Amazon AWS vs Heroku comparison

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Amazon AWS

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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: September 2025).

Amazon AWS vs. Heroku

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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

7.2

Number of Reviews

257

Ranking in other categories

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

Heroku

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

12th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.6%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heroku is 3.4%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon AWS	13.6%
Heroku	3.4%
Other	83.0%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Asif Meem

Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet

Managed cloud services have helped accelerate experiments with flexible configuration options

Sometimes the costs associated with spinning up a service, especially managed services, have implications. For example, if I create a Glue job, that will create S3 buckets and other resources that have cost implications, but once I clean up a Glue job, it does not delete the other accessory resources. Sometimes, I have to go hunting for what resources Amazon AWS might have provisioned and how it is costing behind the scenes. It can be complex depending on your level of expertise. It is not as easy to get started, especially when it comes to secure practices. Amazon AWS is more hands-on than other platforms.

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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.

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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

"Setting up AWS was pretty easy. It was straightforward to set up, and it took us a year to develop and migrate our mobile banking solution to the AWS cloud. Our migration experience was quite positive."

"Amazon AWS has a good Redshift database."

"Stable platform with a straightforward setup. It's user-friendly, with more reliable servers compared to the competition."

"AWS has many integrations and plenty of tools available for anyone to take advantage of. There are new features being added all the time."

"It streamlines tasks like table creation and data loading into Redshift, making the process more efficient and manageable."

"The most valuable features I have found are the Database Migration Service (DMS) for monitoring the host and routing, Route 53, and EC2 tools. The DMS is not available in any other solution that I am aware of. They have a very flexible and professional solution."

"AWS's security model, including IAM or security groups, has contributed to our organization's compliance. It manages authentication, permissions, and overall security posture, which helps us maintain compliance."

"The interface of the solution is good."

More Amazon AWS pros

"The solution's most valuable feature is the auto maintenance of databases."

"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."

"The product is stable."

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

"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."

"What I found most valuable about this solution is that it's easy to use and integrate with GitHub actions."

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

More Heroku pros

Cons

"Amazon AWS could be improved with cheaper licensing costs."

"It should be easier to monitor the performance and generate analytic information so that we can determine how to provide better support for our clients."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

"Could be more user friendly and include additional applications."

"The pricing could be more competitive."

"This solution could be improved by a better licensing model, especially for third-party software. Amazon AWS could also potentially be improved by more free storage, but I think that it's okay when compared to competitors' products."

"The IEM (Infrastructure Event Management) appears to be complicated, specifically cross-account resource permissions."

"There are numerous use cases, and the setup varies from complicated to very simple in some cases."

More Amazon AWS cons

"Heroku had an authentication problem a few months ago, but they solved it."

"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."

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

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

"Heroku should increase its slug size limits."

"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."

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

More Heroku cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the Virtual Desktop service from Amazon AWS could improve, it is more expensive than competitors. The pricing model we are using is pay-as-you-go. You only pay for what you use."

"I rate the tool's pricing a six to seven out of ten."

"It is subscription-based, and we are happy with its pricing."

"The pricing of AWS was attractive for us, so that's something that's okay at least for this transaction-based system. However, we still have some concerns about more data-driven applications or those that involve a lot of heavy uploading and downloading. So our whole data warehouse is still something that would not go into the cloud because of the pricing model."

"The tool’s pricing is reasonable."

"The licensing cost varies with the project involved."

"Technical support is expensive."

"The prices are somewhat on the higher side. It would help if they can bring it down, especially for the sporting segment and for on-demand instances."

More Amazon AWS pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."

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

See which vendors are best for you

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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

16%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	131
Midsize Enterprise	48
Large Enterprise	112

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

Questions from the Community

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 ...

How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?

How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...

Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure

We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...

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.

