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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
6.9
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (4th), Container Management (5th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

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 Red Hat OpenShift is 7.0%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift7.0%
Heroku3.0%
Other90.0%
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.
AA
Operation Director at Zaintech
Platform has transformed our cloud into a secure, unified home for diverse modern applications
One of the best features of Red Hat OpenShift is that it has the catalog, the application catalog, and the operator hub, which allows us to deploy things easily and straightforward without going into a lot of hassles. This is one of the main things, in addition to having integration with ACM and ACS, where we can have the ability to manage multiple clusters and to secure them, deploy them, manage them, run GitOps and day-two operations, as well as upgrades and other functionality which is made easy using these tools. Red Hat OpenShift also provides virtualization capabilities, and I am currently working with Zain to make a project where we will convert F5 appliances to virtual machines and to manage them through Red Hat virtualization, OVE. Red Hat OpenShift is a unique platform because it provides the features for both worlds, containerization, and VMs at the same time, requiring you to learn one skillset in order to manage all of this at the same time. In the beginning, our cloud depended only on virtual machines, so I introduced this to our management to start to work with microservices and with containerization. This was adapted in our cloud, providing us the capability to sell more of these features and to reduce the hardware requirement by about thirty percent, following the trends of using containerization for all modern applications. In addition, it reduced the time to develop and to deploy a new application; all we need is using Jenkins for CI/CD. Once we commit any code, it gets triggered, and it will implement the new container in a very flexible and easy way, within seconds. This decreased the time to market and increased agility, allowing us to capture new opportunities very fast.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The platform is very Node.js-friendly, which is something that is important to us."
"One of the best things about Heroku is that it is very easy and straightforward to deploy an application."
"Valuable for us was the fast deployment. This means the time to market is improved without pain for developers."
"I have been a great fan of Heroku as it simplified my work for many years."
"I like the operations of the product because it makes it easy to push a change and to deploy new things."
"Lots of integrations"
"Deploying with git, npm install git hook ... basically, they got it right for nodejs servers hosting."
"I like the tool's scalability, CLI, and dashboards."
"Scaling and uptime of the applications are positives."
"OpenShift offers robust tools for monitoring application traffic, allowing us to analyze client requests and other business-related metrics."
"Our go-to-market and our deployment for any application, the time is reduced perhaps by eight times, because the things that we used to do in days now take a couple of minutes to be done."
"OpenShift is based on Kubernetes and we try to use all the Kubernetes objects of OpenShift. We don't use features that are specific to OpenShift, except internal certificates for the services. The one feature that is missing from Kubernetes and that is really useful in OpenShift is the lifecycle of the cluster and the ease of installation. We use VMware and VMware integration internally with the OpenShift installer, which is very good. With OpenShift it's easy to spin up or scale out a cluster."
"The most valuable feature of OpenShift is the containers."
"Overall, Red Hat is a handy tool to have, like an electric screwdriver instead of a manual one, because we can use what they've already written to make us more productive."
"The most valuable feature is the high availability for the applications."
"The product seems to be mature enough to use for production application deployments without stability issues."
 

Cons

"The tool's configuration is complex."
"Heroku is pretty stable. We experience the occasional outages."
"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."
"But I recently got my account suspended because someone abused one of my apps."
"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."
"There is an issue because Heroku supports Docker container images, but not if you're using the continuous integration infrastructure."
"I have an issue with the session server in terms of how it can scale, and where I can put my sessions."
"My team has found some bugs in OpenShift due to continuous integration, and this is an area for improvement in the platform. RedHat should fix the bugs. Another area for improvement in OpenShift is that upgrading clusters can be challenging, resulting in downtime. Application support also needs improvement in OpenShift because the platform doesn't support all applications in the cloud. I'd like upgraded storage in the next release of OpenShift, especially when I need to do a DR exercise. It would also be good if the platform allows mirroring with another cluster, or more portability in terms of moving applications to another cluster."
"There is no orchestration platform in OpenShift, but we do in Kubernetes."
"One of the improvements for Red Hat OpenShift which I have problems with is that the changes from version to version could be better."
"The platform's documentation could be more comprehensive to cover the full spectrum of user needs. Sometimes, achieving specific goals is challenging due to a lack of detailed guidance."
"The whole area around the hybrid cloud could be improved."
"OpenShift could be improved if it were more accessible for smaller budgets."
"The main drawback was the upgrade from Openshift Enterprise 3.11 to Openshift Enterprise 4 up to now."
"We had stability issues, especially with earlier versions where the underlying Kubernetes wasn't stable at all."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."
"The tool is free."
"Its price is very good."
"There is a standard fee for a processing unit, they call them "dynos," and then you pay for add-ons."
"I rate the tool's pricing a three out of ten."
"The pricing is standard; the solution isn't particularly expensive or affordable."
"I don't deal with the cost part, but I know that the cost is very high when compared to other products. They charge for CPU and memory, but we don't worry about it."
"We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support."
"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 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."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"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."
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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
22%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

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 Business19
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise56
 

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 ...
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 needs improvement with OpenShift?
I hope that the interface and dashboard can become more user-friendly to assist in creating clusters and managing network interfaces easily, as opposed to relying heavily on command lines, which co...
 

Comparisons

 

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: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.