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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
13th
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
7.0
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (10th), Container Management (8th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Heroku is 3.5%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 8.6%, 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 OpenShift8.6%
Heroku3.5%
Other87.9%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Faizan Haider - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Aldaim Solutions
Used for server deployment and provides auto maintenance of databases
Heroku is deployed on the cloud. We can deploy our private and public projects over at Heroku. Most of the time, when we are starting any new project from scratch, we have to implement our MVP for that project or the core idea. We are unsure how our traffic flow will go or the actual production environment requirements. We don't want to spend the most on the server sites, so then we can use it with our go-to plan for Heroku, and all the resources are available in the basic plan with the minimum expenses. So, it helps us to deploy and make our features available online at the minimum cost. Once we know our needs, we can add the professional add-ons and shift it to another platform. Heroku supports any resource listed in the marketplace. We just have to deploy our AI solutions, and Heroku can also support AI projects. I would recommend the solution to other users. I advise users not to purchase extra add-ons but to make scalable resources so that they can use all the resources efficiently. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
Pratul Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
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."
"It's easy to push a change and to deploy new things."
"Thanks to Heroku, we don't need to do as much direct management in AWS."
"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."
"The platform is very Node.js-friendly, which is something that is important to us."
"The most valuable feature of Heroku is the continuous integration and applications it provides."
"The product is stable."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the auto maintenance of databases."
"It has features that enhance security, ease of deployment, and service exposure compared to Kubernetes."
"Valuable features include auto-recreate of pod if pod fails; fast rollback, with one click, to previous version."
"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."
"The stability has been good."
"The most valuable feature of OpenShift is the security context constraint (SCC). The solution’s security throughout the stack is good. And security context constraints provide port-level security. It's a granular level of control, where you can give privileges to certain users to work on certain applications."
"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 product's initial setup is very easy, especially compared to AWS."
"It is a stable platform."
 

Cons

"The tool's configuration is complex."
"We would like to be notified when something goes wrong in the process. When something is not working, we should get an alert."
"Heroku should increase its slug size limits."
"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."
"Their support is good, but they can improve their response time."
"Heroku doesn't support Docker images on the CI infrastructure."
"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."
"The pricing could be improved because scaling the database becomes costly."
"OpenShift's storage management could be better."
"I had to frequently upgrade my cluster due to OpenShift's rolling updates every six months, which I found to be excessive."
"Documentation and technical support could be improved. The product is good, but when we raise a case with support—say we are having an image issue—the support is not really up to the mark. It is difficult to get support... When we raise a case, their support people will hesitate to get on a call or a screen-sharing session. That is a major drawback when it comes to OpenShift."
"OpenShift can improve monitoring. Sometimes there are issues. Additionally, the solution could benefit from protective tools if something was to happen in our network."
"There are challenges related to additional security layers, connectivity compliance for endpoints, and integration."
"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."
"I think that OpenShift has too many commands for running services from the CLI, and the configuration files are a little complicated."
"OpenShift could improve by providing the ability to integrate with public cloud platforms. This way we can easily use the services that these platforms offer. For instance, Amazon AWS. However, all the three major hyper-scalers solutions offer excellent DevOps and CI/CD tooling. If there was an easy way to integrate with them it would be beneficial. We need a way to easily integrate with the monitoring and dashboard services that they provide."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."
"I rate the tool's pricing a three out of ten."
"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."
"The tool is free."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support."
"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."
"The price depends on the type and the nature of the organizations, along with the types of projects that are of considerable range."
"Depending on the extent of the product use, licenses are available for a range of time periods, and are renewable at the end of the period."
"The product has reasonable pricing."
"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."
"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
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 Enterprise43
 

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.
 

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: February 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.