Google Cloud vs Heroku comparison

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Google Cloud

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Heroku and Google Cloud are competing products in the platform-as-a-service and cloud computing markets. Google Cloud has the advantage in scalability and features, aligning it with enterprises needing advanced solutions, whereas Heroku is favored by startups for its simplicity and affordability.

Features: Heroku's features include seamless integration with multiple programming languages, an app-centric approach, and continuous integration capabilities. In contrast, Google Cloud provides robust infrastructure capabilities, advanced machine learning tools, and a comprehensive global network.

Room for Improvement: Heroku could enhance its scalability and offer more detailed customization options to attract more extensive user bases. Additionally, expanding its enterprise-level features would better cater to larger organizations. Google Cloud could improve its user complexity by simplifying deployment processes. Lowering pricing complexity and offering more beginner-friendly resources would be beneficial. Further enhancements in customer support could also help.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Heroku simplifies deployment with its automated model and responsive customer support ideal for rapid launches. Google Cloud offers a complex deployment model with multiple custom options, supported by detailed documentation and extensive advanced support plans.

Pricing and ROI: Heroku offers competitive and predictable pricing, advantageous for budget-conscious teams which results in satisfactory ROI for smaller projects. Google Cloud features a complex pricing structure with scalable options that deliver high ROI for larger organizations, thanks to its comprehensive service offerings. The key difference lies in Heroku's predictable, lower-cost model versus Google Cloud's flexible pricing tailored for extensive use.

To learn more, read our detailed Google Cloud vs. Heroku Report (Updated: September 2025).

Google Cloud vs. Heroku

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Helped 868,759 peers since 2012

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

Google Cloud

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (4th)

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 Google Cloud is 5.1%, down from 7.6% 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 (%)
Google Cloud	5.1%
Heroku	3.4%
Other	91.5%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Saurav Singh

Technology Manager at Publicis Sapient

Integration with Kubernetes and flexibility improve our application deployment process

The logging could be improved; there's currently no intuitive way to filter logs on the Google console, especially for individuals who are not familiar with query languages. Our non-technical users find it difficult to access logs. Additionally, the user interface could be more user-friendly and intuitive compared to our previous experience with AWS.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Google Cloud is very user-friendly."

"The speed, security, and performance of Google Cloud are excellent."

"The solution scales well."

"It's easy to deploy next-generation applications on Google Cloud. Customers can also use various cloud tools to optimize their operations and generate more insights to do business much smarter."

"The customer service team for this solution is very knowledgeable."

"Most recently, we implemented a data science agent for querying data using natural language, beyond that, it primarily relates to the cost effectiveness of data warehouse running costs versus competitors such as Snowflake."

"It's a perfect tool for startups."

"Technical support has been good."

More Google Cloud pros

"The product is stable."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

More Heroku pros

Cons

"My only concern is that a number of the offerings are built on their own proprietary technologies which means means that, with respect to the offerings in Google Cloud, it's difficult to have a path to migrate to other cloud providers."

"The Spanish version is in beta. It needs to be farther along."

"Uploading documents could be simplified."

"The price of the solution could be more transparent."

"The UI is beautiful but not easy to use, and also a little slow. Anything that you click is slow to load. It is also not easy to find something. I do not find the left-hand side menu good. We have a lot of options mixed there and we need the best way to deploy cloud resources. I prefer Azure ARM templates since their JSON files are easy to manipulate and integrate with other tools."

"There are some areas where Google Cloud could be improved. Specifically, they are not well-aligned with right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic. We encounter numerous issues when we use documents that mix right-to-left languages with left-to-right languages, such as Hebrew and English. This lack of alignment creates significant problems. Considering more than 400 million Arabic speakers, this is a central area where improvements would be beneficial."

"Google Cloud could improve by having better integration with other platforms."

"Google Cloud should provide more introductory videos on how to get started. Currently, very few of these resources are available. Additionally, training on Google Cloud products is not very well streamlined. Users have to search for training, which can be quite complex."

More Google Cloud cons

"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."

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

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

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

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

"The tool's configuration is complex."

"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 should increase its slug size limits."

More Heroku cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Google cloud is less expensive than other comparable solutions."

"The price of the solution could be better."

"For commercial purposes, users need to pay for the products they use on a workload basis, not a license basis. There are two pricing models: fixed monthly and pay-as-you-go. In the pay-as-you-go model, users pay for the resources they use, while in the fixed monthly model, they have 24/7 access to resources for a set monthly fee."

"The licensing for Google Cloud seems to be quite cheap and they're actually quite reasonable in comparison to Azure, which, as it turns out, is quite expensive. Even though Azure has a data center in South Africa it's still quite costly. There's no scaling, so if you go with the VM, you pay 2500 Rand. When you add another VM, it's another 2500 Rand even though you don't use the whole thing. With Google, you can go up as incrementally as you need to, even if it's just 30 Rand."

"The price of Google Cloud is affordable compared to others services. I pay monthly for the service."

