Heroku vs Vercel
Heroku and Vercel are both paas and app hosting software. Heroku is a commercial product from Salesforce, Inc. Vercel is a commercial product from Vercel Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Heroku when
- You want the simplest managed hosting for a standard web app and value stability over price.
- Pick Vercel when
- You build with Next.js or another modern frontend framework and want preview deploys and a global edge with no ops work.
Side by side
A platform-as-a-service that builds and runs apps from a git push, with managed Postgres, Redis and add-ons.
Hosts frontend and full-stack web apps with git-based deploys, preview URLs, serverless and edge functions, built by the makers of Next.js.
Expensive for the resources you get, there is no free tier any more, and it has seen little new development under Salesforce.
Bandwidth and function usage costs can spike on popular sites, and some Next.js features work best only here.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service (both)
Not published
Next.js
Closed source, sold by Salesforce, Inc.
Closed source, sold by Vercel Inc.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code. (both)
603 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
5.5k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Other comparisons
More PaaS and app hosting platforms
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.