Amazon AWS vs Heroku comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Heroku are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.3, while Heroku is ranked #17. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 13.3% mindshare in PSP, compared to Heroku’s 2.9% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Heroku users who would recommend it.

Amazon AWS

Read 260 Amazon AWS reviews

47,004 Views
18,332 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Heroku

Read 29 Heroku reviews

4,079 Views
3,753 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Amazon AWS

Heroku

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Amazon AWS and Heroku are competing in the cloud services category. Amazon AWS has the upper hand due to its extensive deployment capabilities, high performance, and wide range of features.

Features: Amazon AWS includes comprehensive deployment features, exceptional load balancing, and robust security integrations, offering an extensive range of connectors. It supports numerous operating systems and programming models, providing flexibility and scalability for various applications. Heroku is recognized for its ease of use, fast deployment, and scalable solutions, supporting quick application development without needing infrastructure management.

Room for Improvement: Amazon AWS could improve its integration with other platforms, streamline its sorting model for simplicity, and reduce licensing costs. Enhancements in security features and cost transparency are also needed. Heroku users express concerns about pricing, limited free service options, and the requirement for more scalability. The platform lacks Docker CI integration, and daily restarts can be an issue for some users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon AWS is known for its powerful deployment options and wide support across hybrid and public cloud models. Customer service is generally positive, though response times can be slower than some competitors. Heroku excels in deployment ease, offering rapid application implementation with minimal maintenance, focusing on public cloud functionality. Its support is good but could benefit from faster response times.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon AWS features a competitive pay-as-you-go model, noted for scalability, though transparency in cost predictions requires attention. Some users consider it expensive yet beneficial due to the lack of initial investments. Heroku's pricing is perceived as high at scale, although the free tier appeals to small-scale projects. AWS targets large-scale global infrastructure, while Heroku provides cost-effective options for swift deployments with minimal infrastructure management.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon AWS vs. Heroku Report (Updated: November 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS vs. Heroku

November 2026

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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

Amazon AWS

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

260

Ranking in other categories

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)

Heroku

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

17th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.3%, down from 13.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heroku is 2.9%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon AWS	13.3%
Heroku	2.9%
Other	83.8%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Manojchekkilla Manojchekkilla

Data Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Cloud training has boosted my data analytics skills and simplifies building small projects

One area that could be improved in Amazon AWS is its learning curve. The large number of services and configuration options can be overwhelming, especially for new users. Understanding its pricing can also be challenging, as costs can add up unexpectedly if resources are not monitored carefully. For data analytics, setting up and integrating services such as S3, Glue, and Athena sometimes requires a good understanding of permissions, data formats, and service configurations. More guided, simplified onboarding for analytics use cases would make the platform more accessible. One additional area for improvement is documentation and service selection. Amazon AWS offers many services with overlapping capabilities, and it can sometimes be difficult for users to determine which service is the best fit for a particular use case. More decision support tools and guided recommendations would help reduce this complexity. From a data analytics perspective, cost visibility could also be improved since analytics workloads can scale quickly. Having more proactive cost forecasting and optimization recommendations would help teams manage budgets more effectively. Another challenging area is IAM and permission management. While Amazon AWS provides strong security controls, configuring permissions correctly can be complex, especially when multiple analytics services need to interact with one another. Simplifying permissions while maintaining security would enhance the overall user experience. The other area I would mention for improvement is the overall user experience. Given the huge number of services, which are truly excellent, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to navigate, especially for a new user that requires much training. A more streamlined interface and clearer recommendations between similar services would make it easier to get started. I would also like to see more built-in cost optimization guidance and cost management tools. Other than that, Amazon AWS is a very good and mature platform. Most of my feedback is about making it easier to learn, manage, and optimize rather than adding new capabilities.

Read full review

Faizan Haider

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.

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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

"Amazon AWS is very, very stable."

"The product's scalability is good."

"Amazon is a really good solution with high performance. They offer more connectors than some of their competitors, such as Microsoft Azure."

"750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux t2.micro instance usage (1 GiB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) -- It's enough hours to run continuously each month."

"Very good automation and very stable."

"Almost everything is good. It is a whole ecosystem. It is not only the storage, computing, or networking. It is interesting in the way all things are combined to form this ecosystem. It is a very well-built and logical ecosystem that has some small building blocks. These building blocks can be used in the right way to build a much bigger ecosystem that is robust, secure, scalable."

"Without AWS, our organization simply would not exist."

"The initial setup is not difficult and it did not take us more than one day."

More Amazon AWS pros

"The most valuable feature of Heroku is the continuous integration and applications it provides."

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

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

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

"I have been a great fan of Heroku as it simplified my work for many years."

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

"The product is stable."

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

More Heroku pros

Cons

"Amazon needs to develop better tools for troubleshooting network traffic, application insights, performance, and even some aspects of integration mapping. I'm hoping AWS implements something like Azure's Network Watcher and a log analytics solution where a can pull logs from various services and present them in a single dashboard. I want to summarize the performance and usage of every service and application."

"Yes, the initial setup is not so straightforward. The concept changes and you will need to understand this."

"Its subscription model or pricing model is too complex, which should be improved."

"The dashboard can be improved a little bit to provide more information."

"The pricing is something you have to watch. You really have to constantly optimize your costs for instance, storage, IPs and things like that, and that can become a job in itself to manage just from a budgeting standpoint if you are a moderate to heavy user."

"On the console, they used to have some shortcuts making this solution easier to work with, but now we have been dealing with so many problems on the console, and some of the options are not very useful in my perspective, so they should bring back those options that make things easier to run some of the services."

