AWS Lightsail vs Heroku

AWS Lightsail is strongest for AWS ecosystem users. Heroku is strongest for teams migrating away. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	AWS Lightsail	Heroku
Starting price	$0.8/mo	$3/mo
Best for	AWS ecosystem users Predictable bundled pricing Windows workloads	Teams migrating away Legacy Rails/Node apps Historical PaaS comparison
Stated uptime SLA	99.9%	99.5% (Postgres Essential); higher SLAs on Standard/Premium/Private/Shield not separately published
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	16	2
Managed Kubernetes	No	No
Support channels	AWS Support plans (separate from Lightsail), Community forums, Docs	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum
Compliance	SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA eligible	SOC 2, HIPAA (Shield tier only), GDPR, PCI (Shield tier only)
Hidden costs to watch for	Data transfer overage varies significantly by AWS region ($0.09-$0.132/GB) Windows bundles cost 70-90% more than equivalent Linux bundles	Eco dynos ($5/mo flat) are personal-account only and not available to Enterprise/Team customers Postgres Essential tier has no fork/follow, no HA, and only 99.5% uptime SLA -- a hidden reliability cliff vs. Standard Add-on overages (Postgres row/connection limits, Redis memory limits) can force an unplanned upgrade to the next tier Performance dynos require an established payment/billing history before they can be provisioned Private Spaces and Shield Private Spaces carry a substantial network-isolation premium (2-3x) over common-runtime equivalents Heroku Postgres Advanced tier pricing is not published; requires contacting sales
Last reviewed	2026-07-17	2026-07-18