Heroku Platform Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services 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

9 Reviews

Professional, Scientific, and Technical ServicesInformation Technology & Services4Marketing & Advertising3Market Research1Design1

Heroku: perfect platform for agile teams!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 16, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Heroku is the platform in which we deploy our applications. It hosts the backend services and it's dependencies such as databases, message queue platform, etc. Instead of setting up a virtual machine and deploy things manually, with Heroku we just attach it to a code repository and automate the deployment to it. It abstracts the resources units and uses a much easier one named `dyno` which allows a much easier scaling mechanism.

Pros

Continuous deployment via repositories
Abstraction of computing resources
Add-ons mechanism (databases, message-queue services, etc.)

Cons

Some Heroku-specific errors are hard to debug

Likelihood to Recommend

I consider Heroku to be an outstanding platform. It is perfectly suited for agile teams that want to quickly develop and deploy their applications without losing time on setting up virtual machines, dependencies and deploying. With Heroku, you can deploy Docker images, code from repositories, and just let it handle it. If at some point your application gets bottlenecked and you need more computing resources then it's as easy as adding another dyno. No need to set up anything, just focus on writing your application code!

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Information Technology and Services company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Perfect for small projects

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 23, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Heroku as a platform for developing applications, services, websites, and landing pages. Heroku is used by the technology department and product development. Heroku is one of the most versatile platforms ever, it was the first cloud platform as a service. In a marketing agency, it is a good platform to develop customer applications, landing pages, and websites.

Pros

User-friendly interface.
Supports many languages, databases, and other services in the form of addons.
Super easy to deploy!
Large learning curve.
For small and simple applications, it is possible to get it free of cost.

Cons

There could be a form of local currency billing.
There could be a better organization of apps on the dashboard, with apps split by customers.
There is a certain limitation with some addons, which may make your application unfeasible and you may have to migrate to another platform.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is perfect for the custom development of small applications, services, and websites where there is a limited budget or cost forecast. It is a good platform for scalable services and applications, with a great capability to scale an application when needed. In some cases, Heroku may not be as well suited, because when using some addons with more expensive plans, the cost can be quite high compared to AWS or GCP.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Marketing and Advertising company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

The easiest platform as a service Rails app hosting solution that our developers love using

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 17, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Heroku as part of our hosting for our SaaS business. It is not the only web host we use, but for Ruby on Rails web apps that we want to be able to deploy quickly, it is a great solution. Whether or not projects stay on Heroku long term, new projects always start using it. Developers love how easy it is for them to deploy to, and how easy it is to deploy review apps to create multiple staging environments.

Pros

Ease of configuration and scaling.
Ease of code deployment.
Ease of deploying staging environments.

Cons

An ephemeral file system may require workarounds certain developers are not used to.
The cost is high and can easily balloon as you grow if you aren't careful.
While configuration is super simple, it will not be as flexible as bare metal servers.

Likelihood to Recommend

For deploying rails apps, Heroku is a great solution. The ease of use especially starting out on new projects is great. Developers are familiar with and enjoy using it.
If you already have a bare-metal solution that has scaled well with your own DevOps team, then moving to Heroku later would likely only introduce a higher cost without many other benefits.

Bryan McAnulty

Product Director in Product Management at Velora Studios (Design, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

View profile

Heroku Review

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

August 14, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Heroku was used by our organization in our technology department to build and deploy a web platform. The problems it addressed was storage, resources and monitoring of the platform.

Pros

Heroku supplied the appropriate resources to complete our project.
Heroku made deploying our platform simple with their intuitive user interface.

Cons

What would benefit overall is for specific descriptions of errors or issues with platform/app deployment. Many times there were errors shown that only gave brief, vague descriptions of the problem. For example, "mounting and logging issues" or "application timed out". A more detailed description as well as a focus on where the problem occured, would be beneficial.

Likelihood to Recommend

Heroku is well suited in providing the proper resources for deployment as well as managing web applications.

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (Market Research company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Heroku - Great for quick projects

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 12, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Heroku is a great platform for quickly spinning up small web apps. If I had any demo product or simple sample I was working on, I would deploy it to Heroku because of the ease of development. The amount of hooks and integrations Heroku has with other services also make it an excellent choice to get started on a project.

Pros

Quick to get started
Countless Integrations
CLI is easy to use

Cons

The cold start times can be brutal for free plans
Cost can be expensive if you have many dynos
Have to be careful of third party integration pricing as well

Likelihood to Recommend

Ease of use and spinning up a quick project is where this really shines. It also makes it easy to connect to some third-party services to help with your app while making development experience much easier. For example, adding a MongoDB database to your web app with Heroku can be done in just a few clicks. Highly recommend it for quick and small demo projects.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Information Technology and Services company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Perfect for Hobbyists and Beginners

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 12, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Heroku is a fantastic online hosting resource for use in small projects. The workflow is great for trial and error learning, and getting used to pushing and pulling using Git. I've used Heroku to deploy social media bots and other Python scripts. The documentation on various pipes and addons required to get your project up and running are also well documented and easy to follow.

Pros

Free Option is great for people just learning or wanting to make simple apps
Very easy to create several environments for your app in no time with exact clones
Documentation is easy to follow and full of tutorials

Cons

If you're not careful, you can easily create an expensive app by accident.
Inconsistant experience with all the other add-ons. Some are not documented well.

Likelihood to Recommend

Heroku is great for learning to code and learning how hosting works. I've used Heroku for a few different projects ranging from python chat bots, to small websites. Heroku is an app host, not a webhost, so i would not use it to host or learn web development. For small-scale apps and prototypes, Heroku is super affordable, even I hosted many of my apps in free plans.

Collin Berg

Lead Web Developer at SJI Associates | Full-Service Creative Agency (Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Heroku most developer-friendly platform

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 28, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Heroku is an innovative platform for fast web applications development and thus ideal for deploying demos / testing environments / learning / APIs / microservices, etc. Heroku is used primarily as platform for APIs integration. Many software vendors provide Open Source web applications and microservices with API and documentation, ready to be deployed at Heroku with one click or with some manual tuning and configuration, the rest is automated and integrated with various cloud services and platforms by default.

Pros

Opensource (with extensive documentation)
Innovative (cutting-edge web technologies, latest versions of programming languages, tools, services, integrations)
Focused on speed and scalability
Free pricing plan and pricing in general
Experimentation

Cons

Heroku requires installation of Heroku CLI tools locally.

Likelihood to Recommend

The simplest scenario is when some developer engineers a website or portal or online service with third-party integrations and there is a requirement to build some kind of infrastructure, every integrated app (back-end) will live on Heroku, providing APIs / microservices to main application that will aggregate all the data and display on main website. The main website can be easily deployed to Heroku. Everything can be additionally tested, secured, etc right at Heroku. Due to Heroku platform flexibility there are many successful scenarios and use cases.

Andrew Starodubtsev

Freelance Web Developer in Research & Development at Freelance/Contract Graphic Design and Web Development (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

Heroku: Pay to make your DevOps work go away

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 8, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Marketing and Advertising company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Heroku's neat implementation and great documentation made it a great solution for building web apps

Rating: 10 out of 10

March 19, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Integrates with Git and GitHub
Handles all the infrastructure requirements and lets us focus on development
Documentation is fantastic

Cons

Requires technical knowledge to use; you need an engineer for the project
Costs money to scale properly

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend Heroku without reservation for companies looking to deploy a web app written in Node.js or Ruby on Rails.

Jonathan Crane

Solutions Architect in Professional Services at Smartronix (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Heroku: Pay to make your DevOps work go away

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 8, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Marketing and Advertising company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience