Head-to-head, indicative as of Oct 2026. Prices change — always confirm on the vendor page.
Quick read: pick Heroku if your workload is no-devops deploys for small teams and shopify-style workflows and its included egress fits your traffic shape; pick AWS App Runner if you need containers on aws without touching ecs/eks. For anything latency-sensitive at the edge, cold start row is the tiebreaker.
| Heroku | AWS App Runner | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | PaaS (classic) | Container PaaS |
| Free tier | Eco dynos ~$5/mo shared pool | None |
| Paid pricing (indicative) | Basic dyno ~$7/mo each | vCPU + memory per second, scale to zero |
| Egress | Included allowances | Metered |
| Cold start | Dyno boot ~seconds | Seconds from zero |
| Regions | US + EU | AWS regions |
| Best for | No-DevOps deploys for small teams and Shopify-style workflows | Containers on AWS without touching ECS/EKS |
NinjaOps publishes free engineering guides. Some outbound links are affiliate links: they cost you nothing and support the site.
Last reviewed 2026-10-02 · NinjaOps SEO grid · DevOps blog