Heroku Platform Information Reviews & Insights

Score9.2 out of 10

175 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Heroku Platform are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Streamlined Functionality: Users have consistently praised the platform for its streamlined functionality, making it easier to monitor various activities efficiently and effectively. The intuitive design and seamless integration of features contribute to a user-friendly experience. Easy Deployment and Setup: Reviewers appreciate the product's simplicity, easy deployments, fast setup process, and minimal maintenance requirements for infrastructure management. The straightforward deployment process allows users to quickly adapt to changing needs. Scalability and Ease of Use: The application server's scalability and ease of deployment are highly valued by users who find the user-friendly interface intuitive and accessible. This combination of scalability with ease of use enhances the overall user experience.

Heroku Platform Reviews

21 Reviews

InformationComputer Software10Internet10Publishing1

Almost Zero Learning Curve!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 30, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It enables us to deploy quickly and simply. Heroku enables us to get multiple services with almost zero DevOps overhead. We have many different services and many full-stack developers and would like for all of them to be able to create, develop, test and deploy their services with minimal as possible an operational learning curve and set-up.

Pros

Monitoring is very simple and easy to use for most use cases.
Pipelines (development to production) are very simple. Application rollbacks are also very easy.
Notifications and alerts are simple and easy to use.
Very easy integration with other sass services and products.

Cons

Docker support is lacking.
You can't create multiple HTTP network services without creating separate apps.
Enterprise grain security concerns are hard to address.
It can get pretty expensive if you also take the actual infrastructure into the cost calculation.

Likelihood to Recommend

Simple CRUD services that have reasonable scale requirements are very well suited for Heroku.
Simple task-based services can also work well with Heroku.
If you do not have the resources (or priority) to create complex deployment environments go with Heroku.
Highly scaled, Highly concurrent, Network intense and highly complex systems that need a lot of introspection are not very well suited for Heroku.
Systems with high-security requirements are also not well suited to Heroku.

Sagiv Frankel

Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at WeWork (Internet, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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An amazingly easy deployment and hosting service

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 12, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Heroku to deploy and host our backend services. It was used by the whole company and it made deploying, hosting and scaling our software and infrastructure so easy to manage and do, we didn't need to hire a specialized devops or IT person to manage it for us.

Pros

Easy to use
Easy to deploy services
Easy to add plugins

Cons

Could provide a bit more customization
Could be a little easier on the pricing side
Could provide better insight tools

Likelihood to Recommend

Heroku is SO much less complicated than any other hosting providers out there. You can go from writing an app to having it deployed in a matter of minutes. You don't have to worry about physical machines, specifications, rolling deployments, uptime, or anything. Heroku handles everything for you with a series of simple commands.
It's not great if you want ultimate control over all those aspects.

Richard Rout

Software Developer in Information Technology at Factory Inc. (Computer Software, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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Heroku Helps Us Get Things Done

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 12, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Heroku extensively to build our products on; we make extensive use of Heroku's tooling and analytics to get software up and running with ease, and benefit from them abstracting away server instances so that we can easily scale up and down as needed. Beyond that, we also see a lot of value in a dedicated DevOps team handling issues like patching vulnerabilities, and handling underlying hardware failures – all of which would be prohibitively expensive before we really began to scale up. Heroku lets us access all that at a fraction of the price of an FTE dedicated to it.

Pros

Great APIs: Heroku's APIs are extremely useful and always improving.
Developer-friendly documentation: Heroku's docs are thorough and well-written.
Great Customer Support: Heroku's front-line support is great, and knows when to escalate directly to people working on the product.

Cons

Heroku Metrics is great, but we'd love to see direct API access (and the ability to add and customize our own metrics).
Heroku's status/downtime/maintenance notification system could be improved with better granularity to help filter irrelevant alerts.

Likelihood to Recommend

Heroku is fantastic at the beginning of a product lifecycle – in particular, because there are going to be some architecture decisions that will benefit from planning around a PaaS structure. Because of Heroku's fractional and low pricing, it's easy to start up on Heroku and scale up over time without incurring a huge up-front fixed cost.
At the other end, I'd imagine that larger organizations who have in-house staff doing DevOps might see a lot of duplication between those staff and what Heroku is doing to add value. At some point, the premium you're paying Heroku would probably prompt you to move those functions or keep them in-house.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

You Get What You Pay For

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 2, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Jonah Dempcy

Web & Mobile Developer in Engineering at Bluefire Productions (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

11 years of experience

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The best place I know to deploy a brand new Rails app

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 28, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Heroku has both, a free and a paid plan. I [have] used the free tier for many years now, and it's the best platform to deploy an MVP of a Rails application, no doubt. It provides all the tools you need to deploy and manage your application in production so that you can focus on the development of your product. The paid plan is a natural choice when you validate your idea since you're used to the tools and the application is ready for the infrastructure. Both, free and paid, are excellent products.

Pros

The tooling is simply amazing. You can deploy your application in some minutes without any prior experience with the platform.
Their way of building applications encourage you to think about scalability and composability of your app.
They have a big community around the platform and many add-ons written by third-parties.

Cons

The price is not so affordable when you start growing. For small companies, needing small containers, it works quite well but for large applications, it may be too expensive.

Likelihood to Recommend

For small companies that are building a new app or already have one being maintained by a very small team, Heroku is perfect. The price will be affordable and it will totally pay the price of having all the tooling they provide. When you start growing, the platform may become too expensive for the size of the company, so it's important to be prepared to change in case you reach this phase.

Willian Molinari

Backend Engineer in Information Technology at Doist (Internet, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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Deploy Apps Faster on Heroku

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 4, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Highly scalable
Easily traced activities and version control
Optimized for team development

Cons

Needs more docker services
Would be nice to have a unified DX for Salesforce developers/administrators who are working with Heroku

Likelihood to Recommend

It seems like the pricing model prices out the little guy.

Samantha Ready

Senior Product Manager, Trailhead in Product Management at Salesforce (Internet, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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Great Hosting Platform When You Value Time and Simplicity

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

May 3, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Easy to use
Inexpensive to get started
Encourages best practices

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well-suited for services that are not mission-critical, where ease of deployment and speed to get started is paramount.

Robby Grossman

Director of Engineering in Engineering at Wistia (Internet, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

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Heroku, the good, the bad and the ugly

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 22, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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).

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Jake Moffatt

Software Engineer in Information Technology at Snapdocs (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

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For launching your startup or your pet side project, don't bother with anything else.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 19, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Vice-President in Engineering (Computer Software company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

7+ Years using Heroku at Code School and on my own personal projects

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 15, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Adam Fortuna

Content Delivery Engineering Director in Engineering at Code School (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

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