Heroku vs OpenShift comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Heroku and OpenShift based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two PaaS Clouds solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Heroku vs. OpenShift Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable feature of Heroku is the continuous integration and applications it provides.""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.""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.""What I found most valuable about this solution is that it's easy to use and integrate with GitHub actions.""The platform is very Node.js-friendly, which is something that is important to us.""Thanks to Heroku, we don't need to do as much direct management in AWS."

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"Excellent GUI support, so one does not need to use the command line client for almost any tasks. Great support for building images directly from Git repositories with hooks.""OpenShift offers more stability than Kubernetes.""What I like best about OpenShift is that it can reduce some of the costs of having multiple applications because you can just move them into small container applications. For example, applications don't need to run for twenty days, only to be used up by Monday. Through OpenShift, you can move some of the small applications into any cloud. I also find the design of OpenShift good.""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.""Two stand-out features are the security model and value-add features that don't exist in Upstream Kubernetes.""Great integration with Jenkins for constant integration and development. Supports all the major languages and environments - PHP, Java, Node.js, Ruby, etc.""I love to automate everything and OpenShift was been born for that. It takes care of the network layer itself and I don't need to dive into it; I can work on a top level. Our project has numerous services designed to run in Docker containers, and we have run almost all pieces in OpenShift.""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."

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Cons
"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.""They could flesh out some of their analytics a little more.""The tool's configuration is complex.""Heroku doesn't support Docker images on the CI infrastructure.""I think this solution would be improved if free demos were available indefinitely.""We have to do daily restarts of some processes, which is annoying, and the support for custom CI could be better.""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."

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"If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great.""The software-defined networking part of it caused us quite a bit of heartburn. We ran into a lot of problems with the difference between on-prem and cloud, where we had to make quite a number of modifications... They've since resolved it, so it's not really an issue anymore.""OpenShift's storage management could be better.""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.""The area for improvement is mostly in support for legacy applications.""An enhancement to consider for the future might involve incorporating a comprehensive solution for CI/CD tailored specifically for OpenShift.""We want to see better alerting, especially in critical situations requiring immediate intervention. Until we go to the dashboard, it can be challenging to quickly recognize that there's an issue for us to deal with. Therefore, a popup of the event or a tweaked GUI to catch our attention when it's alerting would be a welcome change. Everything else is good. We don't need any additional features. From the operations perspective, as an administrator, there is nothing concerning.""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."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Its price is very good."
  • "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."
  • More Heroku Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."
  • "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."
  • "We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."
  • "The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees."
  • "This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."
  • "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 OpenShift Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:I like the tool's scalability, CLI, and dashboards.
    Top Answer: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.
    Top Answer:We use the solution to streamline mobile application deployment and management. By connecting our project's GitHub repository to Heroku, I enabled automatic deployments whenever changes were pushed to… more »
    Top Answer: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 is… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
    Ranking
    12th
    out of 33 in PaaS Clouds
    Views
    4,427
    Comparisons
    3,285
    Reviews
    4
    Average Words per Review
    307
    Rating
    8.0
    4th
    out of 33 in PaaS Clouds
    Views
    16,712
    Comparisons
    13,265
    Reviews
    29
    Average Words per Review
    679
    Rating
    8.6
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    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.

    OpenShift is Red Hat's Kubernetes platform that provides a cloud environment for development, hosting, and scaling applications. The solution enables a cloud-like experience regardless of the location where it has been deployed, including in the cloud, on premises, or at the edge. It allows developers to select where to build, deploy, and run applications through a consistent experience, supported by full-stack automated operations, and self-service provisioning.

    OpenShift employs an open hybrid cloud strategy which is built on the foundation of technologies including Linux, containers, and automation. This approach provides clients with a flexible selection of where to run their applications. Applications can be built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and are automatically compatible with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. OpenShift enables automation inside and outside clients' Kubernetes clusters.

    The solution works with traditional, modernized, and cloud-native applications. It supports a wide variety of workloads, including Java, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and databases. Due to the vast ecosystem of technology partners that OpenShift supports, clients can benefit from automated deployment and life-cycle management. This product improves the security of the full application life cycle by decreasing operational risk. This is achieved by shifting security left and automating development, security, and operations (DevSecOps).