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Amazon AWS

Comparisons

Compared 22% of the time

Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS

Compared 9% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Amazon AWS

Compared 7% of the time

More Amazon AWS Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 17% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Heroku

Compared 11% of the time

AWS Fargate vs Heroku

Compared 9% of the time

Render vs Heroku

Compared 9% of the time

Google App Engine vs Heroku

Compared 7% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Product Reports

Amazon AWS

Download Amazon AWS product report

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Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS

No data available

Overview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an adopted cloud platform that offers more than 200 fully featured services from data centers located across the globe. This is a scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that is utilized by thousands of businesses of different sizes around the world. The product offers a wide variety of solutions for its customers, which allows them to launch applications regardless of their industry.

The most common use cases for AWS are:

Application hosting: Clients can take advantage of on-demand infrastructure to power their applications. The product supports multiple types of apps, varying from hosted internal applications to software as a service (SaaS) offerings.
Websites: With AWS, clients can satisfy their web hosting needs through a scalable platform for their websites.
Backup and storage: AWS offers reliable data storage services, which allow clients to store their data and build dependable backups for all of their valuable information.
Enterprise IT: The product allows companies to host internal- or external-facing IT applications in a highly secure environment.
Content delivery: Users who want to distribute content to end users worldwide can do so quickly and easily through the high data transfer speeds of this solution.
Databases: AWS offers a variety of database solutions, which include hosted enterprise database software as well as non-relational database solutions.

Amazon AWS supports a global cloud infrastructure with AWS Region and Availability Zone models, which contribute to the high availability of enterprise applications running on the solution. Amazon AWS has an extensive array of products that serve different purposes, including:

Analytics
Application integration
Blockchain
Business applications
Cloud financial management
Compute
Contact center
Containers
Database
Developer tools
End-user computing
Front-end web and mobile
Games
Internet of Things (IoT)
Machine learning
Management and governance
Quantum technologies
Robotics
Satellite
Security, identity and compliance, and others

The products and services that Amazon AWS delivers to these sectors provide a large computing capacity which is quicker and cheaper compared to building a physical server farm. Among the most popular services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2," and Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as "S3."

Amazon AWS Features

The wide array of products that Amazon AWS offers consist of different functions that utilize cloud computing across different sectors. The features of this solution can be categorized in the following ways:

Data and relationship management: With Amazon AWS, companies can manage multiple hierarchies of directory data, they can define attributes for objects and relationships, set custom inheritance rules for directories, and create multiple schemas.
Schema management: This group of features allows users to extend their directory schema according to their needs. They can extend it through multiple applications that share a single directory while avoiding duplication of data.
Fully managed infrastructure: This feature decreases time and costs for administrative tasks for companies regarding scaling infrastructure and managing servers.
Searching feature: The Cloud Directory feature of AWS offers built-in search capabilities which can cover sets of highly connected data and eliminate the need of creating nested queries.
Built-in data encryption: Users can benefit from high levels of protection of their data with AWS's products. The data in the cloud is automatically encrypted at rest and in transit through 256-bit encryption keys, managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
Object policies: This feature allows Amazon AWS users to organize objects in different hierarchies by providing a framework for applications to evaluate policy assignments.

Amazon AWS Benefits

This product delivers various benefits across all industries that utilize its services. The greatest advantages of using Amazon AWS include:

High product functionality is supported by machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, data lakes, and analytics.
The solution has a high level of security, which is backed by a deep set ofmore than 100 cloud security tools.
Amazon AWS has an easy-to-use interface that makes it possible for clients to host applications.
The product is very flexible in terms of which operating system, programming language, web app platform, and database clients can use.
AWS is a scalable and highly secure global computing infrastructure, supported by the reliability of Amazon.com.
Clients can utilize the Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing tools to personally scale up or down applications, depending on their demand.
Users can choose from an array of payment options, including paying for only the services they need, as well as a free trial to select the ones most useful for them.

Reviews from Real Users

Greg G., a chief executive officer at a tech services company, ranks Amazon AWS highly, as he states that the solution is flexible, scales well, and offers good stability.

A technology manager technology at a computer software company values Amazon AWS because it is extremely cost-efficient, easy to upgrade and expand storage with greatly improved interfaces.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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.

Sample Customers

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

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

Amazon AWS vs. Heroku