What is Heroku?

Heroku is a container-based cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS). Developers use Heroku to deploy, manage, and scale modern apps. Our platform is elegant, flexible, and easy to use, offering developers the simplest path to getting their apps to market.

Heroku is fully managed, giving developers the freedom to focus on their core product without the distraction of maintaining servers, hardware, or infrastructure. The Heroku experience provides services, tools, workflows, and polyglot support—all designed to enhance developer productivity.

Explore our products, pricing, language support, and Elements Marketplace.

Heroku works with a wide variety of customers and partners. Learn more about how we support digital and software development agencies, partners, and enterprise companies.

Heroku brand art

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Design is part of Heroku’s DNA, it's at the heart of everything we do. We approach our work using the guiding principles of utility, simplicity, elegance, and quality. Every single person at Heroku sweats the details and contributes to the Heroku experience.

Roberta Carraro Former Head of Design/UX

Our philosophy

At Heroku, we believe that great apps come from inspired and productive developers. That’s why everything we do is focused on building a platform, ecosystem, and set of tools that support the best possible developer experience. Every aspect of our platform is designed to remove mundane tasks and provide tools that maximize productivity.

Developer productivity

The Heroku platform provides a set of capabilities that deliver higher-order value. With Heroku, there is no need to learn about server configuration, network management, or tuning the latest version of a database. Heroku removes obstacles so developers can focus on what they do best: building great apps.

Meticulous design

Every detail of the Heroku experience, from capabilities to tools to workflows, is thoughtfully designed to delight developers and maximize productivity.

Developer experience

Whether developers want to experiment with new ideas or deploy business-critical apps, Heroku helps make app development more than just a job—we make using our platform a rewarding experience, one that gives developers the freedom to stay focused and produce their best work.

Explore the Heroku Platform

Heroku handles more than 60 billion requests every day

That's more than 600,000 requests every second.

Our crew

Heroku is built, maintained, and championed by 300+ talented people who are passionate about what they do. As Herokai (Heroku staff), we are focused on technical and operational excellence, with customer success as our north star. We’re united by a shared purpose to make developers lives easier so they can build great apps.

Why work on Heroku?

Ask any one of us and you’ll hear many reasons, like our passion for developer innovation, designing elegant user experiences, and a diverse set of world-class colleagues. Here are a few important ones:

  • Our culture is collaborative, flexible, and fun.
  • Our work provides opportunities for challenge and growth.
  • Our team contributes expertise to a wide variety of open-source projects.
  • Our company invests in our professional and personal well-being.
  • Our products are simply the best in their class.

Heroku is a business unit of Salesforce, our extended family, which expands our ability to make an impact with developers, businesses, and the app economy.

Join us!

See Open Positions

  • Every day presents a new opportunity for growth and collaboration across the company.

    Natalie Malloy Director, Marketing Programs & Communications
  • Brilliant co-workers and meaningful products make this job extremely fulfilling.

    Joe Kutner Java Language Owner
  • I get to do work I’m proud of every single day with some of the smartest, most curious and caring people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.

    Alasdair Monk UX Architect
  • I started at Heroku when we were less than 20 people. Something that hasn't changed since then are the core values like empathy. I love how every engineer here answers support tickets giving us a customer first perspective.

    Terence Lee Principal Member, Languages Team

Our ecosystem

As part of our commitment to developer productivity, Heroku provides opportunities to extend our runtime platform with additional code, tools, and services that help accelerate app development. An ecosystem of contributors, from individual developers to well-known technology companies, provide a broad range of offerings to our community in the Heroku Elements Marketplace.

We are always seeking new contributions to add to the wealth of technical resources available to Heroku developers. There are two ways to join our ecosystem:

Become a Heroku Ecosystem Partner

Heroku Ecosystem Partners, formerly known as Add-on Providers, are service vendors that provide fully managed technical solutions for Heroku developers. As an Ecosystem Partner, you can share your cloud-based services, new innovations, and best practices with a highly-targeted audience. There are 200+ Heroku Add-ons in the Elements Marketplace.

Contribute a Heroku Button or Buildpack

Heroku developers share their open-source solutions with the community. Heroku Buttons allow others to easily deploy your code in one click. Heroku Buildpacks extend Heroku's build system to support your custom builds or preferred languages. There are 7,200+ Heroku Buttons and 5,400+ Heroku Buildpacks in the Elements Marketplace.

Browse Heroku Elements

"Heroku Elements represents the state of the art when it comes to giving developers the ability to discover add-on services like New Relic to leverage the power of software analytics and more."

