Google Cloud vs Heroku comparison

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Google Cloud

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Heroku and Google Cloud are competing products in the platform-as-a-service and cloud computing markets. Google Cloud has the advantage in scalability and features, aligning it with enterprises needing advanced solutions, whereas Heroku is favored by startups for its simplicity and affordability.

Features: Heroku's features include seamless integration with multiple programming languages, an app-centric approach, and continuous integration capabilities. In contrast, Google Cloud provides robust infrastructure capabilities, advanced machine learning tools, and a comprehensive global network.

Room for Improvement: Heroku could enhance its scalability and offer more detailed customization options to attract more extensive user bases. Additionally, expanding its enterprise-level features would better cater to larger organizations. Google Cloud could improve its user complexity by simplifying deployment processes. Lowering pricing complexity and offering more beginner-friendly resources would be beneficial. Further enhancements in customer support could also help.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Heroku simplifies deployment with its automated model and responsive customer support ideal for rapid launches. Google Cloud offers a complex deployment model with multiple custom options, supported by detailed documentation and extensive advanced support plans.

Pricing and ROI: Heroku offers competitive and predictable pricing, advantageous for budget-conscious teams which results in satisfactory ROI for smaller projects. Google Cloud features a complex pricing structure with scalable options that deliver high ROI for larger organizations, thanks to its comprehensive service offerings. The key difference lies in Heroku's predictable, lower-cost model versus Google Cloud's flexible pricing tailored for extensive use.

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

Google Cloud 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

Google Cloud

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (5th)

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 April 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Google Cloud is 6.7%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heroku is 2.9%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

RaidHammouri

Presales Engineer at 2P - Perfect Presentation

Monitoring solution enhances cost efficiency with good internal tools

In terms of Google services, providing more hypervisors would be beneficial. Currently, in my region, they don't offer many services as they have just started. They have some local instances, yet improvements are needed in the tools and offers provided to customers. I currently only use, for example, a native hybrid. VMware is not available, and other hypervisors are still not there. They need to wait on that.

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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

"Regarding Google Cloud's data analytics features, I find the presentation of information and the ability to move and transform data to be the most valuable. As for machine learning capabilities, they are helpful, especially in detecting anomalies or outliers in our data. For instance, Google Cloud can identify unusual network behavior and provide recommendations on how to address or leverage these findings effectively."

"The solution is user-friendly and easy to spin."

"I like that it is simple to use."

"Google Cloud has low downtime."

"My customers appreciate all the features that Google Cloud has to offer. They are looking for solutions for computing engines, storage, web hosting, and various other needs. The most useful feature depends on their specific requirements and how they plan to utilize Google Cloud. Each customer has their own unique set of needs and the Google Cloud provides a range of options to meet those needs."

"Google Cloud is perceived as a cost-effective and user-friendly option, especially compared to AWS. The current affordability and ease of use make it suitable for medium-sized companies. While the complexity may increase in the future, for now, Google Cloud is considered easy to use."

"The solution can scale."

"It eliminates capital expenditures and subsequent MNO that we would use to spend on on-prem architectures. That money is funneled towards security and connectivity provisioning."

More Google Cloud pros

"Thanks to Heroku, we don't need to do as much direct management in AWS."

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

"The most valuable feature of Heroku is the continuous integration and applications it provides."

"The platform is very Node.js-friendly, which is something that is important to us."

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

"It's easy to push a change and to deploy new things."

"The product is stable."

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

More Heroku pros

Cons

"There are issues with stability."

"Current technologies keep on changing, so definitely those new changes need to be incorporated quickly. The competition is always out there to be one step ahead. How those open-source platforms can be easily integrated into the cloud, is going to be the key in the future."

"They could integrate artificial intelligence into the applications."

"Google Cloud could improve interoperability with other cloud services."

"Google is slower to support .NET."

"I would like for this solution to improve its user interface and documentation."

"As a new product, the product's initial setup phase is a little bit difficult."

"The price of the solution could be more transparent."

More Google Cloud cons

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

More Heroku cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Google offers a free account with minimal data backup and we can subscribe for more data."

"It is not easy to calculate the price of the solution from the pricing table since they are not standard rates. However, I find the solution’s prices to be fair and reasonable."

"The best part of Google Cloud is that it is cheaper than the competitors."

"Pricing is high compared to other solutions."

"Its cost depends on specific use cases."

"For the license, we didn't have to pay for any additional fees."

"This solution is worth the money we are paying. I would rate the pricing a three out of five."

