Google App Engine is Google Cloud's platform-as-a-service offering. It features pay-per-use pricing and support for a broad array of programming languages.
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Heroku Platform
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
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…
$25
per month
Pricing
Google App Engine
Heroku Platform
Editions & Modules
Starting Price
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Max Price
$0.30
Per Hour Per Instance
Production
$25.00
per month
Advanced
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google App Engine
Heroku Platform
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google App Engine
Heroku Platform
TrustRadius Insights
Google App Engine
Heroku Platform
Highlights
Research Team Insight
Published
Google App Engine and Heroku Platform are application environments and hosts for people who want to focus on development work, not complicated server setup and maintenance. Google App Engine is a large, well-known, robust product that scales automatically for traffic spikes, while Heroku’s smaller pricing tiers and specific focus make it great for smaller teams on a more limited budget.
Features
Google App Engine and Heroku Platform are both quick and simple environments for developers, but there are standout features of each.
After you choose the type of service you want, Google App Engine is priced according to volume, so you pay for exactly what you’ve used. If your site or application experiences a traffic spike, Google App Engine will adjust automatically to handle that traffic, so there’s much less risk of an outage or slowdown. Security features are included with every type of service. Google is a household name, so it’s easy to get clients on board with using it.
Heroku is priced in tiers, and each tier has specific features and workloads, so you’ll never be surprised by your bill. It’s quick and simple to use, and pricing tiers include up-to-date documentation and support. Heroku server monitoring tools are easy to use on desktop or mobile, so you can oversee your applications from anywhere.
Limitations
Though Google App Engine and Heroku Platform provide similar services, each has specific limitations that may inform which one is best for your needs.
Google App Engine may be a robust, well-known product that scales easily, but the scaling comes with a downside. If your application or site experiences a spike in usage, the automatic scaling can lead to a large and unexpected bill. Additionally, the large size of the company means that documentation is often outdated, individual support is difficult to get, and features are sometimes deprecated without warning. And once you set up your application or site in Google App Engine, it’s easy to become locked into Google as a vendor.
Heroku Platform’s tiered pricing is a great feature for those who need their billing to be consistent, but if your app experiences a spike in usage, you must manually upgrade to the next pricing tier. The difference between the Standard 2X and Performance tiers is at least $200 per month, which is not a small amount if you’re running a lean operation. The largest Heroku tiers are $500+ per month, and if you’re running multiple applications, this can add up quickly. Several of the lower pricing tiers do not include security features you may need even for smaller applications.
Pricing
As established, Google App Engine and Heroku Platform use very different pricing methods. Both have free services available for smaller applications or trial uses. Heroku’s lowest tier is $7 per month and includes free SSL, while its highest tier with pricing available is $250-$500 per month and includes dedicated features and autoscaling. More fully featured tiers are available with custom pricing. Google’s pricing is heavily dependent on exactly what features you are using and how much, but the lowest price above the free tier is approximately $30 per month, while the highest prices range into the thousands.
Features
Google App Engine
Heroku Platform
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Google App Engine is especially well suited for situations where there is a variable workload during the day, e.g. inbound task processing with task queues. In this situation queues can be setup with parameters governing the process speed/scaling which allows you to easily balance performance with cost and meet a good balance.
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.
Building an application that uses Google's Authentication, means users no longer need to remember an different user id and password. Once they are logged into to Google, they can seamlessly access your application hosted on Google App Engine.
Google App Engine automatically scales up and down. SO if your application receives a spike in user traffic, App Engine automatically launches additional instances of your application to cater for the increased traffic. Once App Engine detects that the spike is usage is over, it automatically scales down to handle the current traffic.
Google App Engine can be easily integrated with Google Cloud SQL, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage etc, so that you can build out a full application using one or more of Google's Cloud Platform products.
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.
App Engine is a solid choice for deployments to Google Cloud Platform that do not want to move entirely to a Kubernetes-based container architecture using a different Google product. For rapid prototyping of new applications and fairly straightforward web application deployments, we'll continue to leverage the capabilities that App Engine affords us.
Heroku is a critical and core part of our infrastructure that is serving our customers well. We are very satisfied with the cost of our solution. While it would be difficult to move away from Heroku, we have no plans to do so. We have had no major issues with it and it is a pleasure to use. Other products on the market might offer comparable functionality, but until we expose a need that Heroku cannot satisfy, we'll stay the course.
Google App Engine is very intuitive. It has the common programming language most would use. Google is a dependable name and I have not had issues with their servers being down....ever. You can safely use their service and store your data on their servers without worrying about downtime or loss of data.
If you have basic backend and Git knowledge, deploying to Heroku is a breeze. It now supports many types of backends, including hybrid backends (ex: nginx + application server) through its build pack system. The dashboard is easy to use, and the CLI tools are well designed. Accessing the add-ons is also easy. It uses an SSO-type system so you don't have to re-sign in to view the add-on dashboards.
Heroku availability correlates pretty strongly to AWS US EAST availability. We had a couple of times where there was a Heroku-specific issue but not for the last 7-8 months.
Good amount of documentation available for Google App Engine and in general there is large developer community around Google App Engine and other products it interacts with. Lastly, Google support is great in general. No issues so far with them.
I've used it for many years without facing any major problem. It's not hard at all to get used to it, it's documentation is outstanding and simple. We are close to 2020 and I don't think most of the existing companies or startups should still face old problems such as wasting time deploying code and calculate computing resources.
Be ready to pay a bit more than expected in the beginning if you're migrating from a big server. The application is probably not ready for the change and you have to keep improving it with time.
It's also important to consider that you can't save anything to the disc as it will be lost when your application restarts, so you have to think about using something like S3.
App Engine is a much more streamlined system than EC2. There is a fundamental difference between them, but they are used for basically the same thing as far a I could tell -- to serve applications EC2 is certainly more complicated, but if offers more machine-level control if that's what you need. It can tend to cost more as well. App Engine is far more straightforward but there are limitations if you need to change the environment. But even then, Google Compute Engine also compares to EC2 and stays within GCP.
Heroku has advantages over Docker, Google App Engine and AWS products, but it depends largely on your use case. If you are already in AWS, it's probably in your best interest to stay with AWS products. However, other "Cloud Formation/Orchestration" products like Docker are typically lacking the ease-of-use factor that allows you to get up and running with Heroku quickly.
