Salesforce today announced that Salesforce (Heroku) has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud-Native Application Platforms. 

Significance: AI is reshaping how businesses serve their customers, creating unprecedented demand for intelligent, responsive applications. But this transformation comes with a cost: organizations are drowning in complexity as they attempt to integrate and maintain hundreds of disparate applications, AI models, and AI tools, creating bottlenecks that slow innovation and increase security risks.

The challenge extends beyond technology. Over two-thirds of development teams lack the resources to build and deploy new classes of applications effectively, forcing them to choose between speed and quality — or abandon AI initiatives altogether.

Heroku AI PaaS eliminates this tradeoff. The comprehensive Cloud-Native Application Platform transforms AI development from a complex engineering challenge into a streamlined workflow, giving businesses simple access to enterprise-grade AI capabilities while automating security and operational best practices. The result: faster time-to-market, reduced risk, and lower total cost of ownership.

Innovation in action: Heroku AI PaaS helps businesses accelerate delivery and simplify operations of apps and agents at every scale. It features:

• An AI-native developer experience with AI IDE support for Cursor, Windsor, Claude Desktop, simplified access to foundation models with Heroku Managed Inference and Agents, and MCP server support with a toolkit for custom MCP Servers and a Heroku Remote MCP Server.
• Support for a wide range of programming languages, frameworks, and databases to remove friction from the development process.
• Deep integration with Salesforce products, including Agentforce, Mulesoft, and Data Cloud with Heroku AppLink to enable unique and enhanced use cases.
• Fully managed and integrated infrastructure platform and DevOps automation to reduce operational overhead and risk.
• Built-in regulatory compliance in Heroku platform for applications with PCI, HIPAA, ISO, and SOC compliance.
• Simple delivery and modernization of a wide range of workloads, including cloud-native, machine learning, AI applications and agents, and traditional applications. 

Salesforce perspective: “We are honored to be recognized again as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud-Native Application Platforms. Heroku makes it easier for businesses to bring their ideas to life through software by removing friction and complexity in their process, and increasing both their creativity and productivity,” said Betty Junod, CMO and SVP, Heroku from Salesforce. “By simplifying the development and deployment of AI applications, we’re helping our customers reduce wait times, improve customer satisfaction, and drive business growth.”

Customer perspective:

“Heroku allowed us to focus more on innovation and building the things we want to build, the applications that make our business unique in the market. Our speed has become our biggest competitive advantage in this space, and Heroku has allowed us to scale quickly.” – Cheyne Pierce, 1West CTO

Heroku provided us the flexibility to move quickly and get the customer’s product to market from 12-18 months to under four months.

Brendan Hennessy, Co-Founder & CTO, LaunchPad Lab

“Using Heroku, we were able to seamlessly integrate Kawasaki Engine’s backend systems and Salesforce instances and provided a scalable platform that was easy for the team to manage and iterate solutions very quickly on. Heroku provided us the flexibility to move quickly and get the customer’s product to market from 12-18 months to under four months.” – Brendan Hennessy, Co-Founder & CTO, LaunchPad Lab

Open Image Modal

Image Modal

Fast facts: Heroku from Salesforce is an AI platform as a service accelerating the delivery of custom applications and agentic solutions at every scale. 

• More than 65 million apps and 38 million data stores have been built on Heroku.
• More than 65 billion requests are served daily on Heroku. 
• Heroku Elements Marketplace hosts hundreds of ecosystem add-on services.

Go deeper:

• Learn more about Heroku 
• Watch a demo of the Heroku AI PaaS
• Download a complimentary copy of the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud-Native Application Platforms

What is a Magic Quadrant report?
Magic Quadrant reports are based on a culmination of rigorous, fact-based research in specific markets, providing a wide-angle view of the relative positions of providers in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct. Providers are positioned into four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players. The research enables you to get the most from market analysis in alignment with your unique business and technology needs.

NOTE: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC. QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Salesforce.