Microsoft Azure vs Heroku

Microsoft Azure is strongest for enterprises. Heroku is strongest for teams migrating away. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Microsoft Azure	Heroku
Starting price	$0.01/mo	$3/mo
Best for	Enterprises Windows/.NET workloads Hybrid cloud Regulated industries	Teams migrating away Legacy Rails/Node apps Historical PaaS comparison
Stated uptime SLA	99.99%	99.5% (Postgres Essential); higher SLAs on Standard/Premium/Private/Shield not separately published
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	60	2
Managed Kubernetes	Yes	No
Support channels	Ticket, Phone (paid plans), Docs, Community forum	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum
Compliance	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR, PCI DSS	SOC 2, HIPAA (Shield tier only), GDPR, PCI (Shield tier only)
Hidden costs to watch for	Windows Server VMs carry a license surcharge on top of the Linux compute rate Outbound bandwidth billed above 100 GB/month pooled free tier, tiered by volume Premium SSD/Ultra Disk IOPS and throughput billed separately from disk capacity Blob Storage Cool/Cold/Archive tiers bill a minimum 128 KiB per object and impose early-deletion penalties (90/180 day minimums) Archive tier retrieval fees are notably high ($6.50/10,000 read ops) AKS Standard tier control plane fee ($0.10/hr per cluster) on top of node VM costs	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	2026-07-18	2026-07-18