Cloud Foundry vs Heroku vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

Read 29 Heroku reviews

2,164 Views
1,948 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 62 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

10,785 Views
6,902 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Cloud Foundry

Red Hat OpenShift

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cloud Foundry, Heroku, and Red Hat OpenShift based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Red Hat and others in PaaS Clouds.

To learn more, read our detailed PaaS Clouds Report (Updated: September 2025).

PaaS Clouds

Download the complete report

Helped 869,089 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:

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Cloud Foundry is 2.1%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heroku is 3.4%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 11.6%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Red Hat OpenShift	11.6%
Heroku	3.4%
Cloud Foundry	2.1%
Other	82.9%

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.

Read full review

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

Pratul Shukla

Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Adopting a flexible and efficient approach with noticeable improvements in operational costs and continued challenges in job management

Currently, one of the biggest challenges we face is with services and jobs. For spawning batches, although it has crons, it is not easy to integrate with enterprise systems such as Autosys. The entire company uses Autosys, but we are not able to integrate it effectively. We need intermediate servers to run OC utility commands and initiate the cron job. We have to do a lot of modifications to ensure our batches work properly. With physical or virtual servers, even in AWS, we are able to write and manage multiple jobs. Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge. Integrating third parties is a challenge with Red Hat OpenShift. For example, with Elasticsearch, onboarding itself was difficult, running file beats and dealing with routing issues. It is not straightforward, especially since we have some components in AWS as. AWS has many capabilities that come out of the box and are easier to work with compared to Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift's biggest disadvantage is they do not provide any private cloud setup where we can host on our site using their services. The main reason we went with Red Hat OpenShift was because it is a private cloud, and we have regulatory requirements that prevent us from using public cloud.

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

More Heroku pros

"We want to build a solution that can be deployable to any cloud because of client requirements and OpenShift allows us to do this."

"OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes."

"The most valuable feature of OpenShift is the security context constraint (SCC). The solution’s security throughout the stack is good. And security context constraints provide port-level security. It's a granular level of control, where you can give privileges to certain users to work on certain applications."

"Two stand-out features are the security model and value-add features that don't exist in Upstream Kubernetes."

"It is a stable platform."

"I am impressed with the product's security features."

"OpenShift offers more stability than Kubernetes."

"Key features are WildFly, because it standardizes infrastructure and the git repository and docker. Git is essential for source code and Docker for infrastructure."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

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

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

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

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

"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."

"We would like to be notified when something goes wrong in the process. When something is not working, we should get an alert."

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

"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."

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

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

More Heroku cons

"Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge."

"The platform's documentation could be more comprehensive to cover the full spectrum of user needs. Sometimes, achieving specific goals is challenging due to a lack of detailed guidance."

"If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great."

"Credential not hidden, so people on the same group can view it."

"The solution needs to support the new features in Kubernetes more quickly."

"The product’s integration with Windows containers and other third-party products needs improvement."

"Not a ten because it's not a standard solution and the endpoint protection user has to prepare with documentation or have training from other people. It's not easy to start because it's not like other solutions."

"The GUI could have more capabilities, particularly around virtualization."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"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."

"The tool is free."

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

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."

"Its price is very good."

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

"The pricing for OpenShift includes support and licensing, which costs approximately $400."

"The cost is quite high."

"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."

"The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees."

"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."

"I don't deal with the cost part, but I know that the cost is very high when compared to other products. They charge for CPU and memory, but we don't worry about it."

"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."

"OpenShift is really good when we need to start, but once we get to a certain scale, it becomes too expensive."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

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

See recommendations

869,089 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

29%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Energy/Utilities Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

28%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	40

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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...

What is your primary use case for Heroku?

We use the solution for web applications and web APIs.

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?

Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderfu...

Which would you recommend - Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift?

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native application platform to simplify app delivery. It is efficient and effective....

What do you like most about OpenShift?

OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.

Amazon AWS vs Cloud Foundry

Comparisons

Compared 40% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 16% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 13% of the time

More Cloud Foundry Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Heroku

Compared 12% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Heroku

Compared 11% of the time

AWS Fargate vs Heroku

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Heroku

Compared 3% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Proxmox VE vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 7% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

PaaS Clouds

Download Cloud Foundry product report

Download Heroku product report

Red Hat OpenShift

Download Red Hat OpenShift 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.