Heroku Enterprise: capabilities, limitations, and alternatives

Heroku pioneered the dream of workload deployment without complexity. For simple workloads, they nailed it. However, as businesses grew and demands evolved, many turned to Heroku Enterprise for more power and flexibility.

It promised a shortcut to innovation: "Deploy faster, manage less, build more." It sounded like a dream—developers could focus on building great software without getting bogged down by infrastructure.

However, as businesses scale and technology advances, cloud platforms need to keep up. And for many, Heroku Enterprise is no longer keeping pace.

Imagine building a high-performance car, only to realize it struggles at top speeds when you need it most. That’s what many organizations are experiencing—what once felt like a rocket booster now feels more like a handbrake on innovation.

In this article, we’ll explore why companies are moving beyond Heroku Enterprise, breaking down its capabilities, limitations, and the alternatives that offer a better path forward.

What is Heroku Enterprise?

Heroku Enterprise is a cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) designed specifically for enterprise organizations. Building on Heroku's developer-friendly foundation, it eliminates infrastructure management headaches so development teams can focus exclusively on creating business-critical applications.

The platform handles deployment, scaling, and operational concerns automatically, significantly reducing the need for dedicated DevOps resources. For organizations already using Salesforce products, Heroku Enterprise provides native integration capabilities that create a unified experience across customer data and custom applications.

Why do organizations consider Heroku Enterprise?

Organizations are drawn to Heroku Enterprise for several compelling reasons:

• Simplified Deployment and Management – Heroku’s fully managed platform eliminates the complexities of infrastructure management, allowing teams to focus on building and scaling applications effortlessly.
• Developer Productivity and Familiar Workflows – With built-in support for Git-based deployments, CI/CD, and popular programming languages, Heroku enables developers to work efficiently using the tools they already know.
• Reduced Operational Overhead – Unlike self-managed platforms, Heroku takes care of infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and maintenance, freeing teams from time-consuming operational tasks.
• Seamless Salesforce Integration – Organizations using Salesforce benefit from Heroku’s deep integration, making it easier to build and extend applications that interact with customer data in real time.
• Support for Legacy Applications – Many businesses have existing applications running on Heroku. Upgrading to Heroku Enterprise ensures continued reliability, enhanced security, and better scalability without requiring a full migration.

What are Heroku Enterprise's core offerings?

Heroku Enterprise provides several powerful capabilities designed specifically for large organizations with complex application needs. These core offerings work together to create a comprehensive cloud platform that balances developer productivity with enterprise requirements.

1. Heroku private spaces create isolated environments where your applications run separately from other customers' workloads. These dedicated runtime environments offer enhanced security through network isolation while maintaining the simplicity of the Heroku developer experience. Heroku private spaces allow you to deploy applications in specific geographic regions to meet compliance requirements or optimize performance for your users.
2. Heroku Connect serves as a crucial integration layer between Heroku applications and Salesforce data. This two-way synchronization service enables seamless data flow between your custom applications and your Salesforce org, allowing developers to build experiences that leverage and extend your existing customer data. This tight integration with the Salesforce ecosystem represents one of Heroku Enterprise's most distinctive advantages for organizations already invested in Salesforce technologies.
3. Heroku Postgres delivers enterprise-grade database services optimized for applications running on the platform. This fully managed database service handles provisioning, backups, monitoring, and scaling automatically. Enterprise customers receive access to larger database instances, point-in-time recovery capabilities, and advanced data protection features that support mission-critical workloads.
4. Team collaboration features enable organizations to implement governance at scale through fine-grained access controls, permission management, and team structures that mirror your organization. Administrators can organize developers into teams, control deployment permissions, and establish approval workflows that align with your governance requirements.
5. Enterprise support and SLAs provide guaranteed response times for critical issues, ensuring your business-critical applications receive prompt attention when problems arise. Enterprise customers gain access to dedicated support channels, technical account managers, and service level agreements designed for production applications where downtime translates directly to business impact.
6. Single sign-on and identity management capabilities allow seamless integration with your existing identity providers such as Okta, Azure AD, or Google Workspace. This integration streamlines user onboarding and off-boarding while enhancing security through centralized authentication and authorization policies that apply across your entire application portfolio.

Additional enterprise features include comprehensive audit logs for compliance reporting, extended application metrics and monitoring capabilities, and specialized runtime environments that support particular language requirements or regulatory constraints. Together, these core offerings create a platform that enables large organizations to gain the productivity benefits of platform-as-a-service while maintaining the control, visibility, and security required in enterprise environments.

What are the limitations of Heroku Enterprise?

Heroku Enterprise presents several limitations that organizations should carefully consider when evaluating it for mission-critical workloads. These constraints can impact performance, reliability, cost management, and operational flexibility in ways that may prove challenging for enterprise requirements.

