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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Heroku Platform

    Score7.6 out of 10
    N/AThe 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

    NativeScript

    Score4.8 out of 10
    N/ANativeScript is an open source framework that allows you to create native iOS and Android apps, with one codebase, using ​the web skills you already have (JavaScript and CSS) and ​the libraries you already love​.N/A
    Pricing
    Heroku PlatformNativeScript
    Editions & Modules
    Production
    $25.00
    per month
    Advanced
    $250.00
    per month
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Heroku PlatformNativeScript
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—The NativeScript framework and CLI are completely free and open source. NativeScript Sidekick is a free download to improve developer productivity with optional paid tiers for power users.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Heroku PlatformNativeScript
    Considered Both Products
    Salesforce
    No answer on this topic
    Progress Software
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    89%
    Would buy again
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    89%
    Happy with the feature set
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Heroku PlatformNativeScript
    Platform-as-a-Service
    Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Heroku Platform and NativeScript
    Feature
    Heroku Platform
    7.2
    44 Ratings
    7% below category average
    NativeScript
    -
    Ratings
    Ease of building user interfaces6.027 Ratings00 Ratings
    Scalability7.044 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform management overhead7.043 Ratings00 Ratings
    Workflow engine capability6.030 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform access control7.043 Ratings00 Ratings
    Services-enabled integration6.042 Ratings00 Ratings
    Development environment creation9.039 Ratings00 Ratings
    Development environment replication9.038 Ratings00 Ratings
    Issue monitoring and notification8.042 Ratings00 Ratings
    Issue recovery7.039 Ratings00 Ratings
    Upgrades and platform fixes7.044 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Heroku PlatformNativeScript
    Small Businesses
    IBM Cloud Foundry
    Score8.5 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Private
    Score9.6 out of 10
    SAP Extension Suite (discontinued)
    Score8.4 out of 10
    Enterprises
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score8.6 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Heroku PlatformNativeScript
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.0
    (47 ratings)
    4.8
    (13 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.5
    (6 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    9.2
    (17 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Availability
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.7
    (19 ratings)
    1.0
    (2 ratings)
    Online Training
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Heroku PlatformNativeScript
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Progress Software
    I gotta be honest, after a PoC period, we choose to rewrite the whole application in a different cross-platform app. Our developers had to invest a lot of time and effort to debug a lot of plugin-related issues, which we needed to utilize the android mobile phone capabilities. QR reader, special visualizations, and fine-tuning were really hard and often resulted in writing native Android code instead of using the shared Angular code. In the end, we think that writing a standalone Android app and an Angular app would have been a better alternative, as the shared code base was so unreliable that it did not save us any time.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Progress Software
    • True native app. The app uses native components and that is quite noticeable in the overall performance of the app. NativeScript is also awesome in the way we can access the native APIs, so we are never really constrained by the framework. If we need, we can just dive into the native APIs without leaving our environment and language (JS).
    • Cross-platform. Builds for Android and iOS. It deals with the platforms differences very well.
    • Support for Vue.js. Even though it is just a community effort, the NativeScript-Vue plugin is the best alternative to build native Apps with Vue.js. That was a major factor to go with NativeScript.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Progress Software
    • The need to know the native Android and iOS APIs to access device hardware and other platform-specific functionality
    • Not all user interface components are available for free
    • NativeScript has no HTML and DOM, which requires some deep knowledge of different UI tools to be implemented instead
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Progress Software
    The hybrid is ok but native is better for performance and the right use case I want to go for is the performance without dealing with too many development tools.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    Progress Software
    No answers on this topic
    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.
    Read full review
    Progress Software
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Progress Software
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Progress Software
    The community support is excellent.
    They have a slack community as well as a discourse forum
    forum.nativescript.org
    Both of these offer community driven support.
    The forum is more for a threaded discussion. The slack community is more for a quick talk.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Progress Software
    No answers on this topic
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Progress Software
    Ionic Ionic is an excellent Angular-based framework for mobile, and it does give a lot of access to the native device api's. However, the technology is based on Cordova, which means the apps being built are just webviews, with html, css and JS all running on the UI thread, and potentially creating very slow experiences for users. NativeScript is a truly native solution, and so provides a faster user experience. ReactNative We evaluate ReactNative, and found it much the same as NativeScript. The main difference is that your JS is all written with React, while NativeScript lets you choose between normal JS, Angular, and Vue. For our team, Angular was the most appropriate choice.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Progress Software
    • The poor quality of NativeScript documentation has the potential to weigh heavily on development timelines, budgets, and QA resources in a NEGATIVE manner.
    • The poor interoperability of NativeScript plugins can significantly increase development time.
    • The need to seek out professional instruction to learn how to use NativeScript effectively may become a burden on your budget.
    • The number of breaking changes between versions of NativeScript, may cause your development efforts to lag further behind the most recent releases of NativeScript and your other chosen environments than you are accustomed to.
    • NativeScript still does not support the latest major version of Angular. Any significant changes to the other environment components of your systems may hold you back even further while NativeScript plays catch-up.
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    NativeScript Screenshots

    Screenshot of Example of a styled NativeScript list viewScreenshot of Charts and graphs available as part of NativeScript UIScreenshot of Groceries – the app you build as part of the getting started tutorialScreenshot of Leverage native mapping systems with NativeScript