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Heroku vs AWS – Which is Best for Your Business

Updated Mar 31, 2021

Thanks to the stunning technological development today, cloud-based platforms get a lot of recognition. The cloud market revenues reached $27.5 billion as per Statista research, in the third quarter of 2019. Businesses can also concentrate more on the core strategy and other processes rather than doing the tech stuff by moving with the cloud. Above all, you don't have to spend too much to access the best of the infrastructure. There are a plethora of solutions to fill in, but as cloud services are in demand and at times, it becomes pretty challenging to choose the best one.

Under this blog, you can see a comparison of the two most popular cloud services including Heroku vs. AWS.

What is AWS?

Amazon web service, in simple terms, is a platform that claims to give flexible, reliable, scalable, easy-to-use, and budget-friendly cloud computing options. It also has a huge collection of cloud services that build a full platform. Additionally, it is well known as a powerhouse of various elements like storage, databases, or delivery options provided to numerous developers.

AWS is available in at least 16 regions. This provider cannot have a plethora of products, but they have at least one hundred, and if needed, you can determine the real number on the product page.

Essential Services Provided by AWS:

  • AWS Elastic Compute Cloud- It is ideally a flexible IaaS service. It would help if you created a server infrastructure that aligns with your project before deploying your app on EC2. Your team has not only set but also support virtual servers manually that launch the app in simple terms. The service provides creating blocks, and you have to configure them and choose the perfect ones for the app and also control them. In the majority of the companies, the duty of DevOps engineers is app deployment control and EC2 infrastructure organization.
  • AWS Lambda-It is ideally a serverless platform that is a part of Amazon Web Services. The service tends to compute services that allow you to run code irrespective of provisioning or managing servers, and it is amazing for uploading code packages. The architecture is closed for devs, and they are not allowed to personalize the scale.
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk- It is ideally a PaaS service and one of the most common competitors of Heroku. The service enables deploying apps fast and straightforward in AWS Cloud by implementing commands. You need to run commands by implementing the management console or some other interface by AWS. Once the deployment is completed, the service manages infrastructure without any control.

Pros of AWS

  • Easy to deploy your app
  • Improved or better developer productivity
  • A handful of automated functionalities, like the scaling, configuration, setup, and others
  • A huge control over your resources
  • Manageable pricing like one can manage their costs depending on the resources they choose to leverage.
  • Quick integration with fellow AWS products
  • Average learning curve

Cons of AWS

  • Deployment speed per-app may stretch to at least 15 minutes
  • Lack of transparency or you can say limited transparency
  • DevOps skills are required

What is Heroku?

Heroku, in simple terms, is a cloud service provider and software development platform. It promises a fast and effective building. Besides that, it also considers deploying and scaling web applications. The tool tends to promise some built-in instant run-time application services. It is a container-type cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, and it is used for various functions.

The platform is said to offer its customers the place where they do different things with the app like build, deploy, and scale. Above all, Heroku helps to boost the productivity of the team by creating an environment for rolling-out and development processes.

Heroku has a better scope and is also available for dealing with the apps built with Node.js, Python, Perl, among others therefore it is also known as a polyglot platform. They tend to include at least 180 extra– tools and services when it comes to developing, monitoring, testing, image processing, and the app besides they cover other operations.

Pros of Heroku

  • Easy to deploy an app
  • Improved developer productivity
  • The free tier is widely available
  • Auto-scaling is available
  • A handful of supportive tools
  • Easy to setup
  • Beginner and startup-friendly
  • Short learning curve
  • Polyglot Platform

Cons of Heroku

  • Rather expensive for both huge and high-traffic applications
  • Slow deployment for larger apps
  • Restricted in types of instances
  • Not suitable for heavy-computing projects

Difference between AWS and Heroku


Specifications

AWS

Heroku

Owned by

Amazon

Salesforce.com

Hosting Server

AWS Data Center

Amazon's EC2 cloud-computing platform

Scaling

Automatic

Manual, Automatic

Database Available

  • Relational Database
  • Amazon Aurora
  • Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
  • Amazon Redshift
  • Key-value Database
  • Amazon DynamoDB
  • In-memory Database
  • Amazon ElastiCache
  • Postgres

Price

Starting at $25 per month Starting at $29 per month

Features

Can deploy on multiple version and also roll back if required

A single command can be used to restart all applications

Auto-Update

It can also roll back the database or code instantly

Scaling – Vertical and Horizontal

Github Intergration

Management and Monitoring Tools

  • AWS Management Console
  • AWS Command Line Interface 
  • Visual Studio
  • Eclipse
  • CloudWatch
    X-Ray
  • Heroku Command Line
  • Heroku Application Metrics
  • Heroku Connect
  • Heroku Status

Platform Offering

IaaS, SaaS, PaaS

PaaS

Server Development

Complicated

Simple

Computational Demands

High

Low

Deployment Engineers

Need one or more DevOps engineers 

No need for DevOps engineers

Service Available

Worldwide Europe, USA, Australia, Japan, etc.

Memory Storage

AWS ElasticCache

Redis

Languages Supported

PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, Docker, Go, Node.js

PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js, Go, Skala, Clojure, Java

Languages Supported

PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, Docker, Go, Node.js

PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js, Go, Skala, Clojure, Java

Suitable for

Medium & Large enterprises

Startups & Medium-size businesses

Companies Using

Netflix, Twitch, Linkedin, Facebook, ESPN, etc. Toyota, StackShare, Accenture, Craftbase, etc.

Which One is More Popular and Why?

Heroku has been the talk of the town for at least four years now and sure longer as compared to Elastic Beanstalk and has not been less in terms of popularity to the Amazon PaaS. At the same time, the plethora of services provided by AWS has been booming in high gear. Their customers tend to have more freedom when it comes to both choice and flexibility. It also has resulted in a quick boost in search interest starting in 2013 and till today.

Here is the google trend graph which clearly indicated that AWS has an edge over Heroku:

Heroku vs AWS

Conclusion

No doubt, both Heroku and AWS are stunning platforms, but one needs to understand what kind of feature their company requires and how much they are willing to pay for them. Additionally, you also have to ascertain the skill sets before making any choice in the team. You can achieve all your business objectives or goals with the right skills and platform.

Ensure that the company you’re working with has experience managing AWS infrastructure if you choose Amazon Web Services. You can consider Heroku or Beanstalk if rapid application development is crucial for you. Also, you need to know that you can always change between the PaaS and IaaS solutions provided there is a change in the hosting plans change or custom infrastructure demand differ.


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