Heroku allows for seamless scaling and usage.
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Starting at $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…
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Popular Features
- Upgrades and platform fixes (43)8.484%
- Scalability (43)8.282%
- Platform management overhead (42)7.676%
- Platform access control (42)7.070%
Pricing
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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Product Details
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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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(171)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(26-47 of 47)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 02, 2019
You Get What You Pay For
- 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
- 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!
- 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!
- 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
- 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
- Easy to use
- Inexpensive to get started
- Encourages best practices
- Expensive at scale
- No access to raw servers -- if Heroku is down, you are too, and all you can do is wait for them to fix it.
- Maintenance and relatively short stack life cycle means you can't push an app to Heroku and leave it for years. You'll be forced to migrate it.
April 22, 2016
Heroku, the good, the bad and the ugly
- 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 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.
- 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
- 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!
- Easily deploy.
- Review apps!
- Add members easily.
- Managing dynos (had to use third party service).
- Analytics could be a bit better.
April 08, 2016
For Small Scale Apps, Heroku can't be beat
- Heroku is extremely easy to get set up. It has very good documentation, and advanced features that can be utilized, but are not necessary.
- Heroku is easy to connect to databases and external services and has seamless integration with Git.
- Heroku's payment plans are straight forward. I have not run into issues of hidden costs or "gotchas".
- Heroku does not scale as well as AWS. Options for scaling are also limited, which makes my company hesitant to use Heroku for any large-scale project.
- Heroku does not provide detailed error handling. It often takes hours of debugging to find out why an app will not deploy correctly.
- I have found automated deployment harder with Heroku; there are more steps involved when re-deploying the app than the couple of key strokes via the command line by AWS.
April 08, 2016
Heroku: Pay to make your DevOps work go away
- 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 13, 2015
I used Heroku and it did the job I wanted it to do
- It allows you to deploy in production really fast and really easily.
- Pricing. I think it's still really expensive, 5 or 6 years after it went out of beta. I see a lot of colleagues who actually move to AWS because it's less expensive.
October 08, 2015
Heroku Makes You Want To Deploy A Product
- The UI and admin dashboard made it easy to understand what was going on with each application.
- Heroku makes it easy to control who has access to your deployment platform.
- The command-line tool (CLI) is very well made. It makes deployment simple.
- Our biggest gripe is the hoops we had to jump through in order to see exactly what went wrong during deployments.
October 06, 2015
Heroku - A Great Choice for Developers Needing Quick Deployment
- 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.
October 06, 2015
Go with Heroku!
- Easy-to-use commandline tools
- Third-party integrations (e.g. Github)
- Reliable servers
- Learning curve is fairly steep
- Better build-packs (esp for python)
- Option to use a GPU server
September 29, 2015
Great for small teams starting out, but plan on migrating away eventually - it comes at a cost
- Simplicity. You won't find an easier way to get an application deployed, so if TTM is super-critical, it's a good choice.
- Because it's so simple, it doesn't require any dedicated DevOps development, which is a cost benefit.
- Adding additional "add on" services is also easy - need search? Need Redis? Need Analytics? Just click a button to activate it.
- Cost. Heroku is somewhat affordable for small applications and teams because it frees up developers from DevOps work, but quickly becomes very expensive when you scale your application and team to support more users on your application.
- Lack of transparency - if Heroku has an outage, you often get little more status than reports of increased error rates, but the issue has been resolved.
- Lack of customization - sometimes you need to ability to change your environment more than Heroku allows, and because you don't have a true server that you can get to a command prompt for, your options can be limited.
May 11, 2015
Heroku's neat implementation and great documentation made it a great solution for building web apps
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- 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
November 04, 2014
Heroku - A+ for almost all situation
- Deployment of apps
- Network of add-ons
- Pricing could be a little more competitive
- Ease of use for new developers
- Professional support offerings
June 04, 2014
Heroku is our genie in a bottle.
- Very low (or no) cost initially for full functionality. Great for a start-up.
- Highly scalable. Adding computing power to an environment, or creating a new one, takes seconds.
- Plug-ins. A wide variety of plug-ins exist for a variety of purposes: data storage, error reporting/logging, metrics gathering, backup and many more.
- Simple. Get up and running in a couple of hours. Documentation is available for all tasks.
- Seamless integration with Git, a quick Git push and your server is updated instantly.
- Heroku does not support .NET, only Ruby, Java, Node.js, Python and a few others
- Heroku can get very expensive if very powerful hardware is required. Not all plug-ins are free; the monthly cost can easily creep up.
- The potential for downtime increases as more plug-ins are used, if you're not careful in how you bring everything together.
- Heroku seamlessly connects you to the plug-ins you use via user accounts for those plug-ins' web sites; however in some cases, such as Mongo HQ, Heroku creates the account for you and it can be difficult to gain access to the plug-in directly if needed.
April 15, 2013
Look at Heroku first when designing a web application
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Very easy to use platform as a service. If you are running a node.js application, the only thing you need to do is to specify the node and npm versions in your package.json and be sure that you are referencing the port provided in your environment rather than hard-coding a port number.
- Really good set of partners. It's easy to try out a wide range of partner applications from within the Heroku environment. Most have a free trial option.
- Single management console for your application. You can access the administrative function for any application from within Heroku.
- For node.js, the platform does not support websockets and because you do not have sticky sessions, it is virtually impossible to do any socket.io applications if you want to run multiple dynos. There is an add-on that will allow you to do push style APIs, but one of the benefits of using node.js is its natural support for this programming model.
- It would be really nice if you could configure your application to spread dynos across multiple availability zones and control this. Heroku runs on top of AWS in the US EAST region. We run all of our other services there as well. For many of these services, we are able to create a scenario where we have a master-slave configuration across different availability zones (i.e. Amazon data centers). I wish we could do that with Heroku.