• High costs with unpredictable scaling – Heroku Enterprise pricing can quickly become a financial burden, with Private Spaces starting at $1.389/hr and Shield Private Spaces starting $4.167/hr (pricing as of March 2025). Costs escalate unpredictably with usage, making budgeting difficult for growing organizations, especially when compared to more flexible alternatives that offer enterprise features at a fraction of the price.
• Limited cloud flexibility and vendor lock-in – Unlike platforms that allow Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) models, Heroku locks organizations into its proprietary infrastructure. This prevents businesses from leveraging existing AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud credits and restricts their ability to optimize cloud strategies for cost, performance, or compliance.
• Geographic and multi-region constraints – Heroku offers fewer regional deployment options than major cloud providers, which can hinder performance optimization and compliance with data residency requirements. The platform’s lack of robust multi-region support also complicates disaster recovery and high-availability strategies for mission-critical applications.
• Networking and infrastructure limitations – Organizations with complex networking needs may find Heroku’s restricted VPC configurations and networking controls insufficient. This limits the ability to implement advanced security, interconnectivity, or hybrid cloud strategies.
• Limited support for modern DevOps practices – While Heroku simplifies deployment, it lacks strong integration with GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and other DevOps automation tools. Enterprises that rely on declarative infrastructure and version-controlled deployments may find Heroku’s approach misaligned with their operational best practices.
• Insufficient support for specialized workloads – Heroku does not support custom hardware configurations such as GPUs, making it unsuitable for AI, machine learning, and other computationally intensive applications. Additionally, its backup, disaster recovery, and high-availability options may not meet the stringent requirements of organizations running mission-critical workloads.

What are the Heroku Enterprise alternatives?

As organizations outgrow Heroku Enterprise, they face a crucial decision: stick with a platform that no longer meets their needs or explore a more scalable, cost-effective solution. This isn’t just about switching platforms—it’s about rethinking cloud infrastructure to support long-term innovation.

Serverless and Managed Platforms

Many teams initially turn to serverless platforms or managed Kubernetes services, hoping for the same ease of deployment Heroku once promised. Services like AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service, and Google Cloud Run offer infrastructure abstraction and quick deployment, making them attractive alternatives.

But these platforms come with their own challenges. Limited deployment patterns, restrictive runtime environments, and unpredictable costs can quickly make them feel as rigid as Heroku. What starts as an effort to simplify infrastructure can lead to new operational headaches.

Building your own platform

Some organizations take the ambitious route of building their own cloud platform using Kubernetes. The appeal is obvious: total control over infrastructure, security, and scaling.

However, the reality is far more complex. Running Kubernetes at scale requires a dedicated platform engineering team to handle:

• Designing deployment workflows
• Managing security and networking
• Keeping up with evolving Kubernetes technologies

Beyond the initial setup, maintaining a Kubernetes-based platform demands continuous investment in tooling, documentation, and expertise. What seems like a path to flexibility can quickly become a full-time operational burden. A homegrown platform is a product in itself that requires maintenance, operational support, iteration, documentation, and so forth. DIY = higher costs and more overhead.

Modern cloud Platforms

A new wave of cloud platforms is bridging the gap between simplicity and control. Platforms like Northflank take the best of Heroku’s developer-friendly experience while offering the flexibility enterprises need.

These modern platforms provide:

• Kubernetes-based infrastructure without the operational complexity
• Seamless deployment workflows similar to Heroku
• Multi-cloud hosting with predictable pricing
• Advanced scaling and automation without requiring DevOps expertise

The biggest difference? Unlike legacy platforms that force organizations to adapt to rigid limitations, these modern alternatives are designed to evolve alongside your business and consolidate multiple tools into one post-commit pipeline.

How to Choose the Right Alternative

Selecting a Heroku replacement depends on business needs:

• If you want full control and are willing to manage infrastructure and build and maintain a developer platform: Kubernetes-based solutions (EKS, AKS, GKE) are a good fit.
• If you prefer a hands-off approach with some flexibility: serverless platforms like Cloud Run and Azure App Service can be a great fit. However, these tools are designed to handle stateless workloads efficiently, meaning you'll need to find alternative solutions for persistent storage, long-running processes, and complex networking requirements.
• If you need Heroku's simplicity with enterprise flexibility: Platforms like Northflank provide a balance of ease and power.

How Northank can help

Moving beyond Heroku Enterprise isn’t just about finding another cloud platform—it’s about choosing one that evolves with your business. Northflank eliminates the constraints of traditional PaaS by combining the ease of Heroku with the flexibility of Kubernetes, all while supporting modern DevOps workflows like GitOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

With Northflank, you can deploy directly within your own Virtual Private Cloud, leverage existing cloud credits, and scale workloads seamlessly across multiple regions. Whether you're running complex machine learning models, fine-tuning CI/CD pipelines, or optimizing infrastructure costs, Northflank provides the control and transparency Heroku lacks—without the operational burden of managing everything yourself.

Your cloud platform should empower innovation, not restrict it. If Heroku Enterprise is holding you back, it’s time for a solution built for the future. Get started with Northflank today and take control of your cloud strategy.