Heroku vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

Heroku and Red Hat are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Heroku is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.0, while Red Hat is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.3. Heroku holds a 3.3% mindshare in PSP, compared to Red Hat’s 12.0% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Heroku users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Heroku

Read 29 Heroku reviews

2,195 Views
1,997 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 62 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

11,087 Views
7,650 Comparison Views

95% 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: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Heroku vs. Red Hat OpenShift

July 2025

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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

14th

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

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Virtualization Software (10th), Container Management (12th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (6th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Heroku is 3.3%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 12.0%, up from 11.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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.

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Pratul Shukla

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.

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

"We use Heroku to run generic data. We also use it for our customer development environment. It helps us to build and test websites."

"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."

"I like the tool's scalability, CLI, and dashboards."

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

"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."

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

"The product is stable."

More Heroku pros

"Scaling and uptime of the applications are positives."

"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."

"This solution is providing a platform with OOTB features that are difficult to build from scratch."

"The company had a product called device financing, where the company worked as a partner with Google. It allowed customers to take mobile phones on loan or via credit. When we migrated those services to OpenShift in February last year, we were able to sell over 100,000 devices in a single day, which was very good."

"The solution is easy to scale."

"OpenShift offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface for cluster management, making it more accessible for administrators."

"Key features are WildFly, because it standardizes infrastructure and the git repository and docker. Git is essential for source code and Docker for infrastructure."

"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

"The tool's configuration is complex."

"Heroku had an authentication problem a few months ago, but they solved it."

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

"The pricing could be improved because scaling the database becomes costly."

"Heroku should increase its slug size limits."

"I think this solution would be improved if free demos were available indefinitely."

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

"We would like to be notified when something goes wrong in the process. When something is not working, we should get an alert."

More Heroku cons

"I had to frequently upgrade my cluster due to OpenShift's rolling updates every six months, which I found to be excessive."

"This solution could be improved by offering best practices on standardization and additional guidance on how to use this solution."

"The operators need a lot of improvement, with better integrations."

"The area for improvement is mostly in support for legacy applications."

"Latency and performance are two areas of concern in OpenShift where improvements are required."

"The solution only offers support for one server."

"We need some kind of a multi-cluster management solution from the Red Hat site."

"The tool lacks some features to make it compliant with Kubernetes"

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a standard fee for a processing unit, they call them "dynos," and then you pay for add-ons."

"The tool is free."

"Its price is very good."

"I rate the tool's pricing a three out of ten."

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."

"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."

"The product has reasonable pricing."

"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."

"The product’s pricing is expensive."

"The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees."

"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."

"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."

"The solution is cost-effective."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

29%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Heroku?

I like the tool's scalability, CLI, and dashboards.

See all answers

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

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 ...

See all answers

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 do you like most about OpenShift?

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

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 21% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Heroku

Compared 11% of the time

AWS Fargate vs Heroku

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Heroku

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon Lightsail vs Heroku

Compared 5% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Google Cloud vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 6% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Heroku

August 2025

Download Heroku product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

August 2025

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Overview

Established in 2007, Heroku is a cloud application platform providing a streamlined, efficient place for web app developers to create and deploy their applications. Heroku is designed to maximize developer productivity. With the entire web application development process available on the Herokucloud, creating and rolling out web apps has been made more efficient, convenient, and cost-effective than ever before.

Heroku

Red Hat OpenShift offers a robust, scalable platform with strong security and automation, suitable for container orchestration, application deployment, and microservices architecture.

Designed to modernize applications by transitioning from legacy systems to cloud-native environments, Red Hat OpenShift provides powerful CI/CD integration and Kubernetes compatibility. Its security features, multi-cloud support, and source-to-image functionality enhance deployment flexibility. While the GUI offers user-friendly navigation, users benefit from its cloud-agnostic nature and efficient lifecycle management. However, improvements are needed in documentation, configuration complexity, and integration with third-party platforms. Pricing and high resource demands can also be challenging for wider adoption.

What are the key features of Red Hat OpenShift?

Security: Comprehensive security features ensure safe deployments and operations.
Scalability: Auto-scaling and monitoring capabilities cater to high-demand environments.
CI/CD Integration: Seamless integration for efficient continuous deployment processes.
Cloud Compatibility: Supports multi-cloud and on-premise solutions with ease.
GUI: Simplifies platform management and enhances usability.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Improved Efficiency: Streamlined operations reduce time and resource investments.
Enhanced Flexibility: Adapt quickly to changing demands and environments.
Quick Deployment: Fast application deployment supports agile project timelines.
Robust Support: Access to dependable customer support services.

Red Hat OpenShift is strategically implemented for diverse industries focusing on container orchestration and application modernization. Organizations leverage it for migrating applications to cloud-native environments and managing CI/CD pipelines. Its functionality facilitates efficient resource management and microservices architecture adoption, supporting enterprise-level DevOps practices. Users employ it across cloud and on-premises platforms to drive performance improvements.

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

July 2025

Free Report: Heroku vs. Red Hat OpenShift

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