Encore Cloud vs Heroku
See why thousands of developers choose Encore Cloud's developer-first cloud platform over other solutions
"We've run Encore in production for over 2 years and it's hard to overstate just how much it's taken off our plates when it comes to provisioning and deploying services and maintaining extremely high uptime. We've reduced time spent on DevOps by 95% — seriously the amount of time we used to spend on Terraform and k8s was stupid."
— Mason Stewart, CTO of Bookshop.org
Development Approach
Encore Cloud
Full backend development platform with microservices support- Infrastructure from Code approach
- Event-driven architecture support
- Kubernetes and custom infrastructure support
- Type-safe infrastructure definitions
Heroku
Limited Platform-as-a-Service approach- Rigid infrastructure model
- Limited event-driven capabilities
- No Kubernetes or custom infrastructure support
- No type-safe infrastructure definitions
Infrastructure control
Full backend development platform vs Platform-as-a-Service
Encore Cloud gives you complete control over your backend architecture while maintaining the simplicity of a managed platform. Unlike traditional PaaS solutions, you're never limited by the platform's capabilities.
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Developer Experience
Encore Cloud
- Integrated development workflow from local to cloud
- Automatic API documentation and OpenAPI specs
- Built-in service discovery and type-safe APIs
- Local development with cloud parity
- AI-powered development assistance
Heroku
- Basic deployment platform
- Manual API documentation
- Manual service configuration
- No AI development tools
Faster development
Modern Development Experience vs Traditional PaaS
Encore provides a modern, integrated development experience with built-in best practices, while Heroku offers a more traditional PaaS approach.
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Infrastructure & Deployment
Encore Cloud
- Automatic deployment to your cloud on AWS or GCP
- Automatic infrastructure provisioning
- Advanced secrets management
- Preview environments
Heroku
- Basic config vars
- Review apps
- Basic deployment pipeline
- Heroku-managed infrastructure only
- Manual add-on configuration
Less DevOps overhead
Cloud-Native Infrastructure vs Traditional PaaS
Deploy to your own cloud with zero configuration while maintaining complete control over your infrastructure and costs.
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Scalability & Performance
Encore Cloud
- Independent service scaling
- Global distribution support
- Automatic load balancing
- Distributed tracing built-in
- Automatic performance monitoring
Heroku
- Basic load balancing
- Manual dyno scaling
- Limited regional availability
- Third-party monitoring required
- Limited performance insights
Scalability
Enterprise-Ready Scale from Day One
Build with confidence knowing your application can scale from prototype to enterprise without architecture changes.
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