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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
13th
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
7.0
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (10th), Container Management (8th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Heroku is 3.5%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 8.6%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Red Hat OpenShift8.6%
Heroku3.5%
Other87.9%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Faizan Haider - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Pratul Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Valuable for us was the fast deployment. This means the time to market is improved without pain for developers."
"The most valuable feature of Heroku is the continuous integration and applications it provides."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the auto maintenance of databases."
"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."
"What I found most valuable about this solution is that it's easy to use and integrate with GitHub actions."
"It's easy to push a change and to deploy new things."
"One of the best things about Heroku is that it is very easy and straightforward to deploy an application."
"A valuable feature of Red Hat OpenShift is its ability to handle increased loads by automatically adding nodes."
"Security is also an important part of this solution. By default, things are running with limited privileges and securely confined to their own resources. This way, different users and projects can all use the same infrastructure."
"Red Hat OpenShift has positively impacted my organization primarily through observability, as for us, application uptime matters a lot when providing public-facing products consumed by customers, and hence, we're using that to keep refining our application and products through observability metrics and keeping pace with market trends, as we promised 99.99% uptime to our customers, and the observability in Red Hat OpenShift is really helping us a lot with that."
"The developers seem to like the source-to-image feature. That makes it easy for them to deploy an application from code into containers, so they don't have to think about things. They take it straight from their code into a containerized application. If you don't have OpenShift, you have to build the container and then deploy the container to, say, EKS or something like that."
"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."
"It has features that enhance security, ease of deployment, and service exposure compared to Kubernetes."
"Great integration with Jenkins for constant integration and development. Supports all the major languages and environments - PHP, Java, Node.js, Ruby, etc."
"OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes."
 

Cons

"The pricing could be improved because scaling the database becomes costly."
"They could flesh out some of their analytics a little more."
"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."
"Heroku had an authentication problem a few months ago, but they solved it."
"We would like to be notified when something goes wrong in the process. When something is not working, we should get an alert."
"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."
"The tool's configuration is complex."
"OpenShift can improve monitoring. Sometimes there are issues. Additionally, the solution could benefit from protective tools if something was to happen in our network."
"I think that OpenShift has too many commands for running services from the CLI, and the configuration files are a little complicated."
"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."
"Latency and performance are two areas of concern in OpenShift where improvements are required."
"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."
"OpenShift could be improved if it were more accessible for smaller budgets."
"The metrics in OpenShift can use improvement."
"It could use auto-scaling based on criteria such as transaction volume, queue backlog, etc. Currently, it is limited to CPU and memory."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."
"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."
"The tool is free."
"Its price is very good."
"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."
"Depending on the extent of the product use, licenses are available for a range of time periods, and are renewable at the end of the period."
"The price depends on the type and the nature of the organizations, along with the types of projects that are of considerable range."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"We had a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) license for all our servers' operating systems. By having multiple Red Hat products together, you can negotiate costs and leverage on having a sort of enterprise license agreement to reduce the overall outlay or TCO."
"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise43
 

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.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, UrbanDictionary, Code for America, Mailchimp, Rapportive, GitHub, TED, and Lyft.
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Heroku vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,180 professionals have used our research since 2012.