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Heroku Platform

Heroku Platform

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…

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Recent Reviews
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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

View all 11 features
  • Upgrades and platform fixes (44)
    8.3
    83%
  • Scalability (44)
    8.2
    82%
  • Platform management overhead (43)
    7.6
    76%
  • Platform access control (43)
    7.0
    70%
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Pricing

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Production

$25.00

Cloud
per month

Advanced

$250.00

Cloud
per month

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
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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

8.1
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

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 Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(175)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 38)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Emily Cooper | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Heroku was more extensive in terms of its operating and scaling from what we witnessed by looking into other options and trying to find the best operating system for a new platform.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Heroku Platform is cheaper to begin with compared to DigitalOcean or Amazon Fargate. The configuration user interface is also arguably easier to understand. With its user friendliness and cheaper tiers, Heroku Platform was our pick to host some of our applications that were suited to be hosted in PaaS. It also supports an add-on that's pretty handy to integrate for our build process.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I believe Azure App Service is pretty similar to Heroku as you can in both deploy your backend applications.
However, the dyno concept and it's drastically simple web dashboard makes Heroku a much better and sane alternative to Azure App Service. In Heroku, you get abstracted of computing resources units by introducing the `dyno` concept, and you do not get overwhelmed by the complexity of the interface of Azure. The Heroku's web dashboard interface is simple and you are only shown what you need.
September 30, 2019

Almost Zero Learning Curve!

Sagiv Frankel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Kuberbetes is an easily scalable docker based option which should need minimal DevOps, however, it has a pretty high learning curve with many decisions that need to be addressed as well as monitoring, logging and security concerns.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We kicked the tires on OpenShift before deciding on Heroku, and found the platform to be much less intuitive and well-documented than Heroku. It felt like we were constantly trying to implement workarounds for esoteric platform problems, and eventually the work became too onerous. Heroku was a breath of fresh air after OpenShift.
Andrew Starodubtsev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • OpenShift and IBM Cloud PaaS (formerly IBM Bluemix - PaaS)
Some APIs are specifically developed to be deployed to certain platforms and usually decision which platform to use is not developer's. Another question is deployment cost and pricing model; in specific cases after price comparison Heroku is often selected among other cloud providers / platforms mostly by being developer-friendly which means Heroku offers more than just a platform, accompanying technologies and documentation.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Heroku has the advantage of simplifying the development and integration with some services (which in Heroku they call addon) wherein other platforms, certainly for those who don't have much experience, it will take much more development time.
Alec Dibble | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Heroku, in my opinion, is the easiest platform to deploy and host web applications on. From collaboration to deployment, everything is well thought out and bulletproof. If you need advanced server functionality, like a VPC, machine-to-machine communication, etc., you will either need to use Heroku Enterprise, which is, honestly, expensive, or another offering.
Mark Hutter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Rackspace can provide dedicated hardware, where Heroku can not. When dealing with particular clients or different fields, this can be a deciding factor if this is a requirement.

AWS provides extensive configuration options, providing a more mature infrastructure, with dedicated resources toward infrastructure, much more control of traffic and components.
Bryan McAnulty | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We also use Cloud 66 which provides some of Heroku's features, at a lower price. It still cannot compare to Heroku's ease of use and ability to easily deploy new staging environments though, so we will always use Heroku for at least some of our projects.
August 13, 2019

Easy Peezy Heroku

Chris Barretto | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I've had experience with using Amazon EC2 directly, Rackspace, and EngineYard. Heroku has provided the best ease of use without too much hands-on management. Outside of that, I believe it provides the most value for what you pay for. As your needs increase, the price increases, but only at the discretion of what is mandatory of the application.
Richard Rout | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Heroku is an all in 1 package for deploying and running your services. It provides an easy to use setup and run for 90% of cases. If you have a more complicated infrastructure, you'd definitely need to move to another hosting provider. But if as long as you can operate within that regular scenario, Heroku will serve you well.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Heroku has advantages over Docker, Google App Engine and AWS products, but it depends largely on your use case. If you are already in AWS, it's probably in your best interest to stay with AWS products. However, other "Cloud Formation/Orchestration" products like Docker are typically lacking the ease-of-use factor that allows you to get up and running with Heroku quickly.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For a different project, Aptible surpassed Heroku when it came to meeting HIPAA-related requirements, though it offers much less flexibility with add-on services (for obvious reasons). Google App Engine had a much more complicated deployment model and seemed unnecessarily complicated for our simple project. We were dissuaded from continuing just in the early set-up.
Ben Gelsey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
To this day no other PaaS matches Heroku in ease of use and maturity. If you want to stay 100% focused on your unique product/service rather than wasting time on boilerplate hosting issues, I can highly recommend Heroku. I personally use it for all of my own websites (flightsmachine.com) and also recommend every client I work with to use Heroku (4 different projects so far). Don't bang your head against the wall fighting with the cumbersome AWS Elastic Beanstalk (like I tried once). It's not worth it unless you are a high traffic site (+100,000 monthly visitors).
February 02, 2019

You Get What You Pay For

Jonah Dempcy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Sazzad Hossain Sharkar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Heroku has the easy facility to deploy and host applications while others have to configure a lot. The price of the services is high for others. But within Heroku pricing and easy to maintain under the same roof.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Heroku is a really great platform to get up and running QUICKLY and efficiently. What Heroku is really great at that other services are lacking is ease of use, documentation. It is really great for beginning developers and awesome to get up and running to take care of lots of the headaches going on under the hood of a live web application. It's easier to get setup than an AWS service but AWS is better for scaling large sites.
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