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Cloud Foundry vs Heroku
March 09, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
9★
Open Source Cloud Application Platform that makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. It is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances.
13★
Heroku is the leading platform as a service in the world and supports Ruby, Java, Python, Scala, Clojure, and Node.js. Deploying an app is simple and easy. No special alternative tools needed, just a plain git push. Deployment is instant, whether your app is big or small.
See also:
Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms
Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms
Cloud Foundry and Heroku are both marvelous contraptions designed to make deploying applications easier, in the same way that self-checkout machines are designed to make shopping faster—except they still require you to do all the work. They both take your code, wrap it in containers and launch it into the cloud with an air of effortless magic, though behind the scenes, there’s an unholy mess of scripts, scaling algorithms and engineers muttering into their coffee. You can talk to them through CLIs, let them handle your dependencies with buildpacks and watch in mild amusement as they auto-scale your app just as a sudden surge in traffic causes it to crash anyway.
Cloud Foundry, being the sort of thing built with enterprises in mind, comes with the requisite complexity of a device meant for very serious people in very serious offices. Conceived by VMware in 2011 and later placed in the capable hands of an open-source foundation, it insists on giving you all the flexibility you could ever want, provided you're willing to spend hours setting it up. It happily runs on AWS, Azure, GCP or even your own servers, for those who enjoy the quiet thrill of managing infrastructure. Unlike Heroku, it’s not particularly interested in being friendly—it assumes you know what you're doing and finds your confusion mildly amusing.
Heroku, on the other hand, was born in 2007 with a simple dream: to make developers happy or at least slightly less miserable. Later adopted by Salesforce, it decided that AWS was the only home it needed and committed itself to a life of ease. It offers a free tier, making it the software equivalent of a friendly stranger handing out free samples at a supermarket—useful, delightful and inevitably leading you to spend more money later. It values simplicity over configurability, like a car with no gears but a very enthusiastic automatic transmission. It’s perfect for startups, side projects and anyone who wants to deploy an app without developing an ulcer.
See also: Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms
Cloud Foundry, being the sort of thing built with enterprises in mind, comes with the requisite complexity of a device meant for very serious people in very serious offices. Conceived by VMware in 2011 and later placed in the capable hands of an open-source foundation, it insists on giving you all the flexibility you could ever want, provided you're willing to spend hours setting it up. It happily runs on AWS, Azure, GCP or even your own servers, for those who enjoy the quiet thrill of managing infrastructure. Unlike Heroku, it’s not particularly interested in being friendly—it assumes you know what you're doing and finds your confusion mildly amusing.
Heroku, on the other hand, was born in 2007 with a simple dream: to make developers happy or at least slightly less miserable. Later adopted by Salesforce, it decided that AWS was the only home it needed and committed itself to a life of ease. It offers a free tier, making it the software equivalent of a friendly stranger handing out free samples at a supermarket—useful, delightful and inevitably leading you to spend more money later. It values simplicity over configurability, like a car with no gears but a very enthusiastic automatic transmission. It’s perfect for startups, side projects and anyone who wants to deploy an app without developing an ulcer.
See also: Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms
