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Heroku vs Red Hat OpenShift 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

Heroku
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
15th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (9th), Container Management (11th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (6th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Heroku is 3.0%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 12.2%, up from 11.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Faizan Haider - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Mikhael Ibrahim - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamlessly monitor microservices with streamlined DevOps capabilities
Most benefit from it, however, I work with Kubernetes, and installing Vanilla Kubernetes is easy. That said, it introduces many tools that need to be set up individually. OpenShift comes ready out of the box, with all tools installed and configured. Red Hat certifies and confirms that all the components are compatible with each other. OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes. The integrated DevOps capabilities, such as pipelines and the container registry, are extremely beneficial. Additionally, its capability to monitor microservices and containers with integrated tools like Prometheus is a major advantage. The horizontal pod scaling exceeds the scalability features I found in Kubernetes.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"One of the best things about Heroku is that it is very easy and straightforward to deploy an application."
"The product is stable."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the auto maintenance of databases."
"It's easy to push a change and to deploy new things."
"We use Heroku to run generic data. We also use it for our customer development environment. It helps us to build and test websites."
"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 features include auto-recreate of pod if pod fails; fast rollback, with one click, to previous version."
"Overall, the solution's security throughout the stack and software supply chain is excellent."
"OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes."
"I love to automate everything and OpenShift was been born for that. It takes care of the network layer itself and I don't need to dive into it; I can work on a top level. Our project has numerous services designed to run in Docker containers, and we have run almost all pieces in OpenShift."
"Its security is most valuable. It's by default secure, which is very important."
"Self-provisioning support saves a lot of time and unnecessary work from the system administrator who can use this time to run and monitor the infrastructure. For the developer, this means less time waiting for the provisioning and excellent flexibility for development, testing, and production. Also, in such systems it is easy for developers to monitor applications even after deployment."
"The scalability of OpenShift combined with Kubernetes is good. At least from the software standpoint, it becomes quite easy to handle the scalability through configuration. You need to constantly monitor the underlying infrastructure and ensure that it has adequate provisioning. If you have enough infrastructure, then managing the scalability is quite easy which is done through configuration."
"I like OCP, and the management UI is better than the open-source ones."
 

Cons

"The tool's configuration is complex."
"We have to do daily restarts of some processes, which is annoying, and the support for custom CI could be better."
"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."
"Heroku had an authentication problem a few months ago, but they solved it."
"Heroku doesn't support Docker images on the CI infrastructure."
"They could flesh out some of their analytics a little more."
"The pricing could be improved because scaling the database becomes costly."
"I think this solution would be improved if free demos were available indefinitely."
"The GUI could have more capabilities, particularly around virtualization."
"This is a fairly expensive solution."
"OpenShift requires a very expensive and complex infrastructure."
"The interface could be simplified a bit more."
"We experienced issues around desktop security, that stopped us implementing a new feature that had been developed."
"One glaring flaw is how OpenShift handles operators. Sometimes operators are forced to go into a particular namespace. When you do that, OpenShift creates an installation plan for everything in that namespace. These operators may be completely separate from each other and have nothing to do with each other, but now they are tied at the hip. You can't upgrade one without upgrading all of them. That's a huge mistake and highly problematic."
"It could use auto-scaling based on criteria such as transaction volume, queue backlog, etc. Currently, it is limited to CPU and memory."
"Autoscaling is a very unique feature, but it could be useful to have more options based on traffic statistics, for example, via Prometheus. So, there should be more ready solutions to autoscale based on specific applications."
 

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."
"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."
"The tool is free."
"I rate the tool's pricing a three out of ten."
"The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees."
"The pricing for OpenShift includes support and licensing, which costs approximately $400."
"We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support."
"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."
"It's important to start small because the solution is scalable. We can build our cluster and look at the bundle option, not the external subscriptions. Talking to the people at Red Hat can save us money."
"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."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"The cost is quite high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Educational Organization
10%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
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 ...
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. The best feature is how easy it is to handle external services such as database...
What do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, UrbanDictionary, Code for America, Mailchimp, Rapportive, GitHub, TED, and Lyft.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Heroku vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
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