Filter Ratings and Reviews
Filter 134 vetted Heroku Platform reviews and ratings
Reviews (1-25 of 43)
August 19, 2019
Beginner to moderate, it will be your Hero-ku ;D
Heroku is used to host and run our web application and background processes. Mainly our software team and data science team use Heroku. The software team uses Heroku and various plugins to deploy and monitor the performance of the web applications and background tasks. It is the hosting services that runs our SaaS product.
- 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.
September 30, 2019
Almost Zero Learning Curve!
It enables us to deploy quickly and simply. Heroku enables us to get multiple services with almost zero DevOps overhead. We have many different services and many full-stack developers and would like for all of them to be able to create, develop, test and deploy their services with minimal as possible an operational learning curve and set-up.
- 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.
September 13, 2019
Heroku most developer-friendly platform
Heroku is an innovative platform for fast web applications development and thus ideal for deploying demos / testing environments / learning / APIs / microservices, etc. Heroku is used primarily as platform for APIs integration. Many software vendors provide Open Source web applications and microservices with API and documentation, ready to be deployed at Heroku with one click or with some manual tuning and configuration, the rest is automated and integrated with various cloud services and platforms by default.
- 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.
We use Heroku as a platform for developing applications, services, websites, and landing pages. Heroku is used by the technology department and product development. Heroku is one of the most versatile platforms ever, it was the first cloud platform as a service. In a marketing agency, it is a good platform to develop customer applications, landing pages, and websites.
- 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.
August 22, 2019
Heroku Makes Back end Management Simple
Heroku is being used organization-wide to handle most of the web-related infrastructure. Production and staging servers for most of our backend platforms live in Heroku, including Ruby on Rails, Wordpress, and Nginx platforms. Much of our support infrastructure is also hosted using Heroku add-ons, including Redis and Solr. Heroku helps simplify Dev-Ops and provides an easy path for any engineer to utilize and launch to our staging and production servers.
- 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.
August 17, 2019
The easiest platform as a service Rails app hosting solution that our developers love using
We use Heroku as part of our hosting for our SaaS business. It is not the only web host we use, but for Ruby on Rails web apps that we want to be able to deploy quickly, it is a great solution. Whether or not projects stay on Heroku long term, new projects always start using it. Developers love how easy it is for them to deploy to, and how easy it is to deploy review apps to create multiple staging environments.
- 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.
We use Heroku as our primary hosting service for our web application. It takes care of scaling when it comes to our database size, web traffic spikes, and background jobs. Deployment and maintenance come with ease without having to worry about managing our infrastructure. We have multiple web applications that serve as our staging and production environments, and we use a tagging system that rolls out our deploys quickly. The scheduler comes in very handy to mimic cronjobs necessary to run at specific times. Without having to worry about the systems side of development, we can concentrate more on features.
- 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.
August 13, 2019
The best place I know to deploy a brand new Rails app
Heroku has both, a free and a paid plan. I [have] used the free tier for many years now, and it's the best platform to deploy an MVP of a Rails application, no doubt. It provides all the tools you need to deploy and manage your application in production so that you can focus on the development of your product. The paid plan is a natural choice when you validate your idea since you're used to the tools and the application is ready for the infrastructure. Both, free and paid, are excellent products.
- 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.
August 12, 2019
An amazingly easy deployment and hosting service
We used Heroku to deploy and host our backend services. It was used by the whole company and it made deploying, hosting and scaling our software and infrastructure so easy to manage and do, we didn't need to hire a specialized devops or IT person to manage it for us.
- 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
August 12, 2019
Perfect for Hobbyists and Beginners
Heroku is a fantastic online hosting resource for use in small projects. The workflow is great for trial and error learning, and getting used to pushing and pulling using Git. I've used Heroku to deploy social media bots and other Python scripts. The documentation on various pipes and addons required to get your project up and running are also well documented and easy to follow.
- 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.
August 12, 2019
Heroku allows you to scale massively without taking on the burden of SysOps or owning servers
We use Heroku to control our web stack across the entire organization. Our engineers are able to scale and control server instances, web, database and others through one easy to use control panel. Heroku runs our website and the background jobs that the website depends on. It addresses the problem of having a single place to control all things related to our web stack.
- 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
August 09, 2019
Quick to Set Up and Experiment With
The product we offer is a web-based, SaaS genealogy platform. The entire platform is hosted by Heroku, making it our most significant tech vendor by far. Because of Heroku's simple deployment model, we were able to set up the initial platform and are able to support it with a small technology team.
