Cloud Foundry vs Heroku comparison

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Cloud Foundry

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Heroku and Cloud Foundry are platforms competing in app deployment and management. Cloud Foundry seems to have the edge due to its scalable enterprise features and broader open-source ecosystem.

Features: Heroku provides seamless integration with third-party services, a powerful add-on marketplace, and efficient buildpacks. Cloud Foundry offers robust container management, support for multiple frameworks, and comprehensive enterprise-level customization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Heroku’s deployment model is known for its simplicity and quick start, making it suitable for developers. Cloud Foundry, though more complex, supports large-scale operations with customization. Customer service is comparable, though Cloud Foundry provides more detailed enterprise support.

Pricing and ROI: Heroku is known for its straightforward pricing, ideal for startups and small companies, offering a strong ROI through rapid deployment and low initial costs. Cloud Foundry requires a higher upfront investment but offers a competitive ROI for enterprises due to its scalability and control.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Foundry vs. Heroku Report (Updated: March 2025).

Cloud Foundry vs. Heroku

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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

Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

22nd

Average Rating

5.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Heroku

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

15th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Cloud Foundry is 1.2%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heroku is 2.7%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Carlos Bittrich

Technology Advisor at Fabrik

Quick to deploy but being deprecated by IBM and should be merged with Kubernetes

We enjoy the fast deployment. Cloud Foundry builds the runtime environment directly without requiring dependency management from the developer or administrator. The autoscaling is great. It is just a switch that needs to be turned on, and autoscaling starts working. At this moment, you begin to see different meters about usage that helps you in updating the scaling limits, which help you tune the running instances. Besides this, autoscaling can be scheduled, so in times of low activity, you can have lower limits or increase in advance for special dates. It has good logging. CF has logging events that help identify when a transaction runs and its response time which helps in monitoring execution.

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Faizan Haider

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM is the only vendor to offer integration with blockchain for smart contract development."

"Cloud Foundry builds the runtime environment directly without requiring dependency management from the user."

"My favorite component of IBM's solution is Node-RED, which greatly shortens the amount of time required to develop, test, and deploy new applications."

"The product is stable."

"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'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."

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

"The solution's most valuable feature is the auto maintenance of databases."

"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

Cons

"In IBM Cloud, the product has been deprecated in favor of Kubernetes, which is a more complicated infrastructure to manage."

"After the initial excitement period with Node-RED is over, you crave the need of additional integrations to third-party services."

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

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

"They could flesh out some of their analytics a little more."

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

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

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

"We have to do daily restarts of some processes, which is annoying, and the support for custom CI could be better."

More Heroku cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You are allocated a minimum amount of resources in the free tier. This seems fair and highly scalable, as you pay per usage as per cloud pricing schemes."

"IBM has a free tier and payment option depending on the products selected."

"The pricing models should be reworked to the needs of a wider range of companies. Some customers will not be able to afford it until quite a few years into production, even after good PoC results and a successful launch."

"The tool is free."

"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."

"The price of Heroku could be less expensive."

"Its price is very good."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Educational Organization

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Heroku?

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

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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 ...

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What is your primary use case for Heroku?

We use the solution for web applications and web APIs.

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Comparisons

Amazon AWS vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 33% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 25% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 11% of the time

More Cloud Foundry Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 31% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Heroku

Compared 13% of the time

AWS Fargate vs Heroku

Compared 11% of the time

Google App Engine vs Heroku

Compared 7% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Heroku

Compared 2% of the time

More Heroku Competitors

Product Reports

PaaS Clouds

Download Cloud Foundry product report

Download Heroku product report

Overview

Cloud Foundry, home of the open source application development technologies CF Application Runtime and CF Container Runtime, is more than a platform. It’s a flexible way of embracing digital transformation that helps businesses evolve in the face of constant change. To put it another way, with Cloud Foundry, companies can rest assured they will have the right tool for the right job.

Cloud Foundry

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.

Sample Customers

Grape Up, c-Com, KONE, TITAN, CSAA, Bosch, Allstate, Verizon, West Corp., Telstra

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

Cloud Foundry vs. Heroku