Overview
What is Heroku Platform?
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…
Every day more disappointing
Great for startups
Great for early stage products
Amazing value for a freelance/contract application web developer
A great option for your initial deployment!
Heroku: perfect platform for agile teams!
Almost Zero Learning Curve!
Heroku Helps Us Get Things Done
Heroku most developer-friendly platform
Perfect for small projects
Heroku Makes Back end Management Simple
Heroku, a solid cloud-offering from Salesforce
Beginner to moderate, it will be your Hero-ku ;D
The easiest platform as a service Rails app hosting solution that our developers love using
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Upgrades and platform fixes (44)8.282%
- Scalability (44)8.080%
- Platform management overhead (43)7.575%
- Platform access control (43)6.868%
Pricing
Production
$25.00
Advanced
$250.00
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $85 per month
Features
Platform-as-a-Service
Platform as a Service is the set of tools and services designed to make coding and deploying applications much more efficient
- 7.5Ease of building user interfaces(27) Ratings
Ability to build flexible user interfaces using drag-and-drop tools
- 8Scalability(44) Ratings
Ease of scaling up or down to meet demand
- 7.5Platform management overhead(43) Ratings
Resources required to keep platform up and running
- 8.1Workflow engine capability(29) Ratings
Process automation using rule-based engine
- 6.8Platform access control(43) Ratings
Rules controlling what data different user categories can access
- 7.7Services-enabled integration(42) Ratings
Ability to integrate with cloud applications and data via APIs and pre-built connectors
- 8.6Development environment creation(39) Ratings
Ease of creating new development environments
- 8.5Development environment replication(38) Ratings
Ease of replicating new development environments
- 8Issue monitoring and notification(42) Ratings
Integrated monitoring and notification of issues and problems
- 8.2Issue recovery(39) Ratings
Ease of recovery from problem state
- 8.2Upgrades and platform fixes(44) Ratings
Ease of deployment of major upgrades or problem fixes
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Heroku Platform?
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 Git, GitHub or Continuous
Integration (CI) systems without the need to manage infrastructure.
The web-based Heroku Dashboard makes it possible to manage applications online
and gain visibility into performance.
Heroku Operational Experience (OpEx)
OpEx helps developers troubleshoot and remediate issues and
customize the ops experience to identify and address trends in application health. Heroku provides a set of tools to alert teams if something
goes wrong, or to automatically scale web dynos if the response time for web
requests exceeds a specified threshold.
Heroku Runtime
Heroku runs apps inside dynos—smart containers on a fully managed runtime
environment. Developers deploy their code written in Node, Ruby, Java, PHP,
Python, Go, Scala, or Clojure to a build system which produces an app that's
ready for execution. The system and language stacks are then monitored,
patched, and upgraded. The runtime keeps apps running without manual
intervention.
Heroku Platform Competitors
Heroku Platform Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(173)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 48)Heroku allows for seamless scaling and usage.
- Streamlines different functionality.
- Makes monitoring activity accessible.
- More user friendly for those who aren't familiar with coding.
- Progress summaries for users with activity reports.
- Potentially a user overview tour of Heroku.
Every day more disappointing
- Not much lately [in my opinion]
- Simple product to use
- Support
- Documentation
Great for startups
- easy deployments
- fast setup
- low maintenance for infrastructure
- easy to change and adapt
- pricing
- better selection of server/dyno types
It's less appropriate when you get to a certain scale where you need your infra to be adjusted to your needs. Also when you get to a certain scale and the price just doesn't make sense.
Great for early stage products
- Server hosting.
- Database hosting.
- Pricing - more expensive than other modern options.
- Marketplace add-ons sometimes change with little notice.
The convenience does come with a cost, and at scale, it's more expensive than other options we've looked at more recently. Overall, we've been happy with Heroku as a platform.
- Easy to use
- Fairly cheap to start with
- Fairly easy to scale the application server
- Not 100% reliable on the cheapest plan; we've had a couple instances of downtime over the year
- Limited number of supported languages
- Limited choice of database
A great option for your initial deployment!
