Heroku allows for seamless scaling and usage.
Heroku runs the back end of our virtual mentoring platform that facilitates our education programs. It allows for email notifications to …
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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…
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- Upgrades and platform fixes (43)8.484%
- Scalability (43)8.282%
- Platform management overhead (42)7.676%
- Platform access control (42)7.070%
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$25.00
Cloud
per month
Advanced
$250.00
Cloud
per month
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- No setup fee
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $85 per month
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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
Heroku Platform starts at $85.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFoundry, and Red Hat OpenShift are common alternatives for Heroku Platform.
Reviewers rate Development environment creation highest, with a score of 8.7.
The most common users of Heroku Platform are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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May 12, 2021
Great for early stage products
We host all our web applications on Heroku. It was the fastest and simplest way to build our proof of concept years ago, and it has scaled well with us over the years. Good communication from the company on periodic scheduled maintenance, and we've never had an issue with platform reliability.
- Server hosting.
- Database hosting.
- Pricing - more expensive than other modern options.
- Marketplace add-ons sometimes change with little notice.
We're using Heroku Platform to quickly ship our web applications to our customer. Heroku Platform made it very easy for us to do an initial launch of our application quickly and fairly cheaply to start with. Heroku Platform also made it possible to scale our application once it gained enough traffic without much hassle.
- 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
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.
August 23, 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.
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
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 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 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.
June 07, 2019
Easy Deployments
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
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.
February 02, 2019
You Get What You Pay For
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
June 10, 2016
Easy to use and the best documentation around!
Heroku is used as both a platform for hosting our website both for production and staging. Where Heroku also thrives is the ease of use due to the fact that it has some of the best documentation on the internet. It also allows for seamless integration for many third party tools.
- Third party integration
- Separation between staging and production sites
- Documentation
- Terminal commands
- Scalability
- Frequent maintenance from Heroku team which forces lack of productivity from my team
- Adding dynos - not very cost effective
May 06, 2016
Heroku FTW for POC!
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?
May 04, 2016
Deploy Apps Faster on 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
April 22, 2016
Heroku, the good, the bad and the ugly
We use Heroku as a staging platform and to host our admin tool. It allows for us to quickly deploy something for testing without worrying much about the infrastructure we are deploying to, or having to worry about software updates for critical services like Redis or our Postgres database.
- Heroku's deployment process is very painless.
- Heroku does a great job of making system/infrastructure upgrades painless and transparent.
- Heroku's CLI toolset is well built and puts all of your app's info, settings, add-ons, logs, etc, right at your fingertips.
- Heroku does not offer a very wide range of dyno sizes - it would be nice to be more flexible about how much RAM or CPU each dyno consumes.
- While Heroku is well engineered for deploying certain common types of applications, it can be tricky to deploy more esoteric or uncommon configurations (like Rails + Node.js at the same time).
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.
April 15, 2016
Heroku for data processing, fast & easy
We use Heroku mainly as the framework for our application (Ruby on Rails, etc.). The data science team also uses Heroku as a simple way to get Python apps up for data processing (Heroku Scheduler, Redis, webhooks). It helps get things up and running quickly when we need to implement some sort of code.
- Fast: We can get web apps up and running very quickly.
- Add-ons: Heroku has a rich add-on library that further saves a lot of time we would spend building things from ground-up.
- Simple: GitHub integration and clean UI makes the learning curve relatively flat.
- Docs Organization: I think the docs are good, but they could definitely be organized better.
- Heroku CLI: Some of the commands feel unintuitive.
- Scaling: I haven't really seen a great solution to scale dynos based on need.
April 12, 2016
Heroku rocks!
We use heroku for our deployment. We love it! We use HireFire to manage dynos and react to variable loads on our server. We also take advantange of Heroku's beta Review Apps feature. We really love this. The more opportunity to test code before we push it into the wild, the better. Heroku rocks!
- Easily deploy.
- Review apps!
- Add members easily.
- Managing dynos (had to use third party service).
- Analytics could be a bit better.
April 08, 2016
Heroku: Pay to make your DevOps work go away
We used Heroku on our engineering team to replace straight AWS EC2 instances for our web app. As we moved towards more service-oriented architecture, we stood up new services on Heroku quite easily. The idea was to reduce DevOps complexity as much as possible and avoid spending our time in that area, even if the infrastructure was slightly costlier.
- When you have an app that closely follows the conventions of its framework (say, a conventional Rails app), Heroku makes it stupid simple to get a production website going.
- Setting up sandboxes and test apps is simple. Because you can associate add-ons and databases to Heroku apps, you can copy an entire environment quite easily.
- Heroku recently added the ability to auto-deploy from GitHub pending Continuous Integration results, make it easy to set up a Continuous Deployment flow through GitHub.
- When you have elements outside of the norm, things can get harder. For example, our Rails app depended on a non-Gem dependency (Pandoc), and figuring out how to get Heroku to play nice with that was rather difficult. Along the same lines, doing something like a combination Node/Rails app requires quite a bit of finesse to get Heroku to do what you want.
- Heroku is much pricier than something like EC2 for the amount of computing power. We had lots of problems with memory usage with our app. On EC2, we could have simply moved to larger instances, but on Heroku we had to go on a bit of a goose chase to find ways to reduce memory usage. It's necessary to assess scale and decide whether the reduced complexity is worth the cost. In my uses of Heroku, it has been.
- You are at Heroku's mercy when they have an outage, and there's generally nobody to talk to.
October 06, 2015
Heroku - A Great Choice for Developers Needing Quick Deployment
Our company used Heroku in order to host the backend of our application. Due to rapid prototyping and creation of a MVP, we needed a solution that was quick to deploy and easy to set up. We resorted to Heroku because of its simplicity in getting our backend up and running. We were able to set up our database on MongoDB with ease by using the MongoLab add-on within Heroku.
- Easy to deploy.
- No need to manage infrastructure on your own.
- Lots of third party add-ons.
- There are no regional dependencies that you can control unlike AWS.
- Locked into their platform.
- No easy way to migrate to a different platform.