Heroku vs Kamatera

Heroku is strongest for teams migrating away. Kamatera is strongest for custom VM sizing. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Heroku	Kamatera
Starting price	$3/mo	$0.05/mo
Best for	Teams migrating away Legacy Rails/Node apps Historical PaaS comparison	Custom VM sizing Global data center selection Windows Server hosting Dev/test environments
Stated uptime SLA	99.5% (Postgres Essential); higher SLAs on Standard/Premium/Private/Shield not separately published	99.95%
Storage	SSD	NVME
Regions	2	20
Managed Kubernetes	No	Yes
Support channels	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum	Ticket, Phone, Docs, Pro/Premium Managed Services (paid)
Compliance	SOC 2, HIPAA (Shield tier only), GDPR, PCI (Shield tier only)	GDPR
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	Bandwidth overage billed at $0.01/GB past the pooled monthly allowance (5 TB US/Canada/Europe, 1 TB Asia-Pacific) Windows Server / SQL Server / Exchange / RDS licensing adds an undisclosed per-server surcharge only shown at calculator checkout Type T (Burstable) CPU incurs a $0.041/hour/CPU overage charge once average CPU usage exceeds 10% Powered-off (but not terminated) servers may continue to accrue charges Pro Managed Services add $50/server/month; Premium Managed Services add $150/server/month
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18