    OpenShift Features

    OpenShift facilitates clients’ application-running processes through various features. Some of the product’s features include:

    • Backup and recovery: This feature ensures logical and physical protection through containers, Kubernetes, and serverless present opportunities. It is used to meet recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).

    • CI/CD pipelines: This feature of OpenShift automates the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, accelerating the time for application development.

    • GitOps: The GitOps feature increases security and reliability for applications through tools like Git repositories, Kubernetes, and CI/CD. The product includes this feature to allow developers more freedom in app development through tracing and accounting for the application life cycle in the Git repository.

    • Helm: Helm is a package and installs manager that simplifies the deployment of containerized apps. It is included in the features of OpenShift to assist users with interoperability and support cloud-native applications from independent software vendors (ISVs).

    • Sandboxed containers: OpenShift offers sandboxed containers based on Kata Containers to provide an additional layer of isolation for applications while meeting high-security requirements.

    • Windows containers: The product offers this feature to facilitate users when running their Windows applications by providing them a scheduled, orchestrated, and managed environment.

    • Security: OpenShift offers various operations through which clients can ensure the safety of their data and applications. They include container host and platform multitenancy, security and trusted content sources, security of the container registry, the build pipeline, and data, managing security container deployments, and more.

    • Service Mesh: This feature provides a uniform way for clients to connect, manage, and observe microservices-based applications. It also provides detailed behavioral insight.

    • Operators: This feature automates the development, configuration, and management of Kubernetes-native applications.

    • Virtualization: OpenShift allows users to run and manage virtual machine (VM) and container workloads side by side.

    OpenShift Benefits

    OpenShift provides the companies and users utilizing it with various benefits. These benefits include the following:

    • OpenShift provides scalability for applications, allowing them to run across hundreds of nodes in seconds.

    • The product offers flexibility by simplifying the deployment and management of hybrid infrastructure and providing self-managed or fully-managed service.

    • OpenShift incorporates open-source technologies alongside its native components and features.

    • The product enhances the developer experience by offering a variety of tools, multi language support, and integrated development environment (IDE) integrations.

    • The solution supports automated installation and over-the-air platform upgrades in the cloud with Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, as well as various on-premise platforms.

    • OpenShift includes streamlined and automated container and app builds, as well as health management and scaling.

    • The solution enhances the support of smaller-footprint topologies in edge scenarios.

    • OpenShift provides easy multiple cluster management through Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.

    • The product has enhanced security capabilities that include access controls, an enterprise registry with a built-in scanner, and networking.

    • The solution supports a wide spectrum of enterprise storage solutions for running stateful as well as stateless apps.

    Reviews from Real Users

    An executive head of department - M-PESA Tech at a comms service provider gives OpenShift a high rating because its automation can go a long way in reducing time to market and the time required to fix issues that arise from deployment.

    Vikram C., head of infrastructure & cloud ops at a comms service provider, rates highly three qualities of OpenShift, summarizing them to mature, seamless integration, and easy setup.

    Sample Customers
    Facebook, UrbanDictionary, Code for America, Mailchimp, Rapportive, GitHub, TED, and Lyft.
    UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company43%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    Marketing Services Firm14%
    Sports Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Educational Organization13%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm32%
    Comms Service Provider18%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Computer Software Company11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm33%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Insurance Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business81%
    Midsize Enterprise8%
    Large Enterprise12%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise65%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise63%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise79%
    Buyer's Guide
    Heroku vs. OpenShift
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Heroku vs. OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Heroku is ranked 12th in PaaS Clouds with 27 reviews while OpenShift is ranked 4th in PaaS Clouds with 53 reviews. Heroku is rated 8.4, while OpenShift is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Heroku writes "Useful for mobile and web applications, and helps with rapid development cycle ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpenShift writes "Provides us with the flexibility and efficiency of cloud-native stacks while enabling us to meet regulatory constraints". Heroku is most compared with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Google App Engine, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), whereas OpenShift is most compared with Amazon AWS, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and SUSE Cloud Application Platform. See our Heroku vs. OpenShift report.

    See our list of best PaaS Clouds vendors.

    We monitor all PaaS Clouds reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.