Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

AWS Elastic Beanstalk VS Heroku

Compare AWS Elastic Beanstalk VS Heroku and see what are their differences

AWS Elastic Beanstalk logo AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud.

Heroku logo Heroku

Agile deployment platform for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, and Scala. Setup takes only minutes and deploys are instant through git. Leave tedious server maintenance to Heroku and focus on your code.
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-30
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05

AWS Elastic Beanstalk features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk simplifies the process of deploying and scaling web applications and services. It automatically handles deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling to application health monitoring.
  • Integration with AWS Services
    Being part of the AWS ecosystem, Elastic Beanstalk easily integrates with other AWS services like RDS, S3, CloudWatch, and IAM, providing a comprehensive and secure application environment.
  • Multi-language Support
    Elastic Beanstalk supports multiple programming languages and frameworks, such as Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker, making it a versatile choice for developers.
  • Managed Environment
    Elastic Beanstalk provides a fully managed environment, taking care of the server configurations, operating system, and middleware, which allows developers to focus more on writing code.
  • Scalability
    Automatic scaling enables applications deployed on Elastic Beanstalk to handle varying amounts of traffic. The service automatically scales your application up and down based on the demands.

Possible disadvantages of AWS Elastic Beanstalk

  • Abstracted Control
    Elastic Beanstalk abstracts away much of the underlying infrastructure. While this simplifies usage, it also limits the amount of control and customization developers have over their environment.
  • Cost
    While the pricing model can be cost-effective for some use cases, it may become expensive as applications scale or when advanced features and higher-end resources are required.
  • Platform Limitations
    Elastic Beanstalk has certain limitations in terms of supported platforms and regions. Not every AWS service or feature is available in all regions, which could restrict some