Filter Ratings and Reviews
Filter 177 vetted Google App Engine reviews and ratings
Reviews (1-25 of 34)
- Serverless is easy to manage and scale up and down resources.
- Ease to deploy.
- Monitoring and troubleshooting are not so easy.
- Creates vendor lock-in
- It is one of the best alternatives of full machine for small applications.
- It takes less time to implement/deploy or run applications on GAE.
- According to me, worst thing with GAE is it's very expensive when we compare with regular implementations.
- It has fewer tutorials or documentations, so a little bit hard to implement at the first time.
Our internal IT team uses it to deploy other systems like a Grab and Go program for Chromebooks (open sourced) and time approval mechanisms.
- Extremely low cost option for web page deployment. It so simple to prototype or even offer a service by using your favourite app servering platform like Django, Flask, etc.
- Incredible scaling. App Engine scales up and down with ease, automatically, and never fails to serve your app.
- Ease of deployment. Google documentation is clear and concise, plus it's extremely extensible. It's easy to learn how to do this!
- Support. It's not frequent at all that we reach out with support questions, but it is sometimes hard to get answers.
- Roadmap visibility. Transitions and deprecations are hard to track and therefore may be hard to plan for!
- Quick to develop, quick to deploy. You can be up and running on Google App Engine in no time.
- Flexible. We use Java for some services and Node.js for others.
- Great security features. We have been consistently impressed with the security and authentication features of Google App Engine.
- Documentation does not always keep up with the latest changes to the service. Google App Engine has undergone a lot of changes these past couple of years. At times, we were surprised to find out that something we didn't think was possible was, or, conversely, something that was supposed to work fine which had been deprecated. We also ended up using some undocumented features and weren't sure whether they would keep working or not.
- Price. Google App Engine isn't cheap. But, you get what you pay for. Rock solid service, great tools, at a hefty price.
- Difficult to tell how to optimize costs. We racked up the expenses and it is still a mystery where all the costs are being incurred.
- Some intimidating or arcane aspects of configuration. Most of it was a breeze but every now and then something would be pretty far out and require a few of us developers putting our heads together to figure it out.
- Sometimes required reading source code to figure out how to do something. Not a ton of examples of how to do various things, nor Stack Overflow posts, at least in the beginning. I imagine this will change as the community grows. But sometimes it felt like we were all alone trying to figure out how to do things.
- Multiple backend frameworks to choose from
- Reasonable pricing and generous free quotas
- Scalability
- Not every language/framework is supported
- Certain APIs have somewhat lower quotas
- Google can choose to deprecate features at any time
- Monitoring and operations.
- Backups.
- SSL security.
- Price.
- No multi-threading.
- Minimizing maintenance overhead
- Multiple languages supported
- Decouples need for platform support knowledge and experience
- Less configurability than conventional infrastructure based solutions
- Creates vendor lock-in with platform specific options and tuning
- Limited points of presence when compared with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Removes the need for manual server configuration, management, orchestration, etc
- Interfaces incredibly well with other GCP services, like Cloud Functions and Firebase
- It is not the most cost-efficient hosting provider and could continue to improve from a cost basis
- Google's UI can be confusing for newcomers when managing an App Engine deployment
- Serving traffic to end users. It can scale automatically when traffic spikes.
- The standard environment has some limitations, but it encourages you to write "scalable" code.
- With Flexible Environment, you can serve any Docker container you want, still taking advantage of auto scaling.
- Easy integration with other Google Cloud products, e.g. Datastore, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, etc.
- Flexible environment needs scaling to zero and support for all APIs available in Standard Environment like ndb for Python and Task Queue.
- Standard Environment needs to update some outdated libraries like lxml for Python.
- Instance pricing of Standard Environment could be lowered, since it wasn't updated for many years.
We are currently evaluating Google App engine as a platform as a service to our customers. The Google App Engine cloud endpoints is equivalent to Microsoft Azure's web apps or API apps. We are impressed with its ability to deploy Java or Python based RestFul API directly to Cloud endpoints. I coded the logic in the RestFul API to access Google's Cloud DataStore (kind-entity-property type of data store). Google's SDK made it easy to integrate its App Engine with its storage solutions. I have not tried its Cloud Bigtable from Cloud endpoints but I'm sure it's on our next task list.
Google App Engine's primary programming language is Java. I tried JetBrain's IntelliJ IDEA for managing Google App engine cloud endpoint projects. I used the community edition, which had less support for Google App Engine Cloud endpoint. The enterprise edition should have better support.
For those who prefer to use Python, JetBrains may have just released PyCharm for $99. Nothing comes for free. If you work at a company that has those licenses, you should feel lucky. Having a good IDE is critical to productivity. It has a "PyCharm Free Educational (Classroom) License" for free.
- Auto scale application load.
- Platform as a Service feature abstracts the web server layer.
- Perfect for Android or iOS app server logic development.
- Connect to different Google storage types.
- Able to use C# as the programming language in its SDK.
- Integration with Visual studio C# for using Google app engine cloud endpoint SDK.
- Documentation on choosing a IDE to get started. Doing things in the command line is too basic. It's good to know them but having a sophisticated IDE is the next step to achieve higher productivity.
- Easy to integrate with other Google services such as Datastore, Database...
- Allow us to create our own dashboard and monitor our application running in Google App Engine
- Requires little effort for configuration of our application and has a very simple deployment process
- Good documentation and easy to find support from the community
- Very stable and easy to scale up and down our resources
- It does not provide full-text search API
- It is hard to deploy multiple applications in the same Google App Engine services
- Scale - we can scale instances up/down based on business needs allowing us to meet demand without wasting money for extra capacity
- Cloud Task Queues
- Documentation - The documentation across the board is lacking and often times out of date or just plain wrong.
- Standard instances could provide better support for more tech stacks so that flex and/or custom instances are not required.

