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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 (43)
    8.4
    84%
  • Scalability (43)
    8.2
    82%
  • Platform management overhead (42)
    7.6
    76%
  • Platform access control (42)
    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 Competitors

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

(171)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 47)
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June 07, 2021

Great for startups

Verified User
C-Level Executive in Engineering
Hospitality Company, 11-50 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
It's amazing for startups with relative small scale that want to run fast and not worry or spend time about infrastructure.

It's less appropriate when you get to a certain scale where you need your infra to be adjusted to your needs. Also when you get to a certain scale and the price just doesn't make sense.
May 12, 2021

Great for early stage products

Verified User
Program Manager in Product Management
Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 1-10 employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Heroku is great for early-stage products. It's very simple to set up multiple environments in a continuous delivery pipeline, and dozens (hundreds?) of one-click integrations with third party tools make it incredibly easy to experiment with different offerings. We're happy to spend time building our apps, not managing servers.

The convenience does come with a cost, and at scale, it's more expensive than other options we've looked at more recently. Overall, we've been happy with Heroku as a platform.
May 01, 2021

Amazing value for a freelance/contract application web developer

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Professional Training & Coaching Company, 11-50 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Heroku Platform is very good if you need to launch your web application quickly at low cost. If you are a startup just starting the business or just need to launch a simple website or webapp that supported by Heroku Platform, Heroku Platform is one of the best choices available. However, if you need a complex web application with a lot of moving gear involved, Heroku Platform might not be for you.
November 16, 2019

Heroku: perfect platform for agile teams!

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
I consider Heroku to be an outstanding platform. It is perfectly suited for agile teams that want to quickly develop and deploy their applications without losing time on setting up virtual machines, dependencies and deploying. With Heroku, you can deploy Docker images, code from repositories, and just let it handle it. If at some point your application gets bottlenecked and you need more computing resources then it's as easy as adding another dyno. No need to set up anything, just focus on writing your application code!
September 30, 2019

Almost Zero Learning Curve!

Sagiv Frankel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Sagiv Frankel
Senior Software Engineer
WeWork (Internet, 10,001+ employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
  • Simple CRUD services that have reasonable scale requirements are very well suited for Heroku.
  • Simple task-based services can also work well with Heroku.
  • If you do not have the resources (or priority) to create complex deployment environments go with Heroku.
  • Highly scaled, Highly concurrent, Network intense and highly complex systems that need a lot of introspection are not very well suited for Heroku.
  • Systems with high-security requirements are also not well suited to Heroku.
September 19, 2019

Heroku Helps Us Get Things Done

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Computer Software Company, 1-10 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Heroku is fantastic at the beginning of a product lifecycle – in particular, because there are going to be some architecture decisions that will benefit from planning around a PaaS structure. Because of Heroku's fractional and low pricing, it's easy to start up on Heroku and scale up over time without incurring a huge up-front fixed cost.
At the other end, I'd imagine that larger organizations who have in-house staff doing DevOps might see a lot of duplication between those staff and what Heroku is doing to add value. At some point, the premium you're paying Heroku would probably prompt you to move those functions or keep them in-house.
September 13, 2019

Heroku most developer-friendly platform

Andrew Starodubtsev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Andrew Starodubtsev
Freelance Web Developer
Freelance/Contract Graphic Design and Web Development (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
August 23, 2019

Perfect for small projects

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Marketing and Advertising Company, 201-500 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
It is perfect for the custom development of small applications, services, and websites where there is a limited budget or cost forecast. It is a good platform for scalable services and applications, with a great capability to scale an application when needed. In some cases, Heroku may not be as well suited, because when using some addons with more expensive plans, the cost can be quite high compared to AWS or GCP.
August 23, 2019

Heroku Makes Back end Management Simple

Alec Dibble | TrustRadius Reviewer
Alec Dibble
Lead Engineer
Soothe (Consumer Services, 51-200 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Heroku is great for a lean team that has a healthy budget for their web tech. It enables teams to set up and deploy to servers very quickly, without much coordination. I have setup equivalent deployment services in AWS and Digital Ocean, but it took a lot of time and trial and error on each of those platforms to reach as smooth of a deployment experience as Heroku. Heroku works great out of the box. As long as you don't have unusual requirements and are OK with the relatively monolithic structure that Heroku enforces, it is a great choice for staging and production web application servers.
August 20, 2019

