Heroku Platform vs. Microsoft Azure

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
Heroku PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Editions & Modules
Production
$25.00
per month
Advanced
$250.00
per month
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Heroku PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsThe free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Heroku PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Considered Both Products
Heroku Platform
Chose Heroku Platform
Kuberbetes is an easily scalable docker based option which should need minimal DevOps, however, it has a pretty high learning curve with many decisions that need to be addressed as well as monitoring, logging and security concerns.
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku, in my opinion, is the easiest platform to deploy and host web applications on. From collaboration to deployment, everything is well thought out and bulletproof. If you need advanced server functionality, like a VPC, machine-to-machine communication, etc., you will …
Chose Heroku Platform
We chose Heroku solely because we had an end goal of putting our data into Salesforce. The platform allowed us to simplify this.
Chose Heroku Platform
To this day no other PaaS matches Heroku in ease of use and maturity. If you want to stay 100% focused on your unique product/service rather than wasting time on boilerplate hosting issues, I can highly recommend Heroku. I personally use it for all of my own websites …
Chose 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 …
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku is a much better choice for small prototyping and small to medium size sites. It is easier to use than most other services/platforms.
Microsoft Azure

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Heroku PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Heroku Platform
8.1
44 Ratings
1% below category average
Microsoft Azure
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces7.627 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability8.244 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead7.643 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability8.329 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control7.043 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration8.042 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation8.739 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication8.638 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification8.242 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery8.339 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes8.344 Ratings00 Ratings
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Heroku Platform
-
Ratings
Microsoft Azure
8.6
17 Ratings
6% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings8.816 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings9.316 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings8.816 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings7.116 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings8.116 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.415 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings9.416 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings9.016 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings8.815 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Heroku PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.8 out of 10
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Heroku PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
6.9
(48 ratings)
8.5
(88 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.5
(6 ratings)
10.0
(15 ratings)
Usability
9.2
(17 ratings)
9.0
(27 ratings)
Availability
8.0
(1 ratings)
6.8
(2 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(19 ratings)
8.8
(27 ratings)
Online Training
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(3 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Heroku PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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Microsoft
In terms of cloud computing, Microsoft Azure is the only comprehensive result the company offers. Regardless of how big or small an organization is, it can make use of this system. As a cyber-security professional, this is your best option for data management. A business that wants to minimize capital expenditures can use Microsoft Azure. Many Microsoft services accept it. People with little or no knowledge of cloud computing may find it impossible. It isn’t the solution for companies that don’t want to risk having only one platform and infrastructure vendor.
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Pros
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.
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Microsoft
  • Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
  • Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
  • BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
  • Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.
Read full review
Cons
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
Microsoft
  • In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
  • Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
  • Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.
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Likelihood to Renew
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.
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Microsoft
Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
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Usability
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.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"
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Reliability and Availability
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.
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Microsoft
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
Read full review
Performance
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
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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.
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Microsoft
Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.
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Implementation Rating
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
Microsoft
As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
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Alternatives Considered
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.
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Microsoft
As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
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Return on Investment
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
Microsoft
  • Brings down Capex to customers.
  • Some of the built-in security features of DDoS Basic protection that comes with VNET on Azure or even WAF on AGW brings huge advantages to customers.
  • Hybrid benefits for those who have software assurance can save even more costs by moving to Azure.
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ScreenShots