DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
$5
Starting Price Per Month
Heroku Platform
Score 8.2 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
DigitalOcean
Heroku Platform
Editions & Modules
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Production
$25.00
per month
Advanced
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean
Heroku Platform
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOcean
Heroku Platform
Considered Both Products
DigitalOcean
Verified User
Engineer
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is not quite as simple as Heroku to get up and running, but it provides a better price point and more configurability. However, in my opinion it's much simpler to get up and running with than AWS OpsWorks and even Google App Engine. It also provides a better price …
Cheaper than Heroku which is prohibitively expensive for a small self-funded startup. We quickly outgrew their free tier and migrated to DigitalOcean. AWS is more feature complete however, we found its maintenance overly confusing and not as well thought out. For many use cases …
DigitalOcean's dead simple pricing and solid but basic feature set combine for a no-nonsense way to get your product shipped. Its API makes it nicely scriptable/automate-able compared to traditional shared hosting providers like Dreamhost. I think it compares most closely with …
DigitalOcean easily has the most flexibility, best pricing, and best ease of use, of the competitors we had used. Rackspace offers better engineer access and support, but this comes at a very significant cost. Heroku offers a cloud container system, which has less maintenance, …
EngineYard is much more similar to Heroku than the other two services I've compared it to. Frankly, I don't see much advantage of EngineYard over Heroku - EngineYard feels a little more "bare metal" than Heroku and it's easy to get to log into a "real server," but it's …
Heroku Platform is cheaper to begin with compared to DigitalOcean or Amazon Fargate. The configuration user interface is also arguably easier to understand. With its user friendliness and cheaper tiers, Heroku Platform was our pick to host some of our applications that were …
Heroku has the easy facility to deploy and host applications while others have to configure a lot. The price of the services is high for others. But within Heroku pricing and easy to maintain under the same roof.
DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced.
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.
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.
Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
There are no regions available on South America.
They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.
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.
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.
I honestly can't think of an easier way to set up and maintain your own server. Being able to set up a server in minutes and have fully control is awesome. The UX is incredibly intuitive for first-time users as well so there's no reason to be intimidated when it comes to giving DigitalOcean a shot.
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.
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.
They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces.
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.
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.
Amazon has a very complex UI and many products to offer. They haven't polished up their UI and it has a much greater learning curve compared to DigitalOcean. However, Amazon Web Services (AWS) does have more comprehensive cloud computing services, which forces some companies to migrate their backend and other services to AWS as they scale up.
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.
