Heroku vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

Heroku and Red Hat are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Heroku is ranked #12 with an average rating of 9.0, while Red Hat is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.5. Heroku holds a 3.0% mindshare in PSP, compared to Red Hat’s 7.0% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Heroku users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Heroku

Read 29 Heroku reviews

2,987 Views
2,688 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 75 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

15,905 Views
7,475 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Heroku

Red Hat OpenShift

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Heroku and Red Hat OpenShift are competing in the cloud platform space, focusing on application hosting and management. Heroku excels in ease of use and competitive pricing, while Red Hat OpenShift has an edge due to its robust feature set appealing to enterprises.

Features: Heroku is valued for its simplicity, seamless integration with Salesforce, and a diverse add-on marketplace. Red Hat OpenShift shines with its scalability, advanced security, and support for hybrid cloud deployments, offering flexibility with comprehensive features suitable for complex enterprise needs.

Room for Improvement: Heroku could improve by offering more advanced deployment options, enhancing its enterprise-level features, and providing more comprehensive customer support. Red Hat OpenShift would benefit from simplifying its deployment model, reducing initial setup costs, and enhancing its user interface for less tech-savvy users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Heroku provides a streamlined deployment process with a user-friendly interface, making it ideal for developers. However, its customer service is somewhat basic. Red Hat OpenShift offers a more intricate deployment model but compensates with strong enterprise-level support, catering to organizations needing solid infrastructure and comprehensive deployment options.

Pricing and ROI: Heroku is cost-effective for small to medium projects with transparent pricing models, offering good ROI. Red Hat OpenShift, while involving higher setup costs, delivers significant ROI for large enterprises, providing comprehensive capabilities justifying its investment for businesses with extensive scalability needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Heroku vs. Red Hat OpenShift Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Heroku vs. Red Hat OpenShift

June 2026

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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

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

Red Hat OpenShift

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

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
Product	Mindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift	7.0%
Heroku	3.0%
Other	90.0%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

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

Ayman Abuqutriyah

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.

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

"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"

"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."

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

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

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

More Heroku pros

"Red Hat OpenShift has positively impacted our organization by improving efficiency and collaboration, and in comparison it seems to be better than IBM Cloud."

"The solution provides a lot of flexibility to the application team for running their applications in the container platform, without needing to monitor the entire infrastructure all the time. It automatically scales and automatically self-heals. There is also a mechanism to alert the team in case it is over-committing or overutilizing the application."

"Red Hat OpenShift has positively impacted my organization primarily through observability, as for us, application uptime matters a lot when providing public-facing products consumed by customers, and hence, we're using that to keep refining our application and products through observability metrics and keeping pace with market trends, as we promised 99.99% uptime to our customers, and the observability in Red Hat OpenShift is really helping us a lot with that."

"The most valuable feature is the high availability for the applications."

"OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins."

"If anybody is looking for a solution that can work on-premise as well as on the cloud and gives the flexibility of not tying the solution to the underlying platform, then OpenShift is one of the popular choices you can make."

"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."

"This solution helps us to account for peak seasons involving higher demand than usual. It also gives us confidence in the security of our overall systems."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

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

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

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

"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."

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

More Heroku cons

"The whole area around the hybrid cloud could be improved. I would like to deploy a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on-premise and on the cloud, then have Red Hat do the entire hybrid cloud management."

"One of the features that I've observed in Tanzu Mission Control is that I can manage multiple Kubernetes environments. For instance, one of my lines of business is using OpenShift OKD; another one wants to use Google Anthos, and somebody else wants to use VMware Tanzu. If I have to manage all these, Tanzu Mission Control is giving me the opportunity to completely manage all of my Kubernetes clusters, whereas, with OpenShift, I can only manage a particular area. I can't manage other Kubernetes clusters. I would like to have the option to manage all Kubernetes clusters with OpenShift."

"For some reason there have been some DNS issues."

"Not a ten because it's not a standard solution and the endpoint protection user has to prepare with documentation or have training from other people. It's not easy to start because it's not like other solutions."

"Red Hat OpenShift is very expensive."

"We had to discontinue this solution due to many limitations."

"We had stability issues, especially with earlier versions where the underlying Kubernetes wasn't stable at all."

"Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."

"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 tool is free."

"Its price is very good."

"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."

"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."

"We had a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) license for all our servers' operating systems. By having multiple Red Hat products together, you can negotiate costs and leverage on having a sort of enterprise license agreement to reduce the overall outlay or TCO."

"The product’s pricing is expensive."

"The pricing for OpenShift includes support and licensing, which costs approximately $400."

"It's important to start small because the solution is scalable. We can build our cluster and look at the bundle option, not the external subscriptions. Talking to the people at Red Hat can save us money."

"We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support."

"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."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	56

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 ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Heroku?

We use the solution for web applications and web APIs.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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 ...

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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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Heroku

Compared 11% of the time

Google App Engine vs Heroku

Compared 8% of the time

Render vs Heroku

Compared 8% of the time

AWS Fargate vs Heroku

Compared 5% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 4% of the time

Hyper-V vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 4% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Heroku

June 2026

Download Heroku product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

June 2026

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Overview

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.

Heroku

Red Hat OpenShift is a comprehensive platform offering versatile container orchestration capabilities, suitable for businesses seeking robust, scalable, and secure solutions for application modernization efforts and microservices deployment.

Red Hat OpenShift combines a user-friendly interface with powerful CLI tools, ensuring rapid deployment and process automation. It seamlessly integrates with Docker and Kubernetes, providing cloud-native stacks for flexibility and compliance. Enhancing development efficiency, OpenShift includes built-in CI/CD tools and dynamic scaling features. It supports multi-cloud environments, avoiding vendor lock-in. However, documentation gaps, interface complexity, and infrastructure demands present challenges, alongside improving integration with third-party tools and monitoring capabilities. Licensing complexities and resource consumption remain areas for improvement, with user experience varying due to support response times.

What are Red Hat OpenShift's key features?

User-Friendly GUI: Offers an intuitive interface for managing containers and applications.
CLI Tools: Robust command line tools for efficient development workflows.
Scalability: Supports dynamic scaling to meet changing demands.
Integration: Seamless integration with Docker and Kubernetes.
Security: Features like role-based access control enhance security.
CI/CD Tools: Built-in tools like Jenkins streamline the development lifecycle.
Multi-Cloud Support: Enables use across different cloud providers.

What benefits should users consider in reviews?

Deployment Speed: Faster application rollouts and updates.
Automation: Reduces manual tasks, increasing operational efficiency.
Security: High-security standards for protecting applications.
Adaptability: Flexible framework suited for diverse environments.
Resource Management: Efficient allocation of resources for cost savings.

In industries embracing cloud-native architectures, Red Hat OpenShift is adept for hosting containerized applications and transitioning legacy systems. It excels in managing DevOps processes, supporting production and development in sectors such as finance, healthcare, and technology, ensuring robust hybrid on-premise and cloud operations.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

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

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton

Buyer's Guide

Heroku vs. Red Hat OpenShift

June 2026

Free Report: Heroku vs. Red Hat OpenShift

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