For Small Scale Apps, Heroku can't be beat
April 08, 2016
For Small Scale Apps, Heroku can't be beat
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Heroku
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.
- Heroku has served our needs for small-scale applications, especially those that are built by interns/students. The positive impact has been being able to deploy apps in a reliable and cost-effective manner.
I primarily use Heroku and AWS. AWS in terms of large-scale scalability and production-grade application tools, cannot be beat. However, for small-scale apps it often provides too many feature/tools/options, unclear documentation, and hidden fees. AWS has great customer support, but managing AWS deployment feels like a full-time developer position in itself. Heroku, on the other hand, has been easily manageable for all the developers on my team, and has been a very easy, straightforward service to use.