"It has a monthly subscription. The customers pay based on the usage."

More Google Cloud 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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

51%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Cloud?

Google Cloud is perceived as a cost-effective and user-friendly option, especially compared to AWS. The current affordability and ease of use make it suitable for medium-sized companies. While the ...

What needs improvement with Google Cloud?

What is your primary use case for Google Cloud?

My platform offers a monitoring solution for the virtual machines hosted in GCP. GCP is one of the firms that I work with. For customers who use GCP as an infrastructure service, software as a serv...

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.

Alibaba Cloud vs Google Cloud

Comparisons

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Red Hat OpenShift vs Google Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Google Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Google Cloud

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Google Cloud

Compared 1% of the time

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Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Compared 31% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Heroku

Compared 14% of the time

AWS Fargate vs Heroku

Compared 10% of the time

Google App Engine vs Heroku

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Heroku

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Google Cloud

Download Google Cloud product report

Download Heroku product report

Overview

Google Cloud is an Infrastructure as a Service Cloud (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that provides infrastructure tools and services for building applications on top of a public cloud computing platform. As one of the leading global infrastructures, this product allows users to securely manage enterprise data, receive valuable insights, and store documents. Google Cloud provides its various services through tools and services for data warehousing, security key enforcement, application programming interface (API) management, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).

The use cases of Google Cloud can be divided into four main categories:

Big data
Compute
Services
Storage

The solution is utilized by organizations of all sizes and industries, as it is suitable for the following purposes:

Running and building applications: Google Cloud lets businesses run and build their applications anywhere because of its commitment to open-source, hybrid, and multi-cloud. This can accelerate development time as businesses avoid vendor lock-in.
Data insight: Google Cloud provides companies with advanced ML and analytics for their data. This can facilitate business decisions and improve work processes, as every team member can have access to data reports via this solution.
Security: Utilizing Google's technology, this solution helps users protect and defend their data and applications against threats and harmful activities.
Team collaboration: Google Cloud offers companies advanced collaboration features. They can integrate email, chat, video calling, and document collaboration all in one place when using this platform.

Google Cloud Features

Google Cloud offers multiple features for its clients. Some of these include:

Big data features: The solution offers full big data services through tools such as BigQuery and Google Cloud Dataflow. These tools allow users to process large data queries as well as create, monitor, and receive reports from data processing pipelines.
Containers: The solution offers containers, which allow users to speed up deployment and scale applications.
Cloud debugger: This feature allows users to debug code during the production process. In this way, businesses are able to locate issues early in the code and fix them before deploying the application.
Cloud save: This feature provides the ability to synchronize cloud-stored data across all devices an organization is supporting. Through it, users can save and retrieve information and maintain all data copies up to date.
Cloud trace: This Google Cloud feature allows users to detect the reasons for performance bottlenecks and fix the issues. It also provides users with information on the time their product takes to process certain requests, allowing them to follow performance more closely.
Hosting features: The solution offers two hosting options. App Engine is the PaaS of Google Cloud and Computes Engine is their IaaS.
Load balancing: This feature balances the traffic of multiple compute instances across various geographic regions.
Maintenance: Users receive frequent insight into the performance of their applications and through automations, Google Cloud lets them know of any issues that need to be fixed.

Google Cloud Benefits

Google Cloud brings various benefits to its users. Some of these include the following:

The pricing model of Google Cloud allows users to pay only for the selected features and tools they wish to use, which saves their organizations money.
Users can rely on accelerated content delivery through Google Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Google Cloud offers a wide variety of tools and libraries, which assist users in the development of cloud applications.
The tool has an advanced admin control that allows users to easily add or remove new users and maintain the security of business platforms.
Google Cloud offers consulting services whereby experts provide assistance with cloud strategy development.
The platform is updated on a frequent basis, which can increase companies' productivity through consistent innovations.
Google Cloud offers remote access from anywhere at all times via Google's web applications.
The solution reduces the risks of data breaches as it offers minimal storage of offline data.
Users can expect support not only from the platform but from the growing online community as well, where their questions can be answered in a timely manner.
The product provides detailed documentation for its clients, allowing them to benefit from tutorials and other samples, in order to learn to work with it in the most efficient way.

Reviews from Real Users

Isuru P., an assistant vice president at a tech services company, likes Google Cloud because it is easy to deploy next-generation applications using it.

An IT solutions consultant at a tech services company rates Google Cloud highly because they find the solution stable with a good user experience and a straightforward setup.

Google

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

Information Not Available

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

Google Cloud vs. Heroku