Heroku vs Linode (Akamai)

Heroku is strongest for teams migrating away. Linode (Akamai) is strongest for developers. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Heroku	Linode (Akamai)
Starting price	$3/mo	$1/mo
Best for	Teams migrating away Legacy Rails/Node apps Historical PaaS comparison	Developers Startups GPU/AI workloads Small-to-mid production apps Kubernetes
Stated uptime SLA	99.5% (Postgres Essential); higher SLAs on Standard/Premium/Private/Shield not separately published	99.99%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	2	20
Managed Kubernetes	No	Yes
Support channels	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum	Ticket, Community forum, Docs, Phone (higher support tiers)
Compliance	SOC 2, HIPAA (Shield tier only), GDPR, PCI (Shield tier only)	SOC 2, PCI DSS (for compatible services), GDPR, HIPAA (with BAA on eligible services)
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	Outbound bandwidth billed at $0.005/GB (compute/storage) or $0.015/GB (NodeBalancer) once pooled network transfer allowance is exceeded Backups service is a separate add-on priced per instance (roughly 20-25% of the instance monthly price) HA control plane for LKE Kubernetes is a flat $60/mo add-on per cluster; LKE Enterprise clusters are $300/mo per cluster Managed Database HA (3-node) clusters cost roughly 2-3x the single-node price
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18