What users are saying about

DigitalOcean vs Heroku Platform

DigitalOcean
115 Ratings
Heroku Platform
160 Ratings

DigitalOcean

115 Ratings
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Score 8.4 out of 100

Based on 115 reviews and ratings

Heroku Platform

160 Ratings
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Score 7.5 out of 100

Based on 160 reviews and ratings

Feature Set Ratings

    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

    8.4

    DigitalOcean

    84%

    Heroku Platform

    Feature Set Not Supported
    N/A
    DigitalOcean ranks higher in 9/9 features
    DigitalOcean ranks higher in 9/9 features

    Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime

    9.0
    90%
    27 Ratings
    N/A
    0 Ratings

    Dynamic scaling

    8.6
    86%
    29 Ratings
    N/A
    0 Ratings

    Elastic load balancing

    7.6
    76%
    21 Ratings
    N/A
    0 Ratings

    Pre-configured templates

    9.3
    93%
    26 Ratings
    N/A
    0 Ratings

    Monitoring tools

    7.9
    79%
    31 Ratings
    N/A
    0 Ratings

    Pre-defined machine images

    8.7
    87%
    30 Ratings
    N/A
    0 Ratings

    Operating system support

    7.6
    76%
    30 Ratings
    N/A
    0 Ratings

    Security controls

    8.1
    81%
    29 Ratings
    N/A
    0 Ratings

    Automation

    8.4
    84%
    3 Ratings
    N/A
    0 Ratings

    Platform-as-a-Service

    DigitalOcean

    Feature Set Not Supported
    N/A
    7.5

    Heroku Platform

    75%
    Heroku Platform ranks higher in 11/11 features
    Heroku Platform ranks higher in 11/11 features

    Ease of building user interfaces

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    7.9
    79%
    27 Ratings

    Scalability

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    6.9
    69%
    44 Ratings

    Platform management overhead

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    8.1
    81%
    43 Ratings

    Workflow engine capability

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    7.0
    70%
    29 Ratings

    Platform access control

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    6.0
    60%
    43 Ratings

    Services-enabled integration

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    6.8
    68%
    42 Ratings

    Development environment creation

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    8.7
    87%
    39 Ratings

    Development environment replication

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    8.0
    80%
    38 Ratings

    Issue monitoring and notification

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    7.5
    75%
    42 Ratings

    Issue recovery

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    7.7
    77%
    39 Ratings

    Upgrades and platform fixes

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    8.0
    80%
    44 Ratings

    Attribute Ratings

    • DigitalOcean is rated higher in 3 areas: Likelihood to Recommend, Availability, Support Rating
    • Heroku Platform is rated higher in 2 areas: Likelihood to Renew, Usability
    • DigitalOcean and Heroku Platform are tied in 1 area: Performance

    Likelihood to Recommend

    8.6

    DigitalOcean

    86%
    32 Ratings
    6.7

    Heroku Platform

    67%
    48 Ratings

    Likelihood to Renew

    9.0

    DigitalOcean

    90%
    2 Ratings
    9.5

    Heroku Platform

    95%
    6 Ratings

    Usability

    8.6

    DigitalOcean

    86%
    6 Ratings
    9.2

    Heroku Platform

    92%
    17 Ratings

    Availability

    10.0

    DigitalOcean

    100%
    2 Ratings
    8.0

    Heroku Platform

    80%
    2 Ratings

    Performance

    9.0

    DigitalOcean

    90%
    2 Ratings
    9.0

    Heroku Platform

    90%
    2 Ratings

    Support Rating

    8.8

    DigitalOcean

    88%
    18 Ratings
    8.7

    Heroku Platform

    87%
    38 Ratings

    Online Training

    DigitalOcean

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    6.0

    Heroku Platform

    60%
    1 Rating

    Implementation Rating

    DigitalOcean

    N/A
    0 Ratings
    9.0

    Heroku Platform

    90%
    6 Ratings

    Product Scalability

    10.0

    DigitalOcean

    100%
    1 Rating

    Heroku Platform

    N/A
    0 Ratings

    Likelihood to Recommend

    DigitalOcean

    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.

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    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 32 answers on this topic

    Heroku Platform

    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.

