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: June 2026).

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

7.0

Number of Reviews

260

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 June 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.5%, up from 12.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heroku is 3.0%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon AWS	13.5%
Heroku	3.0%
Other	83.5%

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

"Technical support has been great. They are helpful and responsive. They are very fast."

"Amazon AWS is very, very stable."

"The scalability is a valuable feature."

"It's very reliable."

"The maturity that the solution offers is its most valuable aspect, as it was one of the first solutions to market and has a long track record, making it very mature in terms of product delivery, very stable, highly scalable, very feature-rich with a strong third-party ecosystem, and enriched with great security features and capabilities."

"I would recommend this solution to others who are considering using it; it's very scalable and serverless, and we are only charged for the functions that we use, including Lambda, which is a nice feature, in my opinion."

"The most valuable feature is the backup ability. Most people are used to one type of backup solution that they're using, but most of these solutions have features that make it difficult to transfer to the cloud. I know that Veeam now gives people the opportunity to backup some on-premises solutions to the cloud. This feature is something that a lot of people are looking for."

"It has many choices of computer options, storage options, and even database options."

More Amazon AWS pros

"Lots of integrations"

"Easy, fast, fun, and extendable."

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

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

"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."

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

"Deploying with git, npm install git hook ... basically, they got it right for nodejs servers hosting."

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

More Heroku pros

Cons

"The console's UI could be a little better, a fluid User Experience is missing."

"The stability could improve."

"An integrated platform would make it easier for administrators to monitor and manage."

"I would appreciate more direct support from AWS."

"The price of the solution is comparatively quite high in comparison with that of Azure."

"Technical support could be improved, they could be better."

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

"User personalization and robotic process automation services need to be mature enough."

More Amazon AWS cons

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

"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."

"Their support is good, but they can improve their response time."

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

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

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

"Heroku should increase its slug size limits."

"The tool's configuration is complex."

More Heroku cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As a startup business, it's very well priced, but if a number of transactions go up, clients have voiced that they are in a situation and feel a type of pressure and desire to move out of AWS."

"For our infrastructure, the cost is approximately $25 per device, and you have to include the other tools that we have in the cloud, for a total of approximately $200,000 per year."

"The tool’s pricing is reasonable."

"Pricing is good. It's average."

"It's expensive."

"They have a pay-as-you-go subscription."

"It is decently priced. The competition is also bringing its own cloud offerings, such as from Oracle."

"It is very expensive, you have to be very cautious."

More Amazon AWS pricing and cost advice

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."

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

"The tool is free."

"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."

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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

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Construction Company

Outsourcing Company

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	120

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 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.

What advice do you have for others considering Heroku?

The integration capabilities are great because of the quick integration and the management features. We don't need a lot of expertise and all external DevOps people. Heroku is the easiest platform ...

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Amazon AWS

Comparisons

Compared 26% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Amazon AWS

Compared 6% of the time

SAP Business Technology Platform vs Amazon AWS

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS

Compared 4% of the time

Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon AWS Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 12% of the time

Google App Engine vs Heroku

Compared 8% of the time

Render vs Heroku

Compared 8% of the time

Engine Yard Cloud vs Heroku

Compared 7% of the time

Virtuozzo Application Platform vs Heroku

Compared 5% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Product Reports

Amazon AWS

Download Amazon AWS product report

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.

Sample Customers

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

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

Amazon AWS vs. Heroku