- Quick to configure
- Quick to deploy
- Easy to use
- Pricing could be cheaper
Heroku: perfect platform for agile teams!
- Continuous deployment via repositories
- Abstraction of computing resources
- Add-ons mechanism (databases, message-queue services, etc.)
- Some Heroku-specific errors are hard to debug
Almost Zero Learning Curve!
- Monitoring is very simple and easy to use for most use cases.
- Pipelines (development to production) are very simple. Application rollbacks are also very easy.
- Notifications and alerts are simple and easy to use.
- Very easy integration with other sass services and products.
- Docker support is lacking.
- You can't create multiple HTTP network services without creating separate apps.
- Enterprise grain security concerns are hard to address.
- It can get pretty expensive if you also take the actual infrastructure into the cost calculation.
- Simple CRUD services that have reasonable scale requirements are very well suited for Heroku.
- Simple task-based services can also work well with Heroku.
- If you do not have the resources (or priority) to create complex deployment environments go with Heroku.
- Highly scaled, Highly concurrent, Network intense and highly complex systems that need a lot of introspection are not very well suited for Heroku.
- Systems with high-security requirements are also not well suited to Heroku.
Heroku Helps Us Get Things Done
- Great APIs: Heroku's APIs are extremely useful and always improving.
- Developer-friendly documentation: Heroku's docs are thorough and well-written.
- Great Customer Support: Heroku's front-line support is great, and knows when to escalate directly to people working on the product.
- Heroku Metrics is great, but we'd love to see direct API access (and the ability to add and customize our own metrics).
- Heroku's status/downtime/maintenance notification system could be improved with better granularity to help filter irrelevant alerts.
At the other end, I'd imagine that larger organizations who have in-house staff doing DevOps might see a lot of duplication between those staff and what Heroku is doing to add value. At some point, the premium you're paying Heroku would probably prompt you to move those functions or keep them in-house.
Heroku most developer-friendly platform
- Opensource (with extensive documentation)
- Innovative (cutting-edge web technologies, latest versions of programming languages, tools, services, integrations)
- Focused on speed and scalability
- Free pricing plan and pricing in general
- Experimentation
- Heroku requires installation of Heroku CLI tools locally.
Perfect for small projects
- User-friendly interface.
- Supports many languages, databases, and other services in the form of addons.
- Super easy to deploy!
- Large learning curve.
- For small and simple applications, it is possible to get it free of cost.
- There could be a form of local currency billing.
- There could be a better organization of apps on the dashboard, with apps split by customers.
- There is a certain limitation with some addons, which may make your application unfeasible and you may have to migrate to another platform.
Heroku Makes Back end Management Simple
- The push to deploy almost always works and is very smooth and seamless.
- The Heroku add-ons have always been very reliable and easy to install.
- Their documentation is very thorough, and they have built a mechanism using buildpacks to make their platform very flexible.
- Some features that can be critical for security are hidden behind their Enterprise offering.
- The product is much pricier than using cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or Digital Ocean. It does solve a lot of Dev-Ops headaches, but may be too expensive for some companies.
- Some logging and auditing functionality is also somewhat hidden behind the Enterprise offering, where many other platforms offer this out-of-the-box.
Heroku, a solid cloud-offering from Salesforce
- Easy integration with the other Salesforce products.
- Has similar if not better features then other cloud providers, but has the advantage of being less development intensive.
- Quick and easy provisioning of commonly used resources.
- The cost can be quite high even for small resource consumption.
- Support can be enhanced upon as it's similar to other Salesforce products.
- There tends to be a lot more maintenance required than other providers.
Beginner to moderate, it will be your Hero-ku ;D
- It makes deployment, environment configuration, and simple manageability extraordinarily simple and easy to do, and getting up and going is a wonderfully simple process.
- The metrics included are excellent as a first resource for diagnosing high level issues.
- For beginners, Heroku is an excellent tool, making initial deployment and environment configuration wonderfully easy and fast.
