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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

(26-48 of 48)
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February 02, 2019

You Get What You Pay For

Jonah Dempcy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Well-suited for the vast majority of use cases where you don't need to do specific configuration, where server performance (RAM usage, etc.) is not tweaked to the nitty gritty, and where you have the budget to spend more on hosting in order to save configuration and deployment time. It's great if you just want to get something running and not worry about it.
Sazzad Hossain Sharkar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
As an all-in-one application service, Heroku is very well suited for everything including, staging, CI Runner, easy deployment, custom domains adding and managing the servers from the native desktop terminal.

Due to its add-on costs and a limited edition of server locations, it seems they need to upgrade their facilities including more server locations like Singapore or India which are near to ours.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Heroku to host some of our clients' applications and services, it allows us to quickly deploy something without worrying much about the infrastructure we are deploying to. It saved us lots of time with technical operations. We really recommend it, since is really easy to use, everything is just a command line away.
  • Heroku deployment process
  • Heroku documentation
  • Heroku Toolbelt makes everything so easy
  • Heroku is incredibly expensive compared to alternatives
  • It'd be nice to have more logs than just the last 1500 lines.
  • No way to install system software.
You can set up an entire environment very fast. It's great for someone starting out and deploying their first webapp, and great as a service overall. I cannot immediately recommend it to larger organisations though without looking deeper into the potential cost first. As traffic rises, consider switching to a performance dyno, which gives you more bang for your buck, and also has much slower response time. Beware of delays in your requests when you deploy, consider using rolling restarts to fix it.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Heroku is great for small websites or to create some kind of a prototype for a product. It was used plenty to get test projects live in a coding bootcamp classroom setting. I find that scaling is a bit of an issue when your application becomes too large. AWS is probably a better choice as growth occurs.
Miles Porter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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?
Heroku is great for very small prototype apps, and can grow with them to medium sized and even larger. I think that it is really easy to get started with heroku. Just the other day, I cloned a Java starter project for heroku, and was up and running in under 10 minutes. That is really great... particulary considering the amount of time I have had to spend in Azure's configuration, and with OpsWorks in AWS in the past. It may not work for everything, but for small simple things, you just cannot go wrong with Heroku.
Samantha Ready | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
It seems like the pricing model prices out the little guy.
Robby Grossman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Heroku to host small applications or services, particularly internal ones, where the ease of the platform and administration is more important to us than a highly available service but one which we need to manage ourselves.
  • 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.
Well-suited for services that are not mission-critical, where ease of deployment and speed to get started is paramount.
Jake Moffatt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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).

Heroku is really, really good for Ruby on Rails applications. Heroku is not very good for applications that require many different languages for various micro-services, or the types of apps where you might have a very tiny service that does not require much RAM or CPU, but which you need to spin up hundreds of such instances.

Heroku would probably be good for a slightly technical client if you were going to turn over the keys after a consulting gig - it is very well documented and there are many resources out there for dealing with specific issues, it is way better than trying to support your client on something like DreamHost or GoDaddy.

Perhaps Heroku's greatest strength is in providing a hosting platform that stays out of the way while you build out your business logic and grow your startup from the beginning. It allows your engineers to focus on the problem, not the infrastructure.

Shannon E. Wells-Mongiovi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I find Heroku to be best for startups and companies in an initial growth phase. Unfortunately, moving away from Heroku can be very painful, and so companies seem to end up throwing a bunch of money at a lot of dynos and workers and not really figuring out a better architecture or hosting platform, because they are growing so fast they don't really have the time for it.
Adam Fortuna | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.

Heroku to me is less suited for companies that have a dedicated sysop who can handle server architecture and maintenance. Once our site was large enough, we found we could save more than the cost of an entire hire by switching to dedicated servers. For these very large sites, I feel like heroku could do better from a pricing standpoint.

I feel it's better for smaller sites that might be in the under $1,000 range, or for companies that have the cash and want to move fast.

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Heroku is pretty robust. I don't think there's really a situation where it wouldn't be a solid option. It definitely does a lot of the leg work for you! For web apps that are super critical, a company might consider an internal server solution since Heroku/AWS goes down from time to time.
April 12, 2016

Heroku rocks!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Not that I can think of....it really fits so many needs. From the individual hobby-ist to the larger 50-100 person company!
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I manage a number of small-scale projects that are deployed on Heroku. I work for a school where students often build and deploy open source projects on Heroku. Heroku is one of the most common deployment tools we use, but we also use AWS.
  • 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.
For small-scale apps, I absolutely recommend Heroku. When dealing with medium-size applications or apps that potentially need to scale, I would be more careful in choosing Heroku. A lot would depend on the build and deployment systems in place.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Recommended for low-scale apps where the additional cost of the computing power you get on Heroku isn't an issue. Not recommended for extremely high-scale apps due to the cost, or if an app has non-standard setup, dependencies, or configuration.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's how we were hosting chooseyourboss.com (and still are).
With Heroku, there is no need for ops and infrastructure experts, perfect for early stage. That's why we actually went with Heroku instead of a IAAS such as AWS. Simplicity and quickness of setup was essential in our decision.
  • 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.

  • It's perfect to start an app and deploy fast
  • If you just need a dumb/rest backend, you might want to go check Parse.com
David Hunt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We needed a trusted hosting platform that could scale but wouldn't come down like the other PaaS companies that pop up every day. In my previous role, Heroku was used for multiple applications, from our production application to one off proof of concepts.
  • 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.
It's especially great if you'd like to deploy a bot to Slack.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I would recommend Heroku when you need quick and simple deployment for an application.
October 06, 2015

Go with Heroku!

Carlos Xavier Hernández | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Heroku to deploy everything from interactive scientific visualizations to our Slack team's signup page. Heroku makes it really easy to prototype and launch a product in minutes.
  • 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
Heroku is best for prototyping.
Mike Desjardins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
I've used Heroku at several different organizations, as well as for personal projects. Generally it's been with teams of 4 people or less, I've used it in an organization with ~20 people.
  • 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.
Well suited to small teams building low-traffic sites or MVPs, but plan on migrating away from it if your team or application grows in order to save expenses, improve transparency, and make your environment more customizable.
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Heroku has been invaluable to our development and delivery of (mostly Ruby-powered) web applications for internal purposes as well as for clients. Heroku's toolbelt and great network of add-ons has let us and our devs focus on building and shipping products and services and not infrastructure and developer ops.
  • Deployment of apps
  • Network of add-ons
  • Pricing could be a little more competitive
  • Ease of use for new developers
  • Professional support offerings
Heroku is well suited for small to medium sized web apps (for huge scale it can get overly expensive) -- of course not well suited for apps where data security like PHI is required as the platform is not HIPAA compliant.
Leigh Wetmore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are a mobile data collection company. We host the server component of our application and our customer data through Heroku and its plug-ins. As such, it is the technological backbone of our company. As we are a small company, we do not have sufficient resources to manage our own server infrastructure - Heroku fills this role nicely. It allows us to easily scale our resources, up or down, to meet customer demand. It offers plug-ins that help expose the issues customers are having, and help gather and report metrics for determination of ROI.
  • 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.
Heroku is well-suited to companies who:
- can't afford their own IT infrastructure, or whom have no interest in the time overhead associated with managing it
- have a business that requires a high level of agility or responsiveness (e.g., quickly signing up a new customer who requires a silo'ed environment)
- work with Ruby, Node.js, Python or Java server components, and use Git for version control
David Hart | TrustRadius Reviewer
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.
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