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Render vs Heroku

We've built Render to help developers and businesses avoid the cost and inflexibility traps of legacy Platform-as-a-Service solutions like Heroku. Our customers often tell us Render is what Heroku could have been. This page explains why so many former Heroku customers consider Render to be the best Heroku alternative.

Flexibility

  • Render allows responses to take up to 100 minutes for HTTP requests. Heroku has a hard response timeout of 30 seconds that can't be configured or changed.
  • Render disks offer convenient block storage for data that needs to persist across deploys. You can also use them to run stateful applications like MySQL, Elasticsearch, Mongo, and MinIO (S3-compatible object storage) without depending on expensive third-party addons. Heroku cannot store data across deploys.
  • Render offers native support for static sites with a global CDN, and full-featured cron (scheduled) jobs which are missing on Heroku.
  • With Render's built-in private networking and service discovery you can create web services, managed Render Postgres and Key Value instances, and other backend services that are inaccessible over the internet. Heroku only provides this feature in Private Spaces, an enterprise offering that costs several thousand dollars more per month compared to Render.
  • With Render's native runtimes, you get complete control over how your application is built: run anything from a single build command to a complex shell script. Deploying to production is no more difficult than running your code locally. Heroku requires buildpacks, which can be hard to understand and customize. Render removes the complexity of buildpacks while retaining many of their benefits, like suggested build and start commands.
  • Render Postgres instances provide built-in IP access control as an additional layer of security. It isn't possible to limit public internet access to Heroku Postgres instances outside of the enterprise Private Spaces offering.
  • Render Key Value instances provide built-in IP access control as an additional layer of security.

Performance and Reliability

  • All Render applications are protected by advanced DDoS protection powered by Cloudflare. Heroku offers basic DDoS protection and recommends using a dedicated provider for more sophisticated attacks.
  • Render's load balancers automatically compress HTTP responses from your apps using Brotli and gzip compression, making your Render apps significantly faster especially over mobile and low bandwidth connections.
  • Heroku applications are forcefully restarted every 24 hours, losing in-memory state (e.g. caches) and disrupting websocket connections. In general, automatic or manual Heroku application restarts can also create downtime, and avoiding them requires signing up for more expensive instance types. In contrast, Render does not have scheduled (or unscheduled) restarts, and every Render application comes with zero downtime deploys.
  • Applications hosted on Heroku have no way to self-heal; Render lets you define custom HTTP health check paths for your services and automatically restarts unresponsive apps.

Developer Experience

  • Heroku is easy to use compared to AWS, but our customers tell us Render is even easier. Simply connect your GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket repository on your Render Dashboard and the platform auto-suggests commands to build and start your app. Once deployed, every Git push automatically builds and updates your app.
  • Render applications can use secret files and shared environment groups, making runtime configuration much more powerful compared to Heroku apps.
  • Render offers native, fully customizable cron jobs which can run a simple script or your application code at any frequency or at any time of the day, month, or year. Heroku's native scheduler only supports three recurring frequencies: once every 10 minutes, once an hour, and once a day.
  • Render offers native support for Docker with multi-stage layer caching; all you need is a Dockerfilein your Git repository; Render automatically builds the Docker image and deploys it on every push. Heroku requires you to write an additional config file. On Render, you can also deploy prebuilt images directly from widely-used public or private container registries. Heroku requires you to push your image to their container registry.
  • Render offers fully automated and completely free TLS certificates for custom domains, including wildcard domains, an increasingly common feature still missing on Heroku.

Pricing

  • Heroku pricing is prohibitively high. Heroku customers running production and staging workloads often see cost reductions of over 50% after switching to Render, saving thousands of dollars every month. For example, a web service on Render with 2GB of RAM is $25/mo. A Heroku dyno with 2.5GB of RAM is $250/mo.

    All Heroku prices are per instance (dyno) per month. Their Hobby tier instances do not support horizontal scaling or zero downtime deploys, both standard Render features.

Customer Focus

  • Render offers all its customers community and email support staffed by the same world-class engineers who build the platform. Compared to Render, Heroku directs users to community support channels like Stack Overflow multiple times before they can file a ticket; they also need to pay an additional Enterprise support fee to chat with a Heroku support engineer.
  • Render's product roadmap is public, and we've maintained it consistently for years. You can submit feature requests and get notified as soon as we start working on them. This keeps us accountable and helps us understand your needs better.

Get Started

Use this guide to help you migrate a Heroku app, Heroku Postgres database, and Heroku Key-Value Store instance to Render. The guide also includes a table to help you translate Heroku concepts, like Dyno and Web Process, to Render concepts. Feel free to contact us at support@render.com if you experience any problems during your migration.