Heroku vs Hetzner

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

Feature	Heroku	Hetzner
Starting price	$3/mo	$0.6/mo
Best for	Teams migrating away Legacy Rails/Node apps Historical PaaS comparison	Budget-conscious developers EU-based workloads Self-hosters High-performance dedicated servers
Stated uptime SLA	99.5% (Postgres Essential); higher SLAs on Standard/Premium/Private/Shield not separately published	99.9%
Storage	SSD	NVME
Regions	2	6
Managed Kubernetes	No	No
Support channels	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum	Ticket, Docs, Community forum
Compliance	SOC 2, HIPAA (Shield tier only), GDPR, PCI (Shield tier only)	GDPR, ISO 27001
Hidden costs to watch for	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	Setup fees on dedicated servers (e.g. AX42/AX102 setup fee raised from 39 EUR to 79 EUR in 2026; AX162-R/S setup fee raised from 79 EUR to 159 EUR) Traffic overage billed per GB beyond included pool (20 TB EU, as little as 0.5-1 TB in USA/Singapore regions for some lines) CPX and CCX cloud lines saw very large price increases in the 15 June 2026 adjustment (CCX +2.1x to +2.73x, CPX +2.4x to +2.75x monthly in EU); CX and CAX rose a smaller ~1.3x-1.4x Load Balancer and Volume prices separately increased ~36-39% in an April 2026 adjustment VAT excluded from all listed prices
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18