Cloud Foundry vs Heroku comparison

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Cloud Foundry

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Heroku and Cloud Foundry are platforms competing in app deployment and management. Cloud Foundry seems to have the edge due to its scalable enterprise features and broader open-source ecosystem.

Features: Heroku provides seamless integration with third-party services, a powerful add-on marketplace, and efficient buildpacks. Cloud Foundry offers robust container management, support for multiple frameworks, and comprehensive enterprise-level customization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Heroku’s deployment model is known for its simplicity and quick start, making it suitable for developers. Cloud Foundry, though more complex, supports large-scale operations with customization. Customer service is comparable, though Cloud Foundry provides more detailed enterprise support.

Pricing and ROI: Heroku is known for its straightforward pricing, ideal for startups and small companies, offering a strong ROI through rapid deployment and low initial costs. Cloud Foundry requires a higher upfront investment but offers a competitive ROI for enterprises due to its scalability and control.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Foundry vs. Heroku Report (Updated: June 2025).

Cloud Foundry 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

Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

21st

Average Rating

5.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Heroku

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

14th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Cloud Foundry is 1.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heroku is 3.2%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Carlos Bittrich

Technology Advisor at Fabrik

Quick to deploy but being deprecated by IBM and should be merged with Kubernetes

We enjoy the fast deployment. Cloud Foundry builds the runtime environment directly without requiring dependency management from the developer or administrator. The autoscaling is great. It is just a switch that needs to be turned on, and autoscaling starts working. At this moment, you begin to see different meters about usage that helps you in updating the scaling limits, which help you tune the running instances. Besides this, autoscaling can be scheduled, so in times of low activity, you can have lower limits or increase in advance for special dates. It has good logging. CF has logging events that help identify when a transaction runs and its response time which helps in monitoring execution.

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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.

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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

"My favorite component of IBM's solution is Node-RED, which greatly shortens the amount of time required to develop, test, and deploy new applications."

"Cloud Foundry builds the runtime environment directly without requiring dependency management from the user."

"IBM is the only vendor to offer integration with blockchain for smart contract development."

"The product is stable."

"We use Heroku to run generic data. We also use it for our customer development environment. It helps us to build and test websites."

"It is easy to deploy applications, and we don't need to bother about software updates on the server. We don't need to bother about machines, servers, and hardware. We only need to care about the system and functionality that we need or want to develop. They take care of everything else. It provides high availability. It is a pretty good solution that provides everything that we need. It has everything that we need to run our applications. We have many different applications, and we generate three million bills for a company in Brazil. We see more than a billion requests per day in another application. Everything works just fine, and it is very good."

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

"Thanks to Heroku, we don't need to do as much direct management in AWS."

"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."

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

More Heroku pros

Cons

"After the initial excitement period with Node-RED is over, you crave the need of additional integrations to third-party services."

"In IBM Cloud, the product has been deprecated in favor of Kubernetes, which is a more complicated infrastructure to manage."

"The tool's configuration is complex."

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

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

"Heroku should increase its slug size limits."

"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."

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

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

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

More Heroku cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing models should be reworked to the needs of a wider range of companies. Some customers will not be able to afford it until quite a few years into production, even after good PoC results and a successful launch."

"IBM has a free tier and payment option depending on the products selected."

"You are allocated a minimum amount of resources in the free tier. This seems fair and highly scalable, as you pay per usage as per cloud pricing schemes."

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

"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."

"The tool is free."

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."

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856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

27%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Energy/Utilities Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Educational Organization

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Heroku?

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

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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 ...

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What is your primary use case for Heroku?

We use the solution for web applications and web APIs.

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Comparisons

Amazon AWS vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 35% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 21% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 5% of the time

More Cloud Foundry Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 26% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Heroku

Compared 13% of the time

AWS Fargate vs Heroku

Compared 10% of the time

Google App Engine vs Heroku

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Heroku

Compared 3% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Product Reports

PaaS Clouds

Download Cloud Foundry product report

Download Heroku product report

Overview

Cloud Foundry, home of the open source application development technologies CF Application Runtime and CF Container Runtime, is more than a platform. It’s a flexible way of embracing digital transformation that helps businesses evolve in the face of constant change. To put it another way, with Cloud Foundry, companies can rest assured they will have the right tool for the right job.

Cloud Foundry

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

Grape Up, c-Com, KONE, TITAN, CSAA, Bosch, Allstate, Verizon, West Corp., Telstra

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

Cloud Foundry vs. Heroku