Dokku vs Heroku Platform | TrustRadius

What users are saying about

Score 9 out of 10

Based on 1 reviews and ratings

Score 8.5 out of 10

Based on 139 reviews and ratings

Feature Rating Comparison

Dokku

Heroku Platform

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

Ease of building user interfaces

Pros

Dockerfile deployments are an incredibly simple and straightforward way to spin up applications.
The docker-options plugin allows endless direct configuration of options passed to different docker lifecycle stages.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 51-200 employees

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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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Verified User

C-Level Executive in Other

Consumer Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Cons

Dokku might overreach on its assumptions about how you want to host your app, using its own VHOSTS plugin by default. This may be a pro or a con depending on what you want.
Proxy port configuration can be somewhat difficult, with Dokku resetting any pre-deployment configuration to "smart" defaults on the first deployment.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 51-200 employees

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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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Co-Creator

Flights MachineLeisure, Travel & Tourism, 1-10 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No 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.

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Software Engineer

ShiptInternet, 51-200 employees

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Usability

No score

No answers yet

No 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.

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Chief Technology Officer

TrustRadiusComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Reliability and Availability

No score

No answers yet

No 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.

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Chief Technology Officer

TrustRadiusComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Performance

No score

No answers yet

No 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.

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Chief Technology Officer

TrustRadiusComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Support Rating

Dokku 5.0

Based on 2 answers

Dokku is incredibly well documented and also takes advantage of the documentation and community of Heroku, being essentially the same thing, but in the case that you encounter an actual bug or issue, it can take time for a fix to make it into a new version. Since you manage Dokku yourself, there is no support team to call for help.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 51-200 employees

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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.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees

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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.

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Willian Molinari

Backend Engineer

DoistInternet, 11-50 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Dokku is essentially the same thing as Heroku, except maintained by you on the platform of your choice. If you have any experience using Heroku, then you will feel right at home using Dokku. Dokku is an entirely free to use PaaS, requiring only that you have a platform to deploy it on, making it far more versatile than Heroku in my opinion.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 51-200 employees

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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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Web & Mobile Developer

Bluefire ProductionsComputer Software, 11-50 employees

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Return on Investment

Since there's no investment besides a little time to set up, the return has been overwhelmingly positive.
Deploying a new app is incredibly quick and easy.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 51-200 employees

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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.

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Shannon E. Wells-Mongiovi

VP of Engineering, Senior Web Developer

UnspecifiedComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Dokku Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

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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

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Rating Summary

Dokku

Heroku Platform

Dokku

Heroku Platform

Dokku

Heroku Platform

Dokku

Heroku Platform

Dokku

Heroku Platform

Dokku

Heroku Platform

Dokku

Heroku Platform

Dokku

Heroku Platform

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