Google Cloud vs Heroku

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

Feature	Google Cloud	Heroku
Starting price	$0.01/mo	$3/mo
Best for	Enterprises Data & AI/ML workloads Kubernetes-native teams BigQuery/analytics-heavy stacks	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	40	2
Managed Kubernetes	Yes	No
Support channels	Ticket, Docs, Community, Phone (paid support tiers)	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum
Compliance	SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA (BAA available), GDPR, FedRAMP (select services)	SOC 2, HIPAA (Shield tier only), GDPR, PCI (Shield tier only)
Hidden costs to watch for	Network egress to internet billed per-GB and rises past free tier (200 GiB/month egress to certain destinations) Sustained-use and committed-use discounts are separate mechanisms and easy to miss when comparing to flat-rate competitors Custom machine types carry a 5% premium over predefined machine type pricing GKE charges a $0.10/hour cluster management fee per cluster (Standard and Autopilot alike) Cloud SQL high-availability configuration doubles vCPU, memory, and persistent disk costs Nearline/Coldline/Archive storage classes carry early-deletion minimum storage durations (30/90/365 days) and per-GB retrieval fees	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