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Heroku vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry 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
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Heroku is 3.0%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 5.0%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Heroku3.0%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry5.0%
Other92.0%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Cristian-Molina - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
reviewer2263239 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
PCF allows for fine-grained configuration, especially regarding scaling but routing limitations
Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice. A few things, such as what OpenShift does better are cluster management. Like, you can manage the entire thing together. Currently, it's possible to manage all the clusters, especially when it comes to cluster management using straightforward configuration. As of now, we have to handle each application instance individually, which means servicing them one by one. It would be better if we could perform these actions as a group or in a more streamlined manner. One more downside is actually the cost of this environment. So, major downside of Pivotal, it's the cost. So, the runtime running costs are very high. Extremely high.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like the tool's scalability, CLI, and dashboards."
"Thanks to Heroku, we don't need to do as much direct management in AWS."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the auto maintenance of databases."
"One of the best things about Heroku is that it is very easy and straightforward to deploy an application."
"The platform is very Node.js-friendly, which is something that is important to us."
"My advice for anybody who is considering Heroku is that it's really simple to use, it's stable, and it is very powerful for continuous deployment."
"We, as a startup, can use Heroku and the plenty of possible configurations to scale from the very beginning to a medium-sized company."
"The most valuable feature of Heroku is the continuous integration and applications it provides."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies, and it has very good performance."
"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."
"The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line interface has the ability to push instances to the cloud easily."
"Stability is not a concern with this product."
"It is a scalable product...We are not facing any particular issues since most of the applications in our company are written in Java and .NET."
"I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities."
 

Cons

"It's pricing is a little high and could be lowered."
"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 had an issue recently where my site was down intermittently for unknown reasons. I posted a ticket and 5 days have gone by without any resolution."
"Plugins aren't cheap (Mailchimp is $1.5/1000 emails)."
"Heroku should increase its slug size limits."
"We have to do daily restarts of some processes, which is annoying, and the support for custom CI could be better."
"Heroku doesn't support Docker images on the CI infrastructure."
"Slow restart on servers"
"Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
"I'd like to see a larger service offering."
"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features and they should be included."
"The initial setup was not easy, it was a bit complex."
"Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale. It's easy to scale on an application level, but not it is not similar to if you were using Amazon. Amazon you can scale thousands of applications."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology, it is a bit complex."
"There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the tool's pricing a three out of ten."
"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."
"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."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."
"We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Educational Organization
8%
Financial Services Firm
35%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
4%
Insurance Company
4%
 

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 Business5
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
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...
 

Also Known As

No data available
PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, UrbanDictionary, Code for America, Mailchimp, Rapportive, GitHub, TED, and Lyft.
Humana, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Liberty Mutual, The Home Depot, GE, West Corp, Merrill Corporation, CoreLogic, Orange, Dish Network, Comcast, Bloomberg, Internal Revenue Service, Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Volkswagen, Solera, Allstate, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ScotiaBank
Find out what your peers are saying about Heroku vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.