the ease of use are the main reasons why we use AWS."

"I like ETL, the EC2 platform, and Route 53. These features are a great complement to the basic infrastructure of any company. The AWS platform has many features, but the fundamental cloud infrastructure is the most important."

"The services that we are using have frequent updates, at least twice a year. They provide a new version that has more capabilities or features that fit our process and procedures."

More Amazon AWS pros

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

"What I found most valuable about this solution is that it's easy to use and integrate with GitHub actions."

"The product is stable."

"The solution's most valuable feature is the auto maintenance of databases."

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

"It's easy to push a change and to deploy new things."

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

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

More Heroku pros

Cons

"I would like to see CloudFormation made more in the programming way of thinking."

"Its interface could be better because there are so many services right now in the product that it is quite difficult to navigate around in this. Its interface could be a subject of improvement."

"We have had several issues with the products and services but as of now, there are no good alternatives."

"As far as the automation is concerned, the backups should be scaled."

"In a future release, I would like to see more support for AI because it is the future."

"They need to improve the engines' availability of services since they have been reducing that availability."

"An easier way to determine estimated costs quickly would be helpful."

"The price could be better."

More Amazon AWS cons

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

"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."

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

"We have to do daily restarts of some processes, which is annoying, and the support for custom CI could be better."

"Heroku doesn't support Docker images on the CI infrastructure."

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

"Heroku should increase its slug size limits."

"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."

More Heroku cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 solution is expensive, and I rate it an eight out of ten."

"Billing for cloud services can be difficult at times."

"Amazon AWS is on the cheaper side, as their pricing is more competitive. There are no additional costs besides the license. However, Azure sells Microsoft licenses, so they have an advantage."

"The pricing is fair."

"The pricing is reasonable. It's not expensive, nor will it be cheap, but the free credits initially given provide leverage for new companies to start their businesses."

"The pricing of Amazon is higher than that of SalesForce."

"Amazon AWS has pay-as-you-go options available."

More Amazon AWS pricing and cost advice

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

"Its price is very good."

"The tool is free."

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."

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

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

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

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	112

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 do you like most about Heroku?

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

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.

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Amazon AWS

Comparisons

Compared 23% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS

Compared 9% of the time

Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS

Compared 9% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Amazon AWS

Compared 7% of the time

More Amazon AWS Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 17% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Heroku

Compared 11% of the time

AWS Fargate vs Heroku

Compared 9% of the time

Render vs Heroku

Compared 8% of the time

Google App Engine vs Heroku

Compared 7% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Product Reports

Download Amazon AWS product report

Amazon AWS

October 2025

Download Heroku product report

October 2025

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.