Heroku vs Render

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

Feature	Heroku	Render
Starting price	$3/mo	$0.25/mo
Best for	Teams migrating away Legacy Rails/Node apps Historical PaaS comparison	Developers Startups Full-stack web apps APIs Small teams replacing Heroku
Stated uptime SLA	99.5% (Postgres Essential); higher SLAs on Standard/Premium/Private/Shield not separately published	99.95%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	2	4
Managed Kubernetes	No	No
Support channels	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum	Ticket, Docs, Community forum, Priority support on Pro/Scale/Enterprise
Compliance	SOC 2, HIPAA (Shield tier only), GDPR, PCI (Shield tier only)	SOC 2
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	Persistent disk storage billed separately at $0.25/GB/month Bandwidth overage billed per-GB beyond workspace plan allowance (best-available figure ~$0.15/GB, exact current rate not printed on fetched docs page) Additional custom domains beyond plan allowance billed at $0.25/month each Postgres storage overage billed at roughly $0.30/GB/month beyond included storage Instances billed by the second while running, so scale-to-zero / suspended services still show partial-month charges for the time they were up
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18