Experience the difference.
Stop struggling with expensive dynos and black-box infrastructure. Discover why teams are leaving the limitations of Heroku behind for Cycle's automated control plane.
The orchestration trade-off.
Evaluating the balance between power, maintenance, and usability.
Simplicity
Pioneered the git-push-to-deploy developer experience, abstracting away infrastructure entirely so teams can ship apps without touching servers, networks, or runtimes.
Customizability
Opinionated buildpack and dyno model intentionally constrains low-level control, limiting custom networking, OS-level tuning, and bring-your-own-infrastructure scenarios.
Operational Burden
Fully managed runtime handles patching, scaling, and platform upgrades automatically, though add-on sprawl and dyno costs can grow unpredictably at scale.'
| Features & Capabilities | Cycle | Heroku |
|---|---|---|
Infrastructure & Compute | ||
| Bring Your Own Infrastructure (BYOI) | Managed platform only | |
| Automated OS / Kernel Updates | ||
| Container, VM, & Serverless Support | Dynos / containers only | |
Networking & Security | ||
| Zero-Config Encrypted Mesh Network | Private Spaces only on Enterprise | |
| Automated Let's Encrypt TLS | Automated Certificate Management | |
| Built-in Dynamic Load Balancing & WAF | Built-in routing, WAF via add-ons | |
Storage & Telemetry | ||
| Seamless Stateful Volume Migration | Ephemeral filesystem, no persistent volumes | |
| Agentless Metrics, Logs & Events | Built-in metrics, deeper visibility via add-ons | |
Developer Experience | ||
| Immutable Configuration (No Drift) | app.json / Procfile driven | |
| Native Two-Way SSH / Secure Console | heroku run / heroku ps:exec | |
Stop configuring,Start building.
Experience the only control plane that natively orchestrates Containers, VMs, and Functions across any provider with a fully automated networking fabric.