Heroku, a solid cloud-offering from Salesforce

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Consumer Goods Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
I would highly recommend it for anyone that is already engaging with Salesforce, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone that's looking to get into the cloud initially. Heroku's selling point is that it's a good platform to get you into the cloud with less technical resources as it follows the goals of Salesforce's no-code strategy.
August 19, 2019

Beginner to moderate, it will be your Hero-ku ;D

Mark Hutter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Mark Hutter
Software Engineer
Shipt (Internet, 51-200 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
August 17, 2019

The easiest platform as a service Rails app hosting solution that our developers love using

Bryan McAnulty | TrustRadius Reviewer
Bryan McAnulty
Product Director
Velora Studios (Design, 1-10 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
For deploying rails apps, Heroku is a great solution. The ease of use especially starting out on new projects is great. Developers are familiar with and enjoy using it.
If you already have a bare-metal solution that has scaled well with your own DevOps team, then moving to Heroku later would likely only introduce a higher cost without many other benefits.
August 13, 2019

Easy Peezy Heroku

Chris Barretto | TrustRadius Reviewer
Chris Barretto
CTO
Cureus (Publishing, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
August 13, 2019

The best place I know to deploy a brand new Rails app

Willian Molinari | TrustRadius Reviewer
Willian Molinari
Backend Engineer
Doist (Internet, 11-50 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
August 12, 2019

An amazingly easy deployment and hosting service

Richard Rout | TrustRadius Reviewer
Richard Rout
Software Developer
Factory Inc. (Computer Software, 1-10 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Heroku is SO much less complicated than any other hosting providers out there. You can go from writing an app to having it deployed in a matter of minutes. You don't have to worry about physical machines, specifications, rolling deployments, uptime, or anything. Heroku handles everything for you with a series of simple commands.
It's not great if you want ultimate control over all those aspects.
August 12, 2019

Heroku - Great for quick projects

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Ease of use and spinning up a quick project is where this really shines. It also makes it easy to connect to some third-party services to help with your app while making development experience much easier. For example, adding a MongoDB database to your web app with Heroku can be done in just a few clicks. Highly recommend it for quick and small demo projects.
August 12, 2019

Heroku allows you to scale massively without taking on the burden of SysOps or owning servers

Verified User
C-Level Executive in Corporate
Financial Services Company, 11-50 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Heroku is very well suited for startups looking to get a server stack up and running quickly. There is little to no overhead when managing your instances. However, you'll need a background in basic DevOps or system management to make sure everything is set up correctly. In addition, it's easy to accidentally go crazy on pricing. Make sure you're only creating the server instances you need to run the base application and set up an auto-scaler plugin to handle peaks.
August 12, 2019

Perfect for Hobbyists and Beginners

Collin Berg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Collin Berg
Lead Web Developer
SJI Associates | Full-Service Creative Agency (Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Heroku is great for learning to code and learning how hosting works. I've used Heroku for a few different projects ranging from python chat bots, to small websites. Heroku is an app host, not a webhost, so i would not use it to host or learn web development. For small-scale apps and prototypes, Heroku is super affordable, even I hosted many of my apps in free plans.
August 09, 2019

Quick to Set Up and Experiment With

Verified User
C-Level Executive in Other
Consumer Services Company, 1-10 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Heroku is very well-suited to early stage and/or rapidly changing projects. It is great for getting moving quickly or changing direction quickly. In scenarios where there is already scale or well-defined requirements, it may be preferable to set things up directly on AWS or another cloud provider to avoid the additional costs of Heroku as the middleman.
April 25, 2019

Under 100K Monthly Visitors for the next 6+ months? Go with Heroku, not AWS

Ben Gelsey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Ben Gelsey
Co-Creator
Flights Machine (Leisure, Travel & Tourism, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Heroku is great if your developer's time is more valuable than your expected hosting bill. I'd put the magic number at 100,000 monthly users for a typical site. If your traffic will be below this for the next 6+ months, then Heroku is a no-brainer over more complex and unwieldy competitors like AWS. Only invest the effort in AWS when your traffic is high enough to merit it.
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