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Amazon AWS vs Heroku comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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
256
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)
Heroku
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 12.4%, down from 17.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heroku is 3.4%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

HarishMahanta - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable cloud service enhances ERP management with advanced security features
I use Amazon AWS for ERP implementation. My responsibility is to integrate our application into the AWS cloud and provide AI solutions to the infrastructure AWS is stable and has provided a reliable infrastructure for my organization. AWS offers add-on services such as security and automated…
Cristian-Molina - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's easy to manage. We can use a wide range of technologies with AWS."
"AWS is constantly growing in features with every new version. It's a good cloud provider with excellent availability. The integration is good, and their security products are interesting. Amazon is always innovating and delivering new products to customers."
"It is quite easy to provision new virtual services for our use. The procedures are quite straightforward and simple as compared to other competitors, such as Microsoft or Huawei. This is what we are happy about with Amazon AWS. It is pretty mature in terms of the availability of most of the infrastructure components. If you want to deploy a server on your platform, everything is already there in terms of the operating system, network components, securities, and data encryption. It is also quite scalable and stable."
"The capacity to grow dynamically based on our needs is most valuable. We can increase resources dynamically. It is also very reliable and fast to implement."
"Our primary use case is to use the solution for running many relatively small instances for back office applications and various other business important applications."
"Security, quick deployment, and scalability are the top three features for me."
"This solution is used as the basic requirement for any virtual machines use cases, the storage is used for each use case."
"I like the flexibility of this solution."
"The product is stable."
"The platform is very Node.js-friendly, which is something that is important to us."
"What I found most valuable about this solution is that it's easy to use and integrate with GitHub actions."
"Thanks to Heroku, we don't need to do as much direct management in AWS."
"The most valuable feature of Heroku is the continuous integration and applications it provides."
"Valuable for us was the fast deployment. This means the time to market is improved without pain for developers."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the auto maintenance of databases."
"We use Heroku to run generic data. We also use it for our customer development environment. It helps us to build and test websites."
 

Cons

"The pricing of AWS is very unclear. They make it quite confusing."
"We would like the system documentation for configuring this solution to be improved, in order to provide better process clarity."
"We have had several issues with the products and services but as of now, there are no good alternatives."
"The security right now needs improvement. It's not bad, per se. It's just that there's always room for improvement in security."
"The features that should be improved are that there should be better clarity on their invoicing. There are so many things they charge for - high line items in the invoice. I think there should be more clarity and more ease of use with their billing. I'd like to see better ease of use of with the billing console and a clear dashboard to understand the usage."
"Amazon AWS is a very poor product for students. Microsoft Azure is a better solution."
"When you are first starting, the initial setup can be a bit complex, but it gets easier after that."
"Its only cons are on the data warehouse side. AWS' data warehouse Redshift is not as good as it should be."
"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."
"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."
"Their support is good, but they can improve their response time."
"Heroku doesn't support Docker images on the CI infrastructure."
"We would like to be notified when something goes wrong in the process. When something is not working, we should get an alert."
"Heroku should increase its slug size limits."
"Heroku had an authentication problem a few months ago, but they solved it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"In terms of price, there are less expensive options."
"Licensing can be purchased on a yearly basis, which is an auto-renewal. We also have an on-demand on-pay purchase."
"The Oracle licensing is higher than it is with Amazon AWS."
"It is quite expensive in my very personal opinion. Going on-prem in a data center is, for sure, not as expensive as going to AWS, but when it comes to a point where you are raising and growing, it simply makes a lot of sense to stay in AWS. It is awesome in that way. I am not aware of any extra costs."
"In comparison to Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, the database offered by Amazon AWS is relatively expensive. However, the database also offers rich features."
"Much faster than other solutions at a super low cost."
"I find that Amazon AWS is expensive."
"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."
"Its price is very good."
"I rate the tool's pricing a three out of ten."
"The tool is free."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Educational Organization
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Facebook, UrbanDictionary, Code for America, Mailchimp, Rapportive, GitHub, TED, and Lyft.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS vs. Heroku and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,390 professionals have used our research since 2012.