- 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.
November 16, 2019
Heroku: perfect platform for agile teams!
Heroku is the platform in which we deploy our applications. It hosts the backend services and it's dependencies such as databases, message queue platform, etc. Instead of setting up a virtual machine and deploy things manually, with Heroku we just attach it to a code repository and automate the deployment to it. It abstracts the resources units and uses a much easier one named `dyno` which allows a much easier scaling mechanism.
- Continuous deployment via repositories
- Abstraction of computing resources
- Add-ons mechanism (databases, message-queue services, etc.)
- Some Heroku-specific errors are hard to debug
September 19, 2019
Heroku Helps Us Get Things Done
We use Heroku extensively to build our products on; we make extensive use of Heroku's tooling and analytics to get software up and running with ease, and benefit from them abstracting away server instances so that we can easily scale up and down as needed. Beyond that, we also see a lot of value in a dedicated DevOps team handling issues like patching vulnerabilities, and handling underlying hardware failures – all of which would be prohibitively expensive before we really began to scale up. Heroku lets us access all that at a fraction of the price of an FTE dedicated to it.
- 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.
Heroku was used by our organization in our technology department to build and deploy a web platform. The problems it addressed was storage, resources and monitoring of the platform.
- 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.
August 12, 2019
Heroku - Great for quick projects
Heroku is a great platform for quickly spinning up small web apps. If I had any demo product or simple sample I was working on, I would deploy it to Heroku because of the ease of development. The amount of hooks and integrations Heroku has with other services also make it an excellent choice to get started on a project.
- 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
August 20, 2019
Heroku, a solid cloud-offering from Salesforce
Heroku is being used by several of our departments to host their backend in the cloud. We primarily utilize their computing solution and their postgres database solution as part of our cloud infrastructure. These workloads are not heavy, but they were inherited from existing teams.
- 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.
As a Ruby on Rails freelancer/consultant (and website owner) I often am tasked to choose the initial hosting stack for my client's new websites/app backends. While Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the new "nobody got fired for buying IBM," I always advise my clients to start with Heroku. With Heroku, your developers will waste zero time on boilerplate configuration tasks that every website needs. Sure, Heroku might cost 2x more than AWS (after all, they themselves are built on AWS), but if your fixed cost in developer time is also 2X, then as a startup you'll come out way ahead using Heroku.
In summary, if you want brain-dead simple hosting for popular web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, to this day nobody beats Heroku.
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.
Heroku is used to host our backend Ruby on Rails API server, our Postgres database, and our Salesforce Connect logic to sync our data to Salesforce.
- Easy deployments
- Variety of quality add-ons
- Good UI/UX
- Autoscaling
- Cost
- Support for React
We use Heroku to host Java web apps, particularly RESTful web services that communicate using a JSON transport layer. It is used in our software development department for rapid deployment and prototyping of web services, as well as long term APIs that are provided for both internal software applications as well as customer-facing.
- Incredibly straightforward deployment processes with best-in-class documentation and getting started tutorials
- Great reporting and analytics
- Transparent pricing lets you get really good estimates on how much hosting will cost, so there aren't any surprises
- Easy to enable and disable plugins
- Autoconfiguration and "convention over configuration" for most features
- The vibrant community means it's easy to find out how to achieve various goals by seeing what others did
- Top notch support that fixes problems right away
- Relatively affordable given what value-added features you get
- Could be less expensive, although you get what you pay for
- Sleeping apps can be an annoyance: Heroku automatically puts your apps in sleep mode and they have to spin back up after periods of inactivity. Much of this can be solved but it requires working around the built-in functionality. I understand why they do it but it's an area that could be improved.
- Restrictions to server access means you can't customize as much as you could if you owned the server. But again, this is also a benefit because it's about convention over configuration. So you can't configure as much, but then, you typically don't have to.
June 27, 2018
Heroku the all in one cloud platform service
Our organization is majorly developing the application by using Node.js and PHP Frameworks. It has very well baked features including auto-deployment, application sleeping, and cost-effective service. Service comes with Free SSL and custom domains which helps customers to satisfy by accessing services within same root domain.
We have deployed several applications using Node.js and it works very well.
