StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Platform As A Service
  5. Heroku vs Kontena

Heroku vs Kontena

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Heroku
Heroku
Stacks25.8K
Followers20.5K
Votes3.2K
Kontena
Kontena
Stacks10
Followers36
Votes0
GitHub Stars1.5K
Forks125

Heroku vs Kontena: What are the differences?

Heroku: Build, deliver, monitor and scale web apps and APIs with a trail blazing developer experience. Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling; Kontena: Docker Container Orchestration Platform Written in Ruby. Kontena is an open source container orchestration tool that makes it easy to deploy and manage containerized applications on your own servers.

Heroku and Kontena can be primarily classified as "Platform as a Service" tools.

Some of the features offered by Heroku are:

  • Agile deployment for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, Go and Scala.
  • Run and scale any type of app.
  • Total visibility across your entire app.

On the other hand, Kontena provides the following key features:

  • Automatic Node Discovery
  • Mixed Infrastructure Support
  • Service Abstraction

Kontena is an open source tool with 1.44K GitHub stars and 117 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Kontena's open source repository on GitHub.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Heroku, Kontena

Alex
Alex

Oct 20, 2020

Decided

I'm transitioning to Render from heroku. The pricing scale matches my usage scale, yet it's just as easy to deploy. It's removed a lot of the devops that I don't like to deal with on setting up my own raw *nix box and makes deployment simple and easy!

Clustering I don't use clustering features at the moment but when i need to set up clustering of nodes and discoverability, render will enable that where Heroku would require that I use an external service like redis.

Restarts The restarts are annoying. I understand the reasoning, but I'd rather watch my service if its got a memory leak and work to fix it than to just assume that it has memory leaks and needs to restart.

101k views101k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Heroku
Heroku
Kontena
Kontena

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

Kontena is an open source container orchestration tool that makes it easy to deploy and manage containerized applications on your own servers.

Agile deployment for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, Go and Scala.;Run and scale any type of app.;Total visibility across your entire app.;Erosion-resistant architecture. Rich control surfaces.
Automatic Node Discovery;Mixed Infrastructure Support; Service Abstraction;Service Linking;Advanced Orchestration
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
1.5K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
125
Stacks
25.8K
Stacks
10
Followers
20.5K
Followers
36
Votes
3.2K
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 703
    Easy deployment
  • 459
    Free for side projects
  • 374
    Huge time-saver
  • 348
    Simple scaling
  • 261
    Low devops skills required
Cons
  • 27
    Super expensive
  • 9
    Not a whole lot of flexibility
  • 7
    No usable MySQL option
  • 7
    Storage
  • 5
    Low performance on free tier
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Mailgun
Mailgun
Postmark
Postmark
Loggly
Loggly
Papertrail
Papertrail
Redis Cloud
Redis Cloud
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Nitrous.IO
Nitrous.IO
Logentries
Logentries
MongoLab
MongoLab
Gemfury
Gemfury
Docker
Docker
Docker Machine
Docker Machine
Vagrant
Vagrant
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Weave
Weave
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean

What are some alternatives to Heroku, Kontena?

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Render

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

Hasura

Hasura

An open source GraphQL engine that deploys instant, realtime GraphQL APIs on any Postgres database.

Cloud 66

Cloud 66

Cloud 66 gives you everything you need to build, deploy and maintain your applications on any cloud, without the headache of dealing with "server stuff". Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Jamstack, Laravel, GoLang, and more.

Jelastic

Jelastic

Jelastic is a Multi-Cloud DevOps PaaS for ISVs, telcos, service providers and enterprises needing to speed up development, reduce cost of IT infrastructure, improve uptime and security.

Dokku

Dokku

It is an extensible, open source Platform as a Service that runs on a single server of your choice. It helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications from building to scaling.

PythonAnywhere

PythonAnywhere

It's somewhat unique. A small PaaS that supports web apps (Python only) as well as scheduled jobs with shell access. It is an expensive way to tinker and run several small apps.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase