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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

(1-5 of 5)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Andrew Starodubtsev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
The simplest scenario is when some developer engineers a website or portal or online service with third-party integrations and there is a requirement to build some kind of infrastructure, every integrated app (back-end) will live on Heroku, providing APIs / microservices to main application that will aggregate all the data and display on main website. The main website can be easily deployed to Heroku. Everything can be additionally tested, secured, etc right at Heroku. Due to Heroku platform flexibility there are many successful scenarios and use cases.
Platform-as-a-Service (11)
96.36363636363637%
9.6
Ease of building user interfaces
100%
10.0
Scalability
100%
10.0
Platform management overhead
70%
7.0
Workflow engine capability
100%
10.0
Platform access control
90%
9.0
Services-enabled integration
100%
10.0
Development environment creation
100%
10.0
Development environment replication
100%
10.0
Issue monitoring and notification
100%
10.0
Issue recovery
100%
10.0
Upgrades and platform fixes
100%
10.0
  • Familiarization with latest web technologies.
  • Reducing deployment costs.
  • Automation.
  • 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.
I gave 10 out of 10 because never had issues with Heroku. "Heroku offers a variety of support options, resources, and partners to help developers focus on their apps, not on issues." as Heroku support page says. Heroku provides with very detailed categorized constantly updating documentation and innovative in presenting documentation and code documenting. Open Source developers are able to find solutions / answers in communities or on github.com also.
No
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
No
I have several cloud applications in development deployed on Heroku Platform, not big at scale and not resources hungry. Their requirements are satisfied with Free pricing plan and support is sufficient. Prospective cloud applications that will potentially require more resources, horizontal scaling and are dynamic and complex by design can be deployed with Premium Plan and premium support.
No
  • Microservices
  • API
  • Integration
  • n/a
Yes, but I don't use it
From developers' perspective Heroku Platform usability technically is excellent. In some sense it cannot be rated as for example usability of website. In some cases the usability can be measured in comparison to Heroku implementation as a standard or prototype. Surely for non-technical persons, building something with Heroku products / tools is very complex process, and they would not give the usability 10.
Mark Hutter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Heroku is the best choice for any developer working on personal projects or small applications. Heroku is also a great choice for an organization with a small technical team relative to the amount of technical throughput. Heroku takes care of the "easy" configurations for you, and comes out of the box with so much. Although the price point is slightly higher, the time and effort saved is well worth the money. Heroku may not be the best case when it comes to more restricted and complicated fields, like healthcare, which are subject to government regulations around access control and logging and log persistence.
Platform-as-a-Service (11)
70.9090909090909%
7.1
Ease of building user interfaces
N/A
N/A
Scalability
100%
10.0
Platform management overhead
90%
9.0
Workflow engine capability
N/A
N/A
Platform access control
80%
8.0
Services-enabled integration
90%
9.0
Development environment creation
90%
9.0
Development environment replication
80%
8.0
Issue monitoring and notification
70%
7.0
Issue recovery
80%
8.0
Upgrades and platform fixes
100%
10.0
  • Heroku has allowed our developers to work on application development, application defect resolution, keeping feature momentum very high. It has, at the very least, postponed the need for a full time dev ops engineer creating deployment packages and managing servers. It lets a small development team get up and going, and keep going, with little upkeep.
  • Heroku's ability to dynamically scale at a single click has provided for quick recovery time from unforeseen excessive traffic.
  • Heroku's quick configuration of web servers and background process servers lets each developer manage the load of their development more effectively.
  • Heroku's documentation is top notch, allowing for any developer to find the answers they need quickly.
It's extremely easy to use. It is intuitive and the tools provided make interacting with the cloud infrastructure a breeze.
Heroku is very customer oriented. They respond quickly and take a great deal of care in keeping customers satisfied.
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.
6
Software engineering, dev ops, and SRE
3
Software engineers, engineering managers, devops engineers
  • Host our applications
  • Provide sandboxes for engineers to quickly develop with business owners through review apps
  • Provide metrics on key functionality
  • Review apps have been great for rapidly iterating on new features and functionality
  • Connecting to the logs for a more real time analysis of operations
Heroku is easy to use, services a ton of functions for you out of the box, and provides a means to get a software product off the ground and managed quickly and easily. The tools provide allows a small to medium size org to move very quickly. The CLI tools provided make managing an entire technical infrastructure simple.
No
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
Ease of use. Heroku wins because it is easy to deploy your application, monitor and manage your application, and connect other services like CI/CD and databases.
I might more thoroughly evaluate the competition. My best experience with any PaaS has been with Heroku. More robust providers like AWS and GCP are complicated to say the least. Familiarity with Heroku gave it a significant leg up.
  • Implemented in-house
No
Change management was minimal
  • Configuration of databases on review apps.
Read the documentation. It's so cliché but RTM
No
When running a hobby size database, I accidentally wiped a very important table. Although they could not recover the data, as I had not paid for the tier which provided data backups, they were able to suggest ways to recreate the data based on other services I had. It was work on my part but did get me back to a good state.
  • Heroku CLI allows you to easily interact with the Heroku Dynos as if you were SSH'ed onto a self managed server.
  • The activity monitor easily allows you to detect change and watch deploys and even rollback to previous deploys.
  • Pipelines and review apps are the best way to get a working prototype into a user's hands without having to commit it into a trunk branch of code.
  • The load time to get to environment variables or resources can be long.
August 13, 2019

Easy Peezy Heroku

Chris Barretto | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
We like to keep our web workers around 3, but often times we need to send out newsletters to thousands of users in a timely manner. In this scenario, Heroku makes it easy to crank up the workers to 20, in order to run through the distribution quickly, and immediately scale back down on success of all the jobs. This avoids unnecessary costs to have that many simultaneous resources running all the time.
Platform-as-a-Service (11)
97.27272727272727%
9.7
Ease of building user interfaces
100%
10.0
Scalability
100%
10.0
Platform management overhead
100%
10.0
Workflow engine capability
100%
10.0
Platform access control
100%
10.0
Services-enabled integration
100%
10.0
Development environment creation
100%
10.0
Development environment replication
100%
10.0
Issue monitoring and notification
100%
10.0
Issue recovery
80%
8.0
Upgrades and platform fixes
90%
9.0
  • With the easy plug and play addons, it has been no-brainers to choose services that will easily integrate with our application. Choosing Redis, MemCache, and the Scheduler all were obvious choices.
Heroku is extremely easy to use. Once in production, scalability is just as easy when it comes to managing web servers, workers, or third party services. All can be done through the command line with easy to digest reporting. You can also set up certain services to scale automatically. This is a great win especially for smaller companies that do not have a dedicated DevOps.
I haven't had to use support much at all. That is how easy this platform is to use. One of the challenges that we did come across were timeout requests if a request takes longer than 30 seconds, but we support was timely in their response and it turned out to be an architectural change we needed to make on our own side.
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.
  • Scaling web dynos and workers
  • Deployment
  • Reporting
  • Targeting R14 memory quota exceeded error and how to handle them
  • What to do when your slug size exceeds the max allowed.
Willian Molinari | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
For small companies that are building a new app or already have one being maintained by a very small team, Heroku is perfect. The price will be affordable and it will totally pay the price of having all the tooling they provide. When you start growing, the platform may become too expensive for the size of the company, so it's important to be prepared to change in case you reach this phase.
Platform-as-a-Service (10)
97%
9.7
Scalability
100%
10.0
Platform management overhead
90%
9.0
Workflow engine capability
100%
10.0
Platform access control
100%
10.0
Services-enabled integration
100%
10.0
Development environment creation
100%
10.0
Development environment replication
100%
10.0
Issue monitoring and notification
90%
9.0
Issue recovery
90%
9.0
Upgrades and platform fixes
100%
10.0
  • A lot less time spent with infrastructure tasks
  • Less money spent on a staging environment. We can use the free tier with the same app on a different scale.
  • A guideline to develop scalable applications in a cloud environment
Heroku has an amazing tooling to deploy and manage infrastructure. It's probably the best infrastructure host I ever used. Everything is so simple to setup and manage that you don't want to get back to manage your own infrastructure anymore. Recently, I migrated an application from a VPS setup to Heroku and I'm more than satisfied.