"The licensing cost is based on the capacity we use."

"This solution is worth the money we are paying. I would rate the pricing a three out of five."

"Pricing is high compared to other solutions."

More Google Cloud 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."

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

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."

"Its price is very good."

See which vendors are best for you

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868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Educational Organization

10%

Computer Software 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	40
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	32

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

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Cloud?

Google Cloud is perceived as a cost-effective and user-friendly option, especially compared to AWS. The current affordability and ease of use make it suitable for medium-sized companies. While the ...

What needs improvement with Google Cloud?

Since I'm working with BigQuery, I had to invest time to become familiar with the system. As I was working in SQL server previously, I had an idea that we would have a server, and inside the server...

What is your primary use case for Google Cloud?

I currently work with Google Cloud, mainly with BigQuery. I have recently started, approximately three months ago. I primarily use Google Cloud for BigQuery operations and data storage, similar to ...

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.

Alibaba Cloud vs Google Cloud

Comparisons

Compared 31% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Google Cloud

Compared 11% of the time

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Google Cloud

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Google Cloud

Compared 8% of the time

Modal Labs vs Google Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

More Google Cloud Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Heroku

Compared 12% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Heroku

Compared 11% of the time

AWS Fargate vs Heroku

Compared 9% of the time

Salesforce Platform vs Heroku

Compared 4% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Product Reports

Google Cloud

Download Google Cloud product report

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Overview

Google Cloud is an Infrastructure as a Service Cloud (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that provides infrastructure tools and services for building applications on top of a public cloud computing platform. As one of the leading global infrastructures, this product allows users to securely manage enterprise data, receive valuable insights, and store documents. Google Cloud provides its various services through tools and services for data warehousing, security key enforcement, application programming interface (API) management, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).

The use cases of Google Cloud can be divided into four main categories:

Big data
Compute
Services
Storage

The solution is utilized by organizations of all sizes and industries, as it is suitable for the following purposes:

Running and building applications: Google Cloud lets businesses run and build their applications anywhere because of its commitment to open-source, hybrid, and multi-cloud. This can accelerate development time as businesses avoid vendor lock-in.
Data insight: Google Cloud provides companies with advanced ML and analytics for their data. This can facilitate business decisions and improve work processes, as every team member can have access to data reports via this solution.
Security: Utilizing Google's technology, this solution helps users protect and defend their data and applications against threats and harmful activities.
Team collaboration: Google Cloud offers companies advanced collaboration features. They can integrate email, chat, video calling, and document collaboration all in one place when using this platform.

Google Cloud Features

Google Cloud offers multiple features for its clients. Some of these include:

Big data features: The solution offers full big data services through tools such as BigQuery and Google Cloud Dataflow. These tools allow users to process large data queries as well as create, monitor, and receive reports from data processing pipelines.
Containers: The solution offers containers, which allow users to speed up deployment and scale applications.
Cloud debugger: This feature allows users to debug code during the production process. In this way, businesses are able to locate issues early in the code and fix them before deploying the application.
Cloud save: This feature provides the ability to synchronize cloud-stored data across all devices an organization is supporting. Through it, users can save and retrieve information and maintain all data copies up to date.
Cloud trace: This Google Cloud feature allows users to detect the reasons for performance bottlenecks and fix the issues. It also provides users with information on the time their product takes to process certain requests, allowing them to follow performance more closely.
Hosting features: The solution offers two hosting options. App Engine is the PaaS of Google Cloud and Computes Engine is their IaaS.
Load balancing: This feature balances the traffic of multiple compute instances across various geographic regions.
Maintenance: Users receive frequent insight into the performance of their applications and through automations, Google Cloud lets them know of any issues that need to be fixed.

Google Cloud Benefits

Google Cloud brings various benefits to its users. Some of these include the following:

The pricing model of Google Cloud allows users to pay only for the selected features and tools they wish to use, which saves their organizations money.
Users can rely on accelerated content delivery through Google Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Google Cloud offers a wide variety of tools and libraries, which assist users in the development of cloud applications.
The tool has an advanced admin control that allows users to easily add or remove new users and maintain the security of business platforms.
Google Cloud offers consulting services whereby experts provide assistance with cloud strategy development.
The platform is updated on a frequent basis, which can increase companies' productivity through consistent innovations.
Google Cloud offers remote access from anywhere at all times via Google's web applications.
The solution reduces the risks of data breaches as it offers minimal storage of offline data.
Users can expect support not only from the platform but from the growing online community as well, where their questions can be answered in a timely manner.
The product provides detailed documentation for its clients, allowing them to benefit from tutorials and other samples, in order to learn to work with it in the most efficient way.

Reviews from Real Users

Isuru P., an assistant vice president at a tech services company, likes Google Cloud because it is easy to deploy next-generation applications using it.

An IT solutions consultant at a tech services company rates Google Cloud highly because they find the solution stable with a good user experience and a straightforward setup.

Google

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

Information Not Available

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

Google Cloud vs. Heroku