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Heroku vs Red Hat OpenShift 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
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (10th), Container Management (11th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (6th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Heroku is 3.4%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 11.6%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Red Hat OpenShift11.6%
Heroku3.4%
Other85.0%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Cristian-Molina - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Pratul Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Adopting a flexible and efficient approach with noticeable improvements in operational costs and continued challenges in job management
Currently, one of the biggest challenges we face is with services and jobs. For spawning batches, although it has crons, it is not easy to integrate with enterprise systems such as Autosys. The entire company uses Autosys, but we are not able to integrate it effectively. We need intermediate servers to run OC utility commands and initiate the cron job. We have to do a lot of modifications to ensure our batches work properly. With physical or virtual servers, even in AWS, we are able to write and manage multiple jobs. Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge. Integrating third parties is a challenge with Red Hat OpenShift. For example, with Elasticsearch, onboarding itself was difficult, running file beats and dealing with routing issues. It is not straightforward, especially since we have some components in AWS as. AWS has many capabilities that come out of the box and are easier to work with compared to Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift's biggest disadvantage is they do not provide any private cloud setup where we can host on our site using their services. The main reason we went with Red Hat OpenShift was because it is a private cloud, and we have regulatory requirements that prevent us from using public cloud.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I found most valuable about this solution is that it's easy to use and integrate with GitHub actions."
"I like the tool's scalability, CLI, and dashboards."
"It's easy to push a change and to deploy new things."
"The most valuable feature of Heroku is the continuous integration and applications it provides."
"The product is stable."
"Valuable for us was the fast deployment. This means the time to market is improved without pain for developers."
"Thanks to Heroku, we don't need to do as much direct management in AWS."
"The platform is very Node.js-friendly, which is something that is important to us."
"OpenShift offers more stability than Kubernetes."
"The security features of OpenShift are strong when in use of role-based access."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is the great customer service and the ability for our team to get assistance when we need it."
"The scalability of OpenShift combined with Kubernetes is good. At least from the software standpoint, it becomes quite easy to handle the scalability through configuration. You need to constantly monitor the underlying infrastructure and ensure that it has adequate provisioning. If you have enough infrastructure, then managing the scalability is quite easy which is done through configuration."
"Key features are WildFly, because it standardizes infrastructure and the git repository and docker. Git is essential for source code and Docker for infrastructure."
"I love to automate everything and OpenShift was been born for that. It takes care of the network layer itself and I don't need to dive into it; I can work on a top level. Our project has numerous services designed to run in Docker containers, and we have run almost all pieces in OpenShift."
"This solution is providing a platform with OOTB features that are difficult to build from scratch."
"Self-provisioning support saves a lot of time and unnecessary work from the system administrator who can use this time to run and monitor the infrastructure. For the developer, this means less time waiting for the provisioning and excellent flexibility for development, testing, and production. Also, in such systems it is easy for developers to monitor applications even after deployment."
 

Cons

"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 doesn't support Docker images on the CI infrastructure."
"The pricing could be improved because scaling the database becomes costly."
"Their support is good, but they can improve their response time."
"We would like to be notified when something goes wrong in the process. When something is not working, we should get an alert."
"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 should increase its slug size limits."
"I think this solution would be improved if free demos were available indefinitely."
"The tool lacks some features to make it compliant with Kubernetes"
"OpenShift can improve monitoring. Sometimes there are issues. Additionally, the solution could benefit from protective tools if something was to happen in our network."
"If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great."
"The product’s integration with Windows containers and other third-party products needs improvement."
"Autoscaling is a very unique feature, but it could be useful to have more options based on traffic statistics, for example, via Prometheus. So, there should be more ready solutions to autoscale based on specific applications."
"We need some kind of a multi-cluster management solution from the Red Hat site."
"It could use auto-scaling based on criteria such as transaction volume, queue backlog, etc. Currently, it is limited to CPU and memory."
"There have been some issues with security, in particular, that we had to address. At times they make it “clunky." I am quite confident these parameters will appear in the next releases. They have been reported as bugs and are actually in process."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."
"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 model of pricing and buying licences is quite rigid. We are in the process of negotiating on demand pricing which will help us take advantage of the cloud as a whole."
"It's expensive. It may be cheaper to invest in building Vanilla Kubernetes, especially if security is not the number one motivation or requirement. Of course, that's difficult, and in some business areas, such as banking, that's not something you can put as a second priority. In other situations, a Vanilla Kubernetes with a sufficiently strong team can be cheaper and almost as effective."
"The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees."
"The product has reasonable pricing."
"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."
"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."
"The price depends on the type and the nature of the organizations, along with the types of projects that are of considerable range."
"OpenShift is really good when we need to start, but once we get to a certain scale, it becomes too expensive."
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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
28%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

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 Business17
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise40
 

Questions from the Community

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.
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 ...
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...
What do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, UrbanDictionary, Code for America, Mailchimp, Rapportive, GitHub, TED, and Lyft.
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Heroku vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
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