DigitalOcean vs Heroku Platform | TrustRadius

What users are saying about

Score 8.1 out of 10

Based on 89 reviews and ratings

Score 8.5 out of 10

Based on 139 reviews and ratings

Feature Rating Comparison

DigitalOcean

Heroku Platform

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime

Dynamic scaling

Elastic load balancing

Pre-configured templates

Monitoring tools

Pre-defined machine images

Operating system support

Security controls

DigitalOcean

Heroku Platform

Ease of building user interfaces

Scalability

Platform management overhead

Workflow engine capability

Platform access control

Services-enabled integration

Development environment creation

Development environment replication

Issue monitoring and notification

Issue recovery

Upgrades and platform fixes

Pros

Ease of use - You can get set up with a new server in a matter of minutes. It doesn't get any easier than that.
Support - The public forums are incredibly helpful as are the official help articles. I've never needed to contact the support team because of this. All of the information is at my fingertips.
Pricing - We're only paying $10/mo for a solution that gives our customers more confidence in us and is a selling point for us.

Read full review

VP of Technology & Human Resources

Quality Ironworks, Inc.Construction, 51-200 employees

View all 29 answers on this topic

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

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Other

Consumer Services Company, 1-10 employees

View all 43 answers on this topic

Cons

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.

Read full review

Leonel Quinteros

Director of Technology

Global Brigades, Inc.Non-Profit Organization Management, 11-50 employees

View all 29 answers on this topic

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

Co-Creator

Flights MachineLeisure, Travel & Tourism, 1-10 employees

View all 43 answers on this topic

Likelihood to Renew

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!

Read full review

Devops Engineer

Tommy BahamaComputer Software, 1-10 employees

View all 2 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Software Engineer

ShiptInternet, 51-200 employees

View all 6 answers on this topic

Usability

DigitalOcean 8.5

Based on 6 answers

While DigitalOcean is a top notch host in our opinion, it could be more user friendly. There have been great strides taken in the last year with user friendliness, and while if you are experienced with web hosting, the services they offer will be easy to use, if you are not then it will require some research on your part.

Read full review

Brandon Mullins

CEO

Moon Books PublishingEntertainment, 1-10 employees

View all 6 answers on this topic

Heroku Platform 9.1

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.

Read full review

Chief Technology Officer

TrustRadiusComputer Software, 1-10 employees

View all 17 answers on this topic

Reliability and Availability

DigitalOcean 10.0

Based on 1 answer

Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.

Read full review

Front-end developer

Velocity PartnersInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

View all 1 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Chief Technology Officer

TrustRadiusComputer Software, 1-10 employees

View all 2 answers on this topic

Performance

DigitalOcean 9.0

Based on 1 answer

Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.

Read full review

Front-end developer

Velocity PartnersInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

View all 1 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Chief Technology Officer

TrustRadiusComputer Software, 1-10 employees

View all 2 answers on this topic

Support Rating

DigitalOcean 8.6

Based on 10 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.

Read full review

Co-Founder / Full Stack Dev

Madness LabsComputer Software, 1-10 employees

View all 10 answers on this topic

Heroku Platform 8.6

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.

Read full review

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees

View all 38 answers on this topic

Implementation Rating

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Willian Molinari

Backend Engineer

DoistInternet, 11-50 employees

View all 6 answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

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.

Read full review

Co-Founder/CEO

aspace, Inc.Computer Software, 1-10 employees

View all 29 answers on this topic

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

Web & Mobile Developer

Bluefire ProductionsComputer Software, 11-50 employees

View all 43 answers on this topic

Scalability

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.

Read full review

Front-end developer

Velocity PartnersInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

View all 1 answers on this topic

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Return on Investment

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.

Read full review

Jeanine Schoessler

Web Developer

satinflame designHigher Education, 1-10 employees

View all 29 answers on this topic

Heroku allowed us to get up and running fast. Deployment was really easy and connecting to our codebase was, too. The deployment integration with GitHub is pretty slick.
The add-ons provisioning is so simple and the documentation is so thorough that, at least at first, it means you don't have to hire a dedicated devops person to manage this stuff.
Heroku has tools that allow the collaborators (those with access to the Heroku dashboard) to be able to quickly and easily do triage from just about anywhere, including your smartphone.

Read full review

Shannon E. Wells-Mongiovi

VP of Engineering, Senior Web Developer

UnspecifiedComputer Software, 1-10 employees

View all 43 answers on this topic

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

DigitalOcean Editions & Modules

Edition

1GB-16GB	$5.00¹
8GB-160GB	$60.00¹

Starting Price Per Month

Additional Pricing Details

—

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Heroku Platform Editions & Modules

Edition

Production	$25.00¹
Advanced	$250.00¹

Per Month

Additional Pricing Details

—

Rating Summary

DigitalOcean

Heroku Platform

DigitalOcean

Heroku Platform

DigitalOcean

Heroku Platform

DigitalOcean

Heroku Platform

DigitalOcean

Heroku Platform

DigitalOcean

Heroku Platform

DigitalOcean

Heroku Platform

DigitalOcean

Heroku Platform

DigitalOcean

Heroku Platform

Add comparison