- Google App Engine APIs to build and deploy the web app was straightforward and very easy.
- Since Google App Engine is fully managed and serverless, the web app auto scales up and down based on the workload.
- Google App Engine is expensive in the long run and cost adds up pretty quickly.
- Since it is fully managed and serverless, you have no access to underlying infrastructure and OS that may be needed for some fine tuned and complex web apps.

- Ease to deploy.
- Flexible ability to scale to meet increases in users.
- Ability to program in various languages allowing for different development teams to work with it.
- The ability to only run web applications. If it could also run self-executing non-web based applications it could be used more heavily.
- It only allows the use of the Google Cloud store which limits the ability to use other cloud stores already in use in the enterprise.
- It's a closed API that can lock into being dependent entirely on Google. There are many open-source projects ongoing that can help to alleviate.

Initially, we were using a mix of ec2 instance and AWS EBS stack but the development to deployment process seemed was a bit more complicated than it is on Google App Engine.
- Automatic scaling of instances based on load.
- Configurability of the instances, it's easy to get up and running with app engine services. Using the YAML file to configure your environment is simple and straightforward.
- Google Cloud DNS is easier to configure than it's AWS counterpart.
- Support for Golang is better.
- Logging on the cloud console and the debugging feature are amazing.
- Better documentation and more examples. (Things are already good).
- Customer support is terrible at times and you have to pay extra to talk to a real person.
- Cheaper instances.

