Heroku Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

it_user7914

Director of Operations at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 19, 2013

Heroku debacle

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Cristian Molina

Ruby programmer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Dec 27, 2020

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Very good for implementing new apps and pushing changes

Pros and Cons

"It's easy to push a change and to deploy new things."

"Heroku doesn't support Docker images on the CI infrastructure."

What is our primary use case?

My primary use case of this product is for hosting Ruby applications. Probably more than half of the people at our company use Heroku for applications. I am a customer of Heroku and a Ruby programmer.

What is most valuable?

I like the operations of the product because it makes it easy to push a change and to deploy new things. We trust the store for add-ons, they are pretty good with some solutions like storage or login add-ons.

What needs improvement?

They used to have MongoDB add-ons, but currently I think they've stopped and I'm not sure why. There is an issue because Heroku supports Docker container images, but not if you're using the continuous integration infrastructure. I really think Heroku should support Docker images on the CI infrastructure. For now, you cannot use those images and have to use the certified ones they provide for continuous integration and continuous delivery.

They have a free plan but it only provides three hours of service, after which you have to switch to a pay plan. It's when you start to scale the application it becomes costly. There should be more scalability options for storage. It would be nice to have more official stacks, to try and support more languages to stack officially.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for eight years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There are some stability issues from time to time.

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support isn't bad. The response time could be improved but I last contacted them some time ago when they were still using email and didn't have a direct chat option. It was either email or on a forum. It's probably improved since then.

How was the initial setup?

Deployment time depends on the type of applications you plan to use. Deployment usually takes less than three minutes.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend this solution. It's very good for small organizations with low traffic that don't need a lot of storage. If you need more storage, you should use an extra add-on or connection like Amazon.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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it_user463269

Full Stack Web Developper, Freelance & Entrepreneur at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jun 22, 2016

My story about going from being a fan of Heroku to leaving Heroku

I have been a great fan of Heroku as it simplified my work for many years.

But I recently got my account suspended because someone abused one of my apps. Since then, I decided to leave Heroku because I cannot afford to loose control on my work.

Here's the story: http://augustin-riedinger.fr/e...

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user175059

Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 23, 2014

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Good host for nodejs, but not the cheapest solution

What is most valuable?

Deploying with git, npm install git hook ... basically, they got it right for nodejs servers hosting. Free trials is limited (1 app running at a time) but good enough for a proof of concept. Using an Heroku backend and a GithHub pages front end serving static content, I can scale my app for free to a reasonable level.

What needs improvement?

Plugins aren't cheap (Mailchimp is $1.5/1000 emails).

For how long have I used the solution?

6 months

How are customer service and technical support?

The doc is good, for nodejs at least. It is newbies friendly.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I rejected Google app engine for there lack of nodejs support, and AWS for the complexity of setting up a simple app.

How was the initial setup?

The CLI tools are good and deployment is quick. The web control panel ain't that great, I got into trouble trying to launch my app.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

0 for now :)

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user154575IT Manager at a wellness & fitness company

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Dec 23, 2014

Heroku's support is very poor.

it_user8373

Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Aug 5, 2013

Great Deployment Options - Heroku, Engine Yard and Amazon

Depending on your needs heroku might get you very far, very fast. I like to use it for clients whose biggest hurdle is not the technology, but in rapidly building a product and iterating quickly. If you already know your customer base, your eventual architecture, and how big your app is going to get, you might prefer to jump ahead to engine yard or amazon, but if you are launching a new app and are still in the process of discovery and exploration, you may find heroku is a good place to start. I work with a lot of small startups and prototype apps, and I think heroku is great for that. Its easy to launch an app quickly, engage users, add new features, scale it up and down as needed, lots of plugins to help you along, while keeping your IT costs reasonable.
Now if the app really takes off, in a sustained way (not just a press-release spike), you will have to decide what changes you want to make to the architecture, and if you have outgrown heroku. I think its great to have Heroku, EngineYard, and Amazon as deployment options. They all have great free options, and each of them has their sweet spot.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user4401Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Sep 7, 2013

On my opinion, Heroku has two main pros: speed and simplicity. Since I just want to focus on my applications, it's a convenience to have a managed platform that I can quickly push application to. I also like that it offers plugins which further simplify things like mailservers, backups, logging, etc. But, as a con, it is expensive.

it_user8136

Director of IT at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees

Jul 28, 2013

Why I love Heroku

I first used Heroku to deploy and host Facebook apps, and I’m a big fan ever since.

Lately, I’ve been doing development with node.js and since Heroku supports it (wonder if they were first to offer it), it was a no-brainer:

deployment via command line with git: nice way to enforce best dev practices
package management with NPM – everything will be fetched and installed for you
built-in SSL support on *.herokuapp.com subdomains
easy monitoring: just type ‘heroku logs’
easy scaling: just type ‘ps:scale web=x’ or ‘ps:scale worker=x’
support of environment variables: one example – running multiple instances from the same git repo
pretty good docs and tutorials
tons of add-ons: you are free to do pretty much anything (I use Mongolab add-on for Mongo hosting)
affordable!

Nodejitsu is another service focusing on node.js primarily, but I’ve been reluctant to switch because I just like Heroku so much.

It’s also super cool that they support multiple environments via buildpacks, I’d love to look under the hood and find out how they made it work (and here’s a great post describing their polyglot platform in high-level)

In contrast to the one-language-per-career programmer, today’s up-and-coming developers can often utilize many languages effectively. Borrowing a term from linguistics, we can call these versatile new developers “polyglot programmers.”

For the latest Show&Tell demo, I talked about benefits of using Heroku (as one of the PaaS options) for rapid deployment and easy hosting, so here’s the deck.

This week I’m working on a recommendation chart for cloud hosting, so I’ll share that as well soon.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user701415

Tech Lead Javascript Full Stack at a tech services company

Jul 15, 2017

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It has improved our deployment speed without requiring time to configure some servers

Pros and Cons

"Valuable for us was the fast deployment. This means the time to market is improved without pain for developers."

"We don't find the pipelines intuitive. The user experience could be better. Having to set up multiple apps, then a pipeline, seems like an overkill on the amount of work to do."

What is most valuable?

Valuable for us was the fast deployment. This means the time to market is improved without pain for developers.

How has it helped my organization?

It has improved our deployment speed without requiring time to configure some servers.

What needs improvement?

We don't find the pipelines intuitive. The user experience could be better. Having to set up multiple apps, then a pipeline, seems like an overkill on the amount of work to do.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using the solution for six months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

How are customer service and technical support?

We didn't need to use the technical support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not use a previous solution.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, and Kubernetes.

What other advice do I have?

It's an easy product to use.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.