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, free offerings, 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.

Sign up for a free Heroku account and discover the Heroku experience for yourself.

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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 Head of Design/UX

  • Our mission: bring structure, insight, and simplicity to app development. Ultimately, our daily success is when devs turn good ideas into world-class apps — whether it's for a few developers on laptops at a coffeehouse in Ghana, a headline Silicon Valley release or greenfield innovation in an enterprise.

    Ike Delorenzo Developer Experience - Product

  • We're deeply committed to crafting smart, sharp, prescriptive tools that enable development and innovation, and measure the effectiveness of our work through the productivity, engagement, and success of our community.

    Roberta Carraro 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 11 billion requests every day

That's more than 125,000 requests every second.

Our crew

Jobs 1 Photo by Adriane White Photography

Heroku is built, maintained, and championed by 200+ 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 at 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 Senior Marketing Manager

  • Heroku challenges me in every way to build products that make a difference in how technology evolves. Everyone I get to work with is dedicated, academic, thoughtful and most importantly they're my friends.

    Kathy Simpson Product Manager

  • 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 Senior Product Designer

  • 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 perpsective.

    Terence Lee Ruby Language Owner

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 150+ Heroku Add-ons in the Elements Marketplace.

Learn more >>

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 1,400+ Heroku Buttons and 2,000+ Heroku Buildpacks in the Elements Marketplace.

Learn more >>

Learn more about Heroku elements

We’ve been part of the Heroku ecosystem for over three years, and it’s been an important part of our success. We’re thrilled about the new Elements marketplace - it makes it even easier for developers to find, evaluate, and integrate Librato into their Heroku app.

Joseph Ruscio CTO, Librato

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 5 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

  • The entire team was excited about the opportunities that Heroku gave us. The platform makes it easy to create and deploy a new app — once we started using Heroku, we never looked back.

    Bharat Mediratta Co-Founder and CTO, AltSchool Read customer story>>

  • Using Heroku helps us build better products and keep our developers happy. They stay energized and focused on building great software rather than getting sidetracked by DevOps tasks.

    Courtney Hemphill Partner and Technical Lead, Carbon Five Read customer story>>

  • Our experience with Heroku has been so seamless—it not only saves us time, but saves on opportunity cost. We don’t have to hire a DevOps role, which means operational budget can be directed to fundraising activities.

    Matthew Eckstein VP of Engineering, charity: water Read customer story>>

  • We felt comfortable with Heroku due to its industry reputation as a market leader – for us it was the obvious choice.

    Victor Dronov GoToMeeting Free Product Manager, Citrix Read customer story>>

  • We are very excited about Heroku’s roadmap and are always first in line for their betas. Our team loves playing with new platform features in staging before they hit prime time. We are usually counting down the days to GA, so we can push the new features to our production apps.

    Daniel Taschik Co-Founder and CTO, Dubsmash Read customer 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 App Cloud.

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 live apps on Heroku

2010

May 2010

Over 60,000 apps on Heroku

September 2010

Heroku Add-ons are introduced

November 2010

Heroku releases 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, the chief designer of the Ruby programming language, joins the company 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 published

September 2012

The Heroku Dashboard is introduced

2013

May 2013

Heroku Platform API available in public beta

2014

May 2014

Heroku Platform API is released

Heroku Connect is introduced

July 2014

Heroku officially supports PHP

September 2014

Two-factor Authentication 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: Pipelines, 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 now free on all paid dynos

December 2016

PostgreSQL 9.6 now generally available on Heroku

2017

January 2017

Heroku Autoscaling for web dynos is released

Over 150 add-on services to help build, test, monitor, and manage your apps.

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