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    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 48 answers on this topic

    Pros

    DigitalOcean

    • DigitalOcean provides some of the best cost-to-value services available
    • The DigitalOcean cloud console is very intuitive and easy to navigate
    • DigitalOcean has great support for Docker and other dev ops tools like Terraform.
    • DigitalOcean iterates quickly and provides cutting edge features for organizations that want to keep up with the latest and greatest dev ops tooling
    • DigitalOcean has a great developer community and numerous support docs/tutorials

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    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 32 answers on this topic

    Heroku Platform

    • 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.

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    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 48 answers on this topic

    Cons

    DigitalOcean

    • 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.

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    Leonel Quinteros | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Leonel Quinteros
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    Heroku Platform

    • 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.

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    Ben Gelsey | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Ben Gelsey
    View all 48 answers on this topic

    Pricing Details

    DigitalOcean

    General

    Free Trial
    —
    Free/Freemium Version
    —
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    —
    Entry-level set up fee?
    No

    Starting Price

    $5 Starting Price Per Month

    DigitalOcean Editions & Modules

    Edition
    1GB-16GB$5.001
    8GB-160GB$60.001
    1. Starting Price Per Month
    Additional Pricing Details
    —

    Heroku Platform

    General

    Free Trial
    —
    Free/Freemium Version
    —
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    —
    Entry-level set up fee?
    No

    Starting Price

    $85 per month

    Heroku Platform Editions & Modules

    Edition
    Production$25.001
    Advanced$250.001
    1. per month
    Additional Pricing Details
    —

    Likelihood to Renew

    DigitalOcean

    DigitalOcean 9.0
    Based on 2 answers
    I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!

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    Creede Lambard | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Creede Lambard
    View all 2 answers on this topic

    Heroku Platform

    Heroku Platform 9.5
    Based on 6 answers
    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.

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    Mark Hutter | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Mark Hutter
    View all 6 answers on this topic

    Usability

    DigitalOcean

    DigitalOcean 8.6
    Based on 6 answers
    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.

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    Chris Widner | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Chris Widner
    View all 6 answers on this topic

    Heroku Platform

    Heroku Platform 9.2
    Based on 17 answers
    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.

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    David Hart | TrustRadius Reviewer
    David Hart
    View all 17 answers on this topic

    Reliability and Availability

    DigitalOcean

    DigitalOcean 10.0
    Based on 2 answers
    Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.

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    Hernán Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Hernán Silva
    View all 2 answers on this topic

    Heroku Platform

    Heroku Platform 8.0
    Based on 2 answers
    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.

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    David Hart | TrustRadius Reviewer
    David Hart
    View all 2 answers on this topic

    Performance

    DigitalOcean

    DigitalOcean 9.0
    Based on 2 answers
    Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.

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    Hernán Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Hernán Silva
    View all 2 answers on this topic

    Heroku Platform

    Heroku Platform 9.0
    Based on 2 answers
    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.

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    David Hart | TrustRadius Reviewer
    David Hart
    View all 2 answers on this topic

    Support Rating

    DigitalOcean

    DigitalOcean 8.8
    Based on 18 answers
    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.

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    Bobby Johnson | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Bobby Johnson
    View all 18 answers on this topic

    Heroku Platform

    Heroku Platform 8.7
    Based on 38 answers
    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.

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    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 38 answers on this topic

    Implementation Rating

    DigitalOcean

    No score
    No answers yet
    No answers on this topic

    Heroku Platform

    Heroku Platform 9.0
    Based on 6 answers
    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.

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    Willian Molinari | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Willian Molinari
    View all 6 answers on this topic

    Alternatives Considered

    DigitalOcean

    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.

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    Fedor Paretsky | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Fedor Paretsky
    View all 32 answers on this topic

    Heroku Platform

    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.

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    Jonah Dempcy | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Jonah Dempcy
    View all 48 answers on this topic

    Scalability

    DigitalOcean

    DigitalOcean 10.0
    Based on 1 answer
    Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.

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    Hernán Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Hernán Silva
    View all 1 answers on this topic

    Heroku Platform

    No score
    No answers yet
    No answers on this topic

    Return on Investment

    DigitalOcean

    • With DigitalOcean, I've been able to move all my sites to https using my own implementations of SSL with LetsEncrypt.
    • Since moving my sites to DigitalOcean, my hosting plan costs less than 40% of what I paid for similar hosting from Site5.

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    Jeanine Schoessler | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Jeanine Schoessler
    View all 32 answers on this topic

    Heroku Platform

    • 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.

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    Emily Cooper | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Emily Cooper
    View all 48 answers on this topic

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