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Heroku Platform

Score9.2 out of 10

175 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Heroku Platform?

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 Git, GitHub or Continuous Integration (CI) systems without the need to manage infrastructure. The web-based Heroku Dashboard makes it possible to manage applications online and gain visibility into performance.

Heroku Operational Experience (OpEx)
OpEx helps developers troubleshoot and remediate issues and customize the ops experience to identify and address trends in application health. Heroku provides a set of tools to alert teams if something goes wrong, or to automatically scale web dynos if the response time for web requests exceeds a specified threshold.

Heroku Runtime
Heroku runs apps inside dynos—smart containers on a fully managed runtime environment. Developers deploy their code written in Node, Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, Go, Scala, or Clojure to a build system which produces an app that's ready for execution. The system and language stacks are then monitored, patched, and upgraded. The runtime keeps apps running without manual intervention.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Heroku Platform has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 175 ratings of Heroku Platform's features
View all features

Top Performing Features

  • Development environment creation

    Ease of creating new development environments

    Category average: 8

  • Development environment replication

    Ease of replicating new development environments

    Category average: 7.7

  • Workflow engine capability

    Process automation using rule-based engine

    Category average: 7.5

Areas for Improvement

  • Ease of building user interfaces

    Ability to build flexible user interfaces using drag-and-drop tools

    Category average: 7.9

  • Platform management overhead

    Resources required to keep platform up and running

    Category average: 7.4

  • Platform access control

    Rules controlling what data different user categories can access

    Category average: 7.8

Reviews

What users are saying about Heroku Platform.
View all reviews

Heroku allows for seamless scaling and usage.

Emily CooperView profile
Director, Illinois Science & Technology Coalition at Illinois Science and Technology Coalition (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Heroku runs the back end of our virtual mentoring platform that facilitates our education programs. It allows for email notifications to be sent to users, and all of the other back-end servers and operating systems to seamlessly work together to run the platform. It is an essential part of our programming and we chose it purposely when we rebuilt the platform entirely.

Pros

  • Streamlines different functionality.
  • Makes monitoring activity accessible.

Cons

  • More user friendly for those who aren't familiar with coding.
  • Progress summaries for users with activity reports.
  • Potentially a user overview tour of Heroku.

Most Important Features

  • Communication features that allow our platform to automatically communicate with users.
  • The different apps within Heroku allow you to track and monitor in different ways.
  • Reports of issues that are occurring on the back end.

Return on Investment

  • It has been critical in seamlessly operating our platform with runs all of our programs.
  • It has been impressive with its ability to scale quickly which results in the growth of our work.
  • It allows for tracking of different features which allows for quick problem solving which saves us time.

Alternatives Considered

AWS Auto Scaling

Other Software Used

GoodHire, Amazon Web Services, Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)

Every day more disappointing

Ana Andres del ValleView profile
Principal Solutions Architect in Engineering at TidyChoice (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Heroku is becoming an average platform with poor support [in my opinion]. Since the acquisition, [I feel] Heroku has put aside engineering quality. Additionally, the support people, [not] only they are not helpful, [I believe] they actually are giving completely [inaccurate] and dangerous advice. Our database has been under attack for days. Heroku support has been telling us there is nothing to worry [about] despite very suspicious Postgress 28000 errors, from external services (bots) trying to hit and get access to our database. I am still waiting for Heroku to tell us how to best solve this or at least how to change the name of our database with no disruption. In the meanwhile, our website is struggling with the consequences of this 'force brute' attack. [I would] not trust Heroku's support advice.

Pros

  • Not much lately [in my opinion]
  • Simple product to use

Cons

  • Support
  • Documentation

Most Important Features

  • Speed
  • Reliability

Return on Investment

  • Speed

Other Software Used

Twilio, DigitalOcean, Sendinblue

Beginner to moderate, it will be your Hero-ku ;D

Incentivized
Mark HutterView profile
Software Engineer in Information Technology at Shipt (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • It makes deployment, environment configuration, and simple manageability extraordinarily simple and easy to do, and getting up and going is a wonderfully simple process.
  • The metrics included are excellent as a first resource for diagnosing high level issues.
  • For beginners, Heroku is an excellent tool, making initial deployment and environment configuration wonderfully easy and fast.
  • Heroku is absolutely fantastic on the mobile break point (mobile responsiveness). As a startup, things still happen on weekends while out at the park or driving out of town, and it has been wonderful to be able to troubleshoot or restart servers from the phone.
  • The Heroku CLI provides a wonderful interface for interacting with the cloud environment.

Cons

  • Heroku does not provide static IP addresses. For most applications this is not a concern, but in particular cases, especially around explicitly sensitive data, this makes Heroku prohibitive.
  • For a more senior engineer seeking to SSH onto a server and monitor the machine's performance, or extract log files for extensive research, Heroku does not provide a great way to do this.
  • Heroku permissions controls could be more granular. For instance, allowing some users to view environment variables while others can not view these.

Return on Investment

  • Heroku has allowed our developers to work on application development, application defect resolution, keeping feature momentum very high. It has, at the very least, postponed the need for a full time dev ops engineer creating deployment packages and managing servers. It lets a small development team get up and going, and keep going, with little upkeep.
  • Heroku's ability to dynamically scale at a single click has provided for quick recovery time from unforeseen excessive traffic.
  • Heroku's quick configuration of web servers and background process servers lets each developer manage the load of their development more effectively.
  • Heroku's documentation is top notch, allowing for any developer to find the answers they need quickly.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Rackspace

Other Software Used

Codeship, GitHub, Travis CI, Slack

Almost Zero Learning Curve!

Incentivized
Sagiv FrankelView profile
Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at WeWork (10,001+ employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • We deploy many many services with almost zero ops and DevOps.
  • The minimal learning curve for developers.
  • High service reliability
  • Easily create services including integration with external services.

Alternatives Considered

AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Microsoft Azure and Kubernetes

Other Software Used

Kubernetes, RabbitMQ, Algolia, Node

Heroku most developer-friendly platform

Incentivized
Andrew StarodubtsevView profile
Freelance Web Developer in Research & Development at Freelance/Contract Graphic Design and Web Development (1-10 employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • Familiarization with latest web technologies.
  • Reducing deployment costs.
  • Automation.

Alternatives Considered

OpenShift and IBM Cloud PaaS (formerly IBM Bluemix - PaaS)

Other Software Used

OpenShift, GitHub, Slack

Usability

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