John Gray
SVP Business Development, New Relic
New Relic APM add-on →

Our customers

Developers around the world are using Heroku to actively tap the potential of modern app development and deliver amazing digital experiences. Developers have created over 13 million apps on Heroku, serving billions of requests per day. Our customers range from startups to industry giants and everyone in-between, and their stories inspire the next wave of groundbreaking apps.

Learn From Our Customers

“Heroku gives us a scalable, long-term solution for running our service, so we don’t have to jump from provider to provider as our business grows.”

Justin Kestler
Co-Founder, LitCharts
LitCharts’ story →

“With Heroku, we don’t need a dedicated DevOps team. We can keep the wheels of innovation turning and allow our engineers to focus on building the best user experience for our customers.”

Jonathan Lister Parsons
CTO, PensionBee
PensionBee’s story →

“The biggest advantage of using Heroku has been our ability to push out a lot more features, a lot more competitions. We can focus on our core work because we're not spending engineering time worrying about infrastructure.”

Isaac Slavitt
Co-Founder & Data Scientist, DrivenData
DrivenData’s story →

Our history

Heroku was founded in 2007 by Orion Henry, James Lindenbaum, and Adam Wiggins. The company was acquired by Salesforce in 2011, and the Heroku platform is now part of Salesforce Platform.

2007

July 2007

Heroku is founded by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry

October 2007

Heroku rolls out in private beta.

2009

April 2009

Heroku launches commercially with support for Ruby.

October 2009

Over 35,000 apps are running on Heroku.

2010

May 2010

Over 60,000 apps are running on Heroku.

September 2010

Heroku Add-ons are introduced.

November 2010

Heroku releases the PostgreSQL database add-on.

December 2010

Salesforce.com acquires Heroku.

2011

June 2011

Node.js is officially supported on Heroku.

July 2011

Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, chief designer of Ruby, joins Heroku as Chief Architect, Ruby.

Clojure becomes the third official language on Heroku.

August 2011

Java is officially supported on Heroku.

September 2011

Python joins the list of officially supported languages.

October 2011

Scala is officially supported.

November 2011

Heroku Postgres launches as a standalone product.

2012

January 2012

The Twelve-Factor App is published.

September 2012

The Heroku Dashboard is introduced.

2013

May 2013

The Heroku Platform API is available in public beta.

2014

May 2014

The Heroku Platform API is released.

Heroku Connect is introduced.

July 2014

Heroku officially supports PHP.

September 2014

Two-factor Authentication is generally available.

Heroku DX: Heroku Developer Experience is introduced.

December 2014

HTTP Git is introduced.

2015

February 2015

Heroku Enterprise is released.

April 2015

The Heroku Elements Marketplace launches.

May 2015

Heroku supports Docker.

June 2015

Heroku Redis is released.

July 2015

Heroku officially supports Go.

September 2015

Heroku Flow is released: Heroku Pipelines, Heroku Review Apps, and GitHub Sync.

2016

January 2016

Heroku Private Spaces is released.

June 2016

Heroku Teams is released.

September 2016

Apache Kafka on Heroku is released.

SSL is free on all paid dynos.

December 2016

PostgreSQL 9.6 is generally available on Heroku.

2017

January 2017

Heroku Autoscaling for web dynos is released.

March 2017

Automated Certificate Management is available for paid apps with custom domains.

May 2017

Heroku CI is released.

June 2017

Heroku Shield for high compliance apps is released.

July 2017

Heroku ChatOps for Slack is released.

August 2017

Heroku Postgres is updated: configuration, credentials, and CI.

November 2017

PCI Compliance for Heroku Shield is announced.

December 2017

PostgreSQL 10 is generally available on Heroku.

2018

January 2018

Heroku Postgres PGX plans are released.

March 2018

oclif CLI framework is open sourced.

June 2018

Automated SSL Certs for Private Spaces is released.

Heroku Shield Connect is released.

August 2018

Heroku achieves ISO and SOC2 Type I certification.

November 2018

Building Docker images with heroku.yml is released.

2019

March 2019

PostgreSQL 11 is generally available on Heroku.

April 2019

The new Dataclips is released.

May 2019

Heroku Postgres via PrivateLink is generally available.

September 2019

Heroku Enterprise Accounts is generally available.

October 2019

Apache Kafka on Heroku Shield is released.

November 2019

Heroku data services integrations using mutual TLS and PrivateLink is generally available.

2020

June 2020

Heroku Shield Redis is released.

Heroku Review Apps is updated: public API, greater automation, and easier access.

October 2020

Heroku Streaming Data Connectors are generally available.

Over 200 add-on services to help build, test, monitor, and manage your apps.

Upcoming Events
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    The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference gathers adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities in Paris, France from 19-22 March, 2024.