There's not much to say because I did not use it. I can only talk about the written help articles they have. They are pretty good.
Better UI and tooling
Todoist, Twist, Toggl
3
Developers and a manager.
2
You definitely have to have some tech skills but you don't need to go hands on in coding or server maintenance. The manager can go there and restart servers, scale instances, and do some other simple things that can save the day.
  • Infrastructure management
  • Application scale
  • Application development
  • It's just a simple application. It uses the basic of Heroku and it's works great.
  • We plan to use other add-ons. Redis is the next one we're going to try.
  • We think about creating new pipelines so new developers can submit code to staging and we can promote it.
We don't have plans to leave Heroku anytime soon.
Yes
We were using Linode before Heroku. It's a different use case, but we decided to refactor the app to be able to use Heroku. Building and maintaining your own server takes time and effort, and we just wanted to improve the application instead of focusing on the infrastructure side of things. Heroku is great for that.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
Product features is probably the most important factor. The idea of having an immutable infrastructure was something that made a huge difference for us. We don't want to keep maintaining our own server to have the application running.
I would choose Heroku once again.
  • Implemented in-house
No
Change management was minimal
  • Changing the application to use 12factor.net
  • The application had to be written to work good on Heroku
  • Making the application use less memory and CPU. It was using a big server and we wanted it to use small heroku instances
Be ready to pay a bit more than expected in the beginning if you're migrating from a big server. The application is probably not ready for the change and you have to keep improving it with time.

It's also important to consider that you can't save anything to the disc as it will be lost when your application restarts, so you have to think about using something like S3.
I did not have the change to talk to the support team directly but I used their writen instructions many times. I have to say that its very well written and solved my problems almost every time. They even have instructions on how to improve your application so it can run better on Heroku. In my opinion, it's one of the best I ever used.
  • Their command like tool is awesome. You can do almost anything there.
  • Creating a new database or a new app is fantastic.
  • The fact that I can deploy my application by using git push is amazing.
  • If you start growing, it's hard to keep the prices low. Everything is so easy to add.
Yes
I had to check charts and do basic scaling via mobile interface and it works good. It's not a fully-featured interface but it has all the basic functions you would expect if you're in need. Nothing to complain about that.
Jonathan Crane | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used Heroku to deploy two Node.js web apps for clients in our Health practice. Both apps integrated various COTS products and were brought to market very quickly.
  • Integrates with Git and GitHub
  • Handles all the infrastructure requirements and lets us focus on development
  • Documentation is fantastic
  • Requires technical knowledge to use; you need an engineer for the project
  • Costs money to scale properly
I would recommend Heroku without reservation for companies looking to deploy a web app written in Node.js or Ruby on Rails.
  • Made great use of staff resources; we didn't need to procure any infrastructure or have any infrastructure support
  • Supports agile methodology; very short time to market
  • Takes care of versioning due to integration with Git
  • AWS,GoDaddy
Heroku is another layer of abstraction on top of AWS that is targeted toward a very specific use case (building a web app in a limited list of languages). It takes much less configuration and expertise than AWS and is much more robust and scalable than GoDaddy.
It works great; we'll keep renewing our subscription until the project is over.
No
The basic support rocks!
All my answers were answered thoroughly and well within their advertised timeframes.
Yes
It was not so much a bug with Heroku as a bug with npm, and they gave me the fix within hours.
So apparently NPM unilaterally and without much warning discontinued support for packages with self-signed certificates. This well known issue had many solutions posted online within 34 hours of it happening but none of them were specific to Heroku. I emailed support and received a full set of instructions for a bug fix within hours which worked perfectly. So they even solve other peoples' bugs with alacrity!
  • Deploying a new version of the app
  • Provisioning an addon
  • Creating a new app
  • Upgrading the database plan
  • Automatically Setting environment variables
  • Load testing
No
While there is a steep learning curve, I love learning and I love how Heroku works. I would suggest that companies using it budget plenty of time for even a highly technical engineer to learn it. But learn it they will, and they will probably love it, too.
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