- Heroku is absolutely fantastic on the mobile break point (mobile responsiveness). As a startup, things still happen on weekends while out at the park or driving out of town, and it has been wonderful to be able to troubleshoot or restart servers from the phone.
- The Heroku CLI provides a wonderful interface for interacting with the cloud environment.
- Heroku does not provide static IP addresses. For most applications this is not a concern, but in particular cases, especially around explicitly sensitive data, this makes Heroku prohibitive.
- For a more senior engineer seeking to SSH onto a server and monitor the machine's performance, or extract log files for extensive research, Heroku does not provide a great way to do this.
- Heroku permissions controls could be more granular. For instance, allowing some users to view environment variables while others can not view these.
The easiest platform as a service Rails app hosting solution that our developers love using
- Ease of configuration and scaling.
- Ease of code deployment.
- Ease of deploying staging environments.
- An ephemeral file system may require workarounds certain developers are not used to.
- The cost is high and can easily balloon as you grow if you aren't careful.
- While configuration is super simple, it will not be as flexible as bare metal servers.
If you already have a bare-metal solution that has scaled well with your own DevOps team, then moving to Heroku later would likely only introduce a higher cost without many other benefits.
Heroku Review
- Heroku supplied the appropriate resources to complete our project.
- Heroku made deploying our platform simple with their intuitive user interface.
- What would benefit overall is for specific descriptions of errors or issues with platform/app deployment. Many times there were errors shown that only gave brief, vague descriptions of the problem. For example, "mounting and logging issues" or "application timed out". A more detailed description as well as a focus on where the problem occured, would be beneficial.
Easy Peezy Heroku
- On-demand scalability
- Ease of deployment
- Command Line Interface
- Fail safe when Amazon has problems. I understand that some of the ownership is on us, but we would prefer if we didn't have to resort to another service for backup.
The best place I know to deploy a brand new Rails app
- The tooling is simply amazing. You can deploy your application in some minutes without any prior experience with the platform.
- Their way of building applications encourage you to think about scalability and composability of your app.
- They have a big community around the platform and many add-ons written by third-parties.
- The price is not so affordable when you start growing. For small companies, needing small containers, it works quite well but for large applications, it may be too expensive.
An amazingly easy deployment and hosting service
- Easy to use
- Easy to deploy services
- Easy to add plugins
- Could provide a bit more customization
- Could be a little easier on the pricing side
- Could provide better insight tools
It's not great if you want ultimate control over all those aspects.
Heroku - Great for quick projects
- Quick to get started
- Countless Integrations
- CLI is easy to use
- The cold start times can be brutal for free plans
- Cost can be expensive if you have many dynos
- Have to be careful of third party integration pricing as well
Heroku allows you to scale massively without taking on the burden of SysOps or owning servers
- Easy to use control panel
- Virtually effortless to scale server instances with the click of a button
- Fully managed servers, although you still have good control over what is run on the instances
- Price has crept up a bit
- The plugin system is useful, but sometimes not perfect
Perfect for Hobbyists and Beginners
- Free Option is great for people just learning or wanting to make simple apps
- Very easy to create several environments for your app in no time with exact clones
- Documentation is easy to follow and full of tutorials
- If you're not careful, you can easily create an expensive app by accident.
- Inconsistant experience with all the other add-ons. Some are not documented well.
Quick to Set Up and Experiment With
- 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.
- Heroku can get pricey pretty quickly as you scale.
- The quality of add-on vendors is increasingly variable as Heroku expands the marketplace.
Easy Deployments
- Easy deployments
- Variety of quality add-ons
- Good UI/UX
- Autoscaling
- Cost
- Support for React
In summary, if you want brain-dead simple hosting for popular web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, to this day nobody beats Heroku.
- Amazingly clear and straightforward documentation (versus the quagmire of AWS docs).
- Deploy your entire site in one command.
- Setting up asynchronous job processing for long running operations (e.g. sending emails, making external API calls).
- A wonderful portfolio of tightly-integrated add-ons in their marketplace.
- 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.