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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

"It's easy to push a change and to deploy new things."
"Thanks to Heroku, we don't need to do as much direct management in AWS."
"We use Heroku to run generic data. We also use it for our customer development environment. It helps us to build and test websites."
"The product is stable."
"What I found most valuable about this solution is that it's easy to use and integrate with GitHub actions."
"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."
"Valuable features include time to market, avoiding vendor lock-in, and the ease of working in a multi-cloud environment."
"OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins."
"It has features that enhance security, ease of deployment, and service exposure compared to Kubernetes."
"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."
"I have seen a return on investment, and it depends upon the types and the nature of some of the most critical applications that have been hosted on the OpenShift infrastructure."
"Valuable features include auto-recreate of pod if pod fails; fast rollback, with one click, to previous version."
"Two stand-out features are the security model and value-add features that don't exist in Upstream Kubernetes."
"The most valuable feature is the high availability for the applications."
 

Cons

"Heroku should increase its slug size limits."
"Heroku had an authentication problem a few months ago, but they solved it."
"Their support is good, but they can improve their response time."
"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."
"I think this solution would be improved if free demos were available indefinitely."
"Heroku doesn't support Docker images on the CI infrastructure."
"We have to do daily restarts of some processes, which is annoying, and the support for custom CI could be better."
"The pricing could be improved because scaling the database becomes costly."
"There are challenges related to additional security layers, connectivity compliance for endpoints, and integration."
"I had to frequently upgrade my cluster due to OpenShift's rolling updates every six months, which I found to be excessive."
"The operators need a lot of improvement, with better integrations."
"If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great."
"There have been some issues with security, in particular, that we had to address. At times they make it “clunky." I am quite confident these parameters will appear in the next releases. They have been reported as bugs and are actually in process."
"They could work on the pricing model, making it more flexible and possibly lower."
"The metrics in OpenShift can use improvement."
"I think that OpenShift has too many commands for running services from the CLI, and the configuration files are a little complicated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is free."
"I rate the tool's pricing a three out of ten."
"Its price is very good."
"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."
"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
"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."
"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."
"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."
"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."
"The cost is quite high."
"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."
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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.
 

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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.