- Supports auto deployment using the GIT version control system
- Free SSL for custom domains
- Easy to customize server needs
- Pipelines help to stage the application
- Has inbuilt application for accessing and managing the servers from the terminal
- Add-ons are pretty costly
- Limited server locations
- Prices are costly
Heroku is used in our organization to prototype various service and dynamic web site implementations. While I have access to other cloud based PAAS and SAAS technologies such as AWS, Azure and Rackspace, I have found that Heroku provides the only really true "Free" platform to prototype very simple ideas. I have also used Heroku for some websites in the past that were above the free level.
- Works well with GIT making deployment pretty easy.
- A variety of add-ons to that offer various additional features.
- Multiple language support (RoR, Java, etc.)
- Stability. Heroku seems to suffer from stability issues from time to time.
- Logging. I know that there are a number of different options out there. I just don't want to pay extra for something that is a pretty basic requirement.
- The web based UI is pretty sparse. I appreciate the simplicity (having used AWS and Azure). That said, I sometimes have trouble finding things... like how do I get to my running app?
I have used Heroku since around 2010 for both personal and work-related, Ruby on Rails applications. In all but one case it was used across the whole organization for its main product. The Heroku platform is very well suited for a startup and with enough time investment the platform will serve through an intermediate growth stage.** My experience is only at the small, startup level (around $300/month for 2 dynos and 2 workers plus some add-ons). The main business problem it has addressed for my companies, is substituting as a dedicated devops person, which is especially valuable for a smaller organization that needs to run lean. ** At the later stages, you may very well have a complex enough product with enough pieces that it will be worth hiring at least one devops person - even a junior one - to manage everything, because Heroku just can't do everything, and you'll likely also be running multiple apps and instances.
- I can't stress enough the importance of Heroku's integration with a wide variety of providers in the form of add-ons. Provisioning is easy for logging and monitoring, caching, data storage, text messaging, email, source code hosting, payment processors, performance and load testing, different database add-ons, etc., -- if you can think of it, Heroku probably supports at least one type of provider for it. This alone saves a ton of time evaluating and integrating the different providers into your application.
- Heroku is insanely well-equipped to host Rails applications and other Ruby-based web applications (e.g. Sinatra and custom Rack applications). They also support PHP, Node.js, Python, Java, Go, Clojure and Scala-based applications.
- The Heroku Dashboard is one of the best UIs I've seen for just about anything. Given how complicated it could get, it's obvious what you are doing and how to do it.
- The Heroku documentations is top-notch and always kept up-to-date. I am VERY picky about this sort of thing and I have no complaints at all.
- I've found customer support to be variable. When I've contacted them by filing tickets, they have been professional and generally very responsive, however, when we set up a phone conference to discuss our security needs, the support person we talked to was only marginally professional in his responses, and not really helpful.
- Heroku needs more than one hosted location in the US. Relating to the meeting I mentioned, my previous company needed a disaster recovery plan since we were trying to qualify for SOC-2 certification. Because we were also a fintech business, we could not choose a host outside of the US, so having only Virginia as an available location caused problems for us.
We've used Heroku for a number of projects over the years -- probably more than 100 different sites and applications. It is undoubtably the easiest way for us to get started on a project. A number of sites are, or were at some point hosted on Heroku -- Code School, Try Ruby, Try Git and many more. Heroku enabled us to grow without a dedicated systems administrator, while not worrying about the reliability of our servers and instead focusing on the customer experience and product.
- Easy to get started -- you just need some git experience.
- Reliable - over the years our sites have rarely been down. When they are down due to our own code (memory limitations, bugs), they're restarted in a smart way that brings them back fast.
- Database management using Postgres is made extremely easy. As someone who's not a sysop, I setup database replication, made and restored backups, connected from my local computer, and did many other things with surprising ease.
- For personal sites and small sites, the price can be daunting. For the same price as a worker, and an addon or two, I could get a full out server.
- Better reporting on how apps scale and whether I should add more dynos or less. At times our site was growing slower and slower and we upped our dynos. It wasn't until we lowered our dynos that the site sped up.
- The "heroku" plans on the addons are sometimes confusing to understand how that works if I transition off Heroku.
Our team uses Heroku to manage our community portal. It helps our team scale as our product scales, install add-ons when needed, and get a clear view into who is doing what using Heroku Dashboards and Pipelines. It was a game changer in helping us get up and running quickly with a short runway to launch.
- Highly scalable
- Easily traced activities and version control
- Optimized for team development
- Needs more docker services
- Would be nice to have a unified DX for Salesforce developers/administrators who are working with Heroku
Heroku Platform Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
About 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.
Categories: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Heroku Platform Competitors
Heroku Platform Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application: | No |