Heroku vs UpCloud

Heroku is strongest for teams migrating away. UpCloud is strongest for performance-sensitive VPS workloads. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Heroku	UpCloud
Starting price	$3/mo	$3.5/mo
Best for	Teams migrating away Legacy Rails/Node apps Historical PaaS comparison	Performance-sensitive VPS workloads European data residency Simple predictable billing
Stated uptime SLA	99.5% (Postgres Essential); higher SLAs on Standard/Premium/Private/Shield not separately published	99.999%
Storage	SSD	NVME
Regions	2	13
Managed Kubernetes	No	Yes
Support channels	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum	Ticket, Docs, Community
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	Simple Backups add-on billed as a percentage surcharge on server price (Day +10%, Week +20%, Month +40%, Year +60%) Data transfer beyond the Fair Transfer Policy allowance can incur overage charges despite marketing free egress Premium plans require MaxIOPS block storage which is priced/allocated differently than Starter plan Standard SSD
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18