"Recently we had a long conversation about functionality that is missing in Alexa — in Mexico, specifically. Alexa for Business is a service and platform that Americans can use to make a call to an Amazon Echo device or a telephone via the app. But in Mexico, we are not allowed to use that technology. This is a significant disadvantage of AWS for those living in Mexico."

"The pricing of AWS is very unclear; they make it quite confusing, and sometimes there are hidden charges."

More Amazon AWS cons

"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."

"Plugins aren't cheap (Mailchimp is $1.5/1000 emails)."

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

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

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

"I have an issue with the session server in terms of how it can scale, and where I can put my sessions."

"There is an issue because Heroku supports Docker container images, but not if you're using the continuous integration infrastructure."

More Heroku cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its pricing model is too complex."

"Its price should be lower. Currently, the price is the same if you are working in-house or in production. If you have to do internal testing or you are checking if things are working in-house, you need to pay for that, and the price is the same. The price for in-house usage should be different from production usage."

"The price, in general, could be better."

"For the initial 12 months, the solution is reasonably priced. On enterprise license contracts where you negotiate, have been reasonable too."

"When I first started using the solution I used a free trial, and then we upgraded to a pay-as-you-go subscription. We have an allocated budget of $50."

"Pricing is an area that can be improved because it is very complicated. It considers the number of processes, bandwidth, and different kinds of usage. This makes it difficult to predict."

"To anyone thinking about using AWS, I would suggest carefully designing your implementation. This is very important because it will impact the monthly cost of the solution. You need to think ahead and talk with your staff to find opportunities to make this more efficient."

"In comparison to Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, the database offered by Amazon AWS is relatively expensive. However, the database also offers rich features."

More Amazon AWS pricing and cost advice

"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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Comparison Review

it_user8586

Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Aug 14, 2013

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Construction Company

Comms Service Provider

10%

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	131
Midsize Enterprise	48
Large Enterprise	120

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

Questions from the Community

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Comparisons

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Amazon AWS

Compared 17% of the time

SAP Business Technology Platform vs Amazon AWS

Compared 7% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Amazon AWS

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS

Compared 4% of the time

Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon AWS Competitors

Google App Engine vs Heroku

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 9% of the time

Render vs Heroku

Compared 8% of the time

Engine Yard Cloud vs Heroku

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Heroku

Compared 5% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS

October 2026

Download Amazon AWS product report

Buyer's Guide

Heroku

October 2026

Download Heroku product report

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS

No data available

Overview

Amazon AWS offers cloud services known for ease of use, scalability, and diverse services such as EC2, S3, and Lambda. Its pay-as-you-go pricing and robust security features make it a preferred choice for businesses managing growing demands efficiently.

Amazon AWS provides a comprehensive ecosystem with services like EC2 for computing, S3 for storage, and Lambda for serverless computing. It emphasizes scalability and quick resource provisioning, allowing businesses to handle IT workloads, host websites, and manage analytics seamlessly. AWS integrates a wide range of services, enhancing flexibility and reliability while offering robust security and automated management to streamline operations.

What are the most important features of Amazon AWS?

EC2: Offers scalable computing capacity in the cloud to manage business applications efficiently.
S3: Provides highly secure, durable, and scalable cloud storage solutions for data archiving and backup.
Lambda: Enables running code without provisioning or managing servers, improving application deployment.
Pricing: Employs a pay-as-you-go model, allowing cost-effective resource usage.
Security: Implements comprehensive security protocols to ensure data protection across services.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Scalability: Supports business growth by easily scaling resources according to demand.
Integration: Offers seamless integration capabilities with numerous services, enhancing operational flexibility.
Performance: Provides stable and reliable performance for critical IT workloads and applications.
Management: Features automated management tools that reduce overhead and improve deployment efficiency.

Amazon AWS is widely implemented across industries for cloud computing, infrastructure hosting, and data storage. Businesses in finance, healthcare, and technology sectors leverage AWS for running applications, hosting analytics databases, and deploying scalable solutions. By utilizing tools like EC2, S3, and Lambda, they ensure flexibility and security in infrastructure management and data applications, meeting diverse operational needs effectively.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Heroku offers fast deployment with ease of use and seamless integration capabilities, making it a preferred platform for developers needing reliable continuous integration and scalability.

Heroku is known for handling server-related tasks, allowing developers to concentrate on building application functionality. Its automatic database maintenance and powerful performance are key for projects using Node.js and Ruby on Rails. Users appreciate its simple application deployment and maintenance, supported by a diverse range of plugins. Beyond efficiency, its CLI and dashboards enable a straightforward user experience, essential for developers focused on production, staging, and development environments.

What are Heroku's key features?

Fast Deployment: Offers rapid application deployment with minimal setup.
Continuous Integration: Supports streamlined integration processes for development cycles.
Scalability: Easily scales applications to meet growing demand.
High Availability: Ensures applications remain online and responsive.
Automatic Database Maintenance: Provides hands-off management of database tasks.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Ease of Use: Simplifies complex tasks, allowing developers to focus on coding.
Integration Capabilities: Connects seamlessly with tools like GitHub for updates.
Performance: Delivers consistent, reliable application performance.
Development Flexibility: Supports Node.js, Ruby on Rails, and Docker environments.

Organizations use Heroku to deploy production servers and stage development environments. Educational apps and offsite backends benefit from its Docker support. E-commerce, mobile app development, and web apps leverage Heroku's ability to maintain rapid development cycles and manage server deployment efficiently.

Heroku

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS vs. Heroku

November 2026

Free Report: Amazon AWS vs. Heroku

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