Heroku vs Vercel

Heroku has no free plan. Its listed entry prices are $5/month for Eco, which sleeps after 30 minutes of inactivity, and $7/month for always-on Basic. Standard-1X is $25/month; larger dyno and private-space options rise to $1,500/month for Performance-2XL, with additional tiers for Shield and Fir workloads. Vercel’s Hobby plan is free for personal, non-commercial projects and includes 1M CDN requests and 100 GB data transfer monthly. Pro starts at $20/month and includes a $20 monthly usage credit; Enterprise is custom-priced. Vercel’s costs can grow through metered services: function invocations start at $0.60 per 1M and Fluid Active CPU at $0.128/hour. The pricing pages list monthly prices, not annual discounts. Compare expected workload, not just entry price: Heroku lists runtime tiers, while Vercel lists many separate usage meters.

Heroku’s deployment path includes git push heroku main, GitHub deployments, and disposable Review Apps for pull requests. Buildpacks let teams customize language stacks, and third-party add-ons extend the platform. Heroku also lists integrations with Salesforce and identity providers. That fits application teams looking for a managed runtime and attached data services rather than a deployment-only workflow.

Vercel lists an API, CLI, MCP, and Skills for coding agents, alongside access to 400+ models. Its platform features include deployment environments, global delivery, serverless functions, and infrastructure for sandboxed apps and agents. The product pages do not specify language-specific SDK coverage; check the vendor’s docs for the languages and methods your codebase needs. Heroku’s homepage likewise does not give a language-by-language SDK matrix. In either case, confirm API authentication, versioning, and quotas before making the platform a production dependency.

Neither Heroku nor Vercel publishes an open-source license or self-hosting option on its product pages. Treat both as hosted platforms, and ask the vendors about deployment portability and data export requirements before committing.

Heroku couples apps to dynos, managed Postgres, its Redis-based key-value store, add-ons, and buildpacks. Moving away can mean adapting deployment configuration and replacing platform services; the amount of work depends on how much your app relies on them. Vercel’s deployment environments, global delivery, AI Gateway, and metered services can create similar platform dependencies. The vendors do not describe data-export procedures in their product pages. Before adopting either, identify what must leave the platform—application data, configuration, logs, and deployment artifacts—and verify export formats, access, and costs with the vendor. Keep application configuration and service boundaries documented so a future migration has a defined scope.