Head-to-head, indicative as of Oct 2026. Prices change — always confirm on the vendor page.
Quick read: pick AWS Lambda if your workload is event-driven pipelines inside the aws ecosystem and its pricing model fits your traffic shape; pick Heroku if you need no-devops deploys for small teams and shopify-style workflows. For anything latency-sensitive at the edge, cold start row is the tiebreaker.
| AWS Lambda | Heroku | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Function-as-a-Service | PaaS (classic) |
| Free tier | 1M requests/month (always free) | Eco dynos ~$5/mo shared pool |
| Paid pricing (indicative) | ~$0.20 per million requests + GB-seconds compute | Basic dyno ~$7/mo each |
| Egress | ~$0.09/GB (billed) | Included allowances |
| Cold start | ~100ms-1s (varies by runtime/VPC) | Dyno boot ~seconds |
| Regions | ~30+ regions | US + EU |
| Best for | Event-driven pipelines inside the AWS ecosystem | No-DevOps deploys for small teams and Shopify-style workflows |
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Last reviewed 2026-10-02 · NinjaOps SEO grid · DevOps blog