Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) vs. Heroku Platform

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon S3
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.N/A
Heroku Platform
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
The Heroku Platform, now from Salesforce, is a platform-as-a-service based on a managed container system, with integrated data services and ecosystem for deploying modern apps. It takes an app-centric approach for software delivery, integrated with developer tools and workflows. It’s three main tool are: Heroku Developer Experience (DX), Heroku Operational Experience (OpEx), and Heroku Runtime. Heroku Developer Experience (DX) Developers deploy directly from tools like…
$85
per month
Pricing
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Heroku Platform
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Production
$25.00
per month
Advanced
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon S3Heroku Platform
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Heroku Platform
Considered Both Products
Amazon S3
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
S3 is the most mature simple storage service on the web. It has direct competitors from Google and Azure, as well as a bunch of other competitors that focus on different aspects. For example, Backblaze specializes on file backups, and while s3 can also be used for that, Backbla…
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
I haven't been personally involved in the decision to use S3, but in comparison to Dropbox or Google Drive, this offers a less robust UI to modify things, while being a cheaper storage mechanism over the rest.
Heroku Platform
Chose Heroku Platform
I believe Azure App Service is pretty similar to Heroku as you can in both deploy your backend applications.
However, the dyno concept and it's drastically simple web dashboard makes Heroku a much better and sane alternative to Azure App Service. In Heroku, you get abstracted of …
Chose Heroku Platform
We also use Cloud 66 which provides some of Heroku's features, at a lower price. It still cannot compare to Heroku's ease of use and ability to easily deploy new staging environments though, so we will always use Heroku for at least some of our projects.
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku is a really great platform to get up and running QUICKLY and efficiently. What Heroku is really great at that other services are lacking is ease of use, documentation. It is really great for beginning developers and awesome to get up and running to take care of lots of …
Chose Heroku Platform
The other places we've looked at include Bluebox, Linode and AWS. For all of these, we were able to realize places where it made sense to move away from Heroku from a cost perspective. After moving, we also realized much faster performance on these sites (due to the higher …
Chose Heroku Platform
You get much more machine for your money with EC2, but it requires much more time to set up and maintain, at least as it stood two years ago when we stopped using it. We spoke with Engine Yard when selecting Heroku, and they're good folks. They offer much more power and …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Heroku Platform
Data Center Backup
Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
9.7
2 Ratings
13% above category average
Heroku Platform
-
Ratings
Universal recovery9.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Instant recovery9.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Recovery verification10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Multiple backup destinations10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Backup to the cloud10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Snapshots10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Flexible deployment10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Management dashboard7.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform support10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Retention options10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Encryption10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Enterprise Backup
Comparison of Enterprise Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
9.5
2 Ratings
16% above category average
Heroku Platform
-
Ratings
Continuous data protection10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Replication10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Operational reporting and analytics8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-location capabilities10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
-
Ratings
Heroku Platform
8.1
44 Ratings
1% below category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings7.627 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings8.244 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings7.643 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings8.329 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings7.043 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.042 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.739 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.638 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings8.242 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings8.339 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.344 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Heroku Platform
Small Businesses
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Score 9.6 out of 10
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.7 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.7 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Heroku Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(68 ratings)
6.9
(48 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(6 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(10 ratings)
9.2
(17 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.8
(21 ratings)
8.7
(19 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Heroku Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
Read full review
Salesforce
Heroku is very well suited for startups looking to get a server stack up and running quickly. There is little to no overhead when managing your instances. However, you'll need a background in basic DevOps or system management to make sure everything is set up correctly. In addition, it's easy to accidentally go crazy on pricing. Make sure you're only creating the server instances you need to run the base application and set up an auto-scaler plugin to handle peaks.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
  • Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
  • It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
  • Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Heroku has a very simple deployment model, making it easy to get your application up-and-running with minimal effort. We can focus on our efforts the unique aspects of our application.
  • The robust add-on marketplace makes it easy to try out new approaches with minimal effort and investment -- and when we settle on a solution, we can easily scale it.
  • Heroku's support is quite good -- their staff is quite technical and willing to get into the weeds to diagnose even complicated problems.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
  • Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Large price jumps between certain resource tiers (2x Dyno for $50 per month versus Performance Dyno for $250). Free Postgres next jumps to $50 per month.
  • Marketing/Branding to non-technical stakeholders. As the years pass, I've had to fight more to convince stakeholders on the value of Heroku over AWS.
  • Improve Buildpack documentation. This is one area where Heroku's documentation is fairly confusing.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Heroku is easy to use, services a ton of functions for you out of the box, and provides a means to get a software product off the ground and managed quickly and easily. The tools provide allows a small to medium size org to move very quickly. The CLI tools provided make managing an entire technical infrastructure simple.
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
Read full review
Salesforce
Easy to use web based console and easy to use command line tools; deployment is done directly from a GIT repository. What more could you ask for? The one thing that keeps me from giving it a 10 is that custom build packs are almost incomprehensible. We used one for a while because we needed cairo graphics processing. Fortunately, I was able to figure out a different way to do what we needed so that we could get off the custom build pack.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Heroku availability correlates pretty strongly to AWS US EAST availability. We had a couple of times where there was a Heroku-specific issue but not for the last 7-8 months.
Read full review
Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
The only issue that I ever have is that about 1 out of 20 deployments (git push) will hang and need to be cancelled and done again.
Read full review
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
Read full review
Salesforce
I've used it for many years without facing any major problem. It's not hard at all to get used to it, it's documentation is outstanding and simple. We are close to 2020 and I don't think most of the existing companies or startups should still face old problems such as wasting time deploying code and calculate computing resources.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Be ready to pay a bit more than expected in the beginning if you're migrating from a big server. The application is probably not ready for the change and you have to keep improving it with time.
It's also important to consider that you can't save anything to the disc as it will be lost when your application restarts, so you have to think about using something like S3.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
Read full review
Salesforce
Heroku is the more expensive option for hosting compared to some of the cloud platforms we investigated, but it's worth it for us because of the plug-and-play nature of Heroku deployment. We can be up and running in a few minutes and know with precision how much it will cost us each month to run the application, unlike Amazon Web Services where you have to go to great pains to configure it correctly or else you might end up with a shocking monthly bill. Overall, spending the time to configure Amazon Web Services or one of its competitors is likely the more affordable and powerful choice, because you have control over so many specifics of the configuration. But it also requires the burden of continuing to maintain and update your AWS instance, whereas with Heroku they take care of security fixes and platform upgrades. It's a great service and we are happy to pay the extra cost for the value-adds Heroku provides.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
  • The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
  • If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • It has been critical in seamlessly operating our platform with runs all of our programs.
  • It has been impressive with its ability to scale quickly which results in the growth of our work.
  • It allows for tracking of different features which allows for quick problem solving which saves us time.
Read full review
ScreenShots