Heroku vs WP Engine

Heroku is strongest for teams migrating away. WP Engine is strongest for WordPress-only sites. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Heroku	WP Engine
Starting price	$3/mo	$30/mo
Best for	Teams migrating away Legacy Rails/Node apps Historical PaaS comparison	WordPress-only sites Agencies managing multiple WP sites Enterprise WordPress High-traffic WordPress blogs/publishers
Stated uptime SLA	99.5% (Postgres Essential); higher SLAs on Standard/Premium/Private/Shield not separately published	99.99%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	2	1
Managed Kubernetes	No	No
Support channels	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum	Chat, Phone (Professional plan and above), Docs, Dedicated support team (Enterprise)
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	Visit overages billed at $2 per 1,000 visits beyond plan allowance Extra sites beyond plan limit billed around $20/mo per additional site on Startup Annual-billed prices shown on the marketing site often include a first-year-only promotional discount; renewal/steady-state annual rate can be higher than the advertised starting price Month-to-month billing (no annual commitment) costs roughly 17-20% more per month than annual billing Email hosting is NOT included; third-party estimates put it around $6-7 per mailbox per month Smart Plugin Manager and NitroPack optimization add-ons priced/bundled separately on Essential plans (included standard on Core) Numeric 99.99% uptime SLA is marketed prominently for Core/Enterprise tiers; not clearly guaranteed with a published SLA credit policy on Essential (Startup/Professional/Growth/Scale) plans
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18