- It helped us to maintain mass data like live location data.
- They offered some free quota as well.
- We noticed that sometimes the backend returns the connection exception, but the data is inserted successfully in the database. This needs to resolve as per my experience on this.
- Coding environment
- Create test environments
- Have a history of all builds
- Not free
- Cross platform access
- Data visualizations
- Operational efficiency
- Complicated to start using
- Training required
- Not everyone is using it

- The scalability testing of Google App Engine is top notch. You can quickly and efficiently test if your new app will support millions of users.
- Google App Engine is an out-of-box platform, in that it allows the user to begin development and testing immediately, with no further services needed.
- Google App Engine's version controlling allows for effective quality assurance. If you make a mistake and the app breaks, you can rollback the update and debug.
- With a 99.9+% uptime, Google App Engine is very reliable (as are all Google products).
- Google App Engine has its own version of SQL called GQL which is inferior to straight SQL. This means a steeper learning curve.
- The documentation on best practices for the platform is lacking.
- No support for C# is a frustrating limitation.
- Client SDK and examples for integrating with services (Datastore/Storage/Pub/Sub).
- Lightweight deployment code/config (lightweight YAML).
- Autoscale (configuration and runtime).
- Flexible runtimes.
- Missing scheduler as a service. Has static cron, but no fault-tolerant, dynamic scheduling as a service. Azure has this.
- Documentation. Documentation can be stale, to terse, cumbersome to navigate.
- Deploy time and CI. Azure has Git hooks and auto update built in. So from commit to live can be under one minute. GCP more manual, and closer to 5+ min for same.
- Well suited for doing asynchronous long running process jobs through task queues
- Supports for huge files upload process (fast and efficient)
- Integrates pretty well with Java and Spring MVC technologies
- Although GAE does support relational databases if you pay for it, developers wanting to try GAE for free are forced to use cloud datastore which is a NoSQL database.
- Logging is recorded and accessible through a web console. However, there is no easy way (I mean through the console) to display a custom log line format like it's possible with slf4j or log4j logging patterns. This makes reading log inefficient.
- The GAE plugins for Eclipse are buggy and inconsistent. Many times we are forced to reboot the local server after a full webapp recompile, and the command line SDK is not intuitive.
- Easy
- Interoperating
- Powerful
- Not so cheap
- Learning curve
- Frequently changes
- Very flexible, runs PHP, Node, Java, Go, etc.
- Standard environments with regards to the stack being used.
- Now part of Google Cloud.
- Documentation for certain things is lacking.
- Better tutorials for certain stacks.
- Database management
- User Friendly
- Excellent GUI
- Provide webinars
- Implement modules in college and Universities to use the product
- Give regular seminars to students and businesses

- Supports all popular languages (and you can even bring your own language runtime)
- Built-in automatic scaling is great
- Lags behind competing platforms (Azure, AWS) in terms of features
- Less documentation, examples, etc. as compared to competitors' platforms
Google App Engine Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
What is Google App Engine?
Google App Engine is Google Cloud's platform-as-a-service offering. It features pay-per-use pricing and support for a broad array of programming languages.
Key Features
Popular Languages
Build applications in Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Go, Python, or PHP—or bring a
custom language runtime
Open & Flexible
Custom runtimes allows developers to bring any library and framework to App
Engine by supplying a Docker container
Fully Managed
A fully managed environment lets developers focus on code while App Engine
manages infrastructure concerns
Monitoring, Logging & Diagnostics
Google Stackdriver provides application diagnostics to debug and monitor the
health and performance of apps
Application Versioning
Host different versions of applications, create development, test, staging, and
production environments
Traffic Splitting
Route incoming requests to different app versions, A/B test, and do incremental
feature rollouts
Application Security
Help safeguard applications by defining access rules with App Engine firewall
and leverage managed SSL/TLS certificates* by default on a custom domain at no
additional cost
Services Ecosystem
Tap a growing ecosystem of GCP services from applications including a suite of
cloud developer tools
Google App Engine Integrations
Google App Engine Competitors
Google App Engine Pricing
- Does not have featureFree Trial Available?No
- Has featureFree or Freemium Version Available?Yes
- Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
- Entry-level set up fee?No
Edition | Pricing Details | Terms |
---|---|---|
Starting Price | $0.05 | Per Hour Per Instance |
Max Price | $0.30 | Per Hour Per Instance |
Google App Engine Technical Details
Deployment Types: | SaaS |
---|---|
Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
Mobile Application: | No |