Contabo vs Heroku

Contabo is strongest for budget-conscious developers. Heroku is strongest for teams migrating away. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Contabo	Heroku
Starting price	$3.23/mo	$3/mo
Best for	Budget-conscious developers Personal projects Storage-heavy workloads Self-hosters	Teams migrating away Legacy Rails/Node apps Historical PaaS comparison
Stated uptime SLA	99.90%	99.5% (Postgres Essential); higher SLAs on Standard/Premium/Private/Shield not separately published
Storage	NVME	SSD
Regions	4	2
Managed Kubernetes	No	No
Support channels	Ticket, Docs, Community forum	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum
Compliance	GDPR	SOC 2, HIPAA (Shield tier only), GDPR, PCI (Shield tier only)
Hidden costs to watch for	Quoted monthly prices are the effective rate for a 24-month prepaid/contract term; shorter terms (1 or 12 months) cost more per month Additional IPv4 addresses, extra backup slots, and storage extensions are billed as add-ons Outgoing traffic is technically unlimited but subject to a fair usage policy that can throttle abusive/sustained high-bandwidth usage Support is ticket-only on lower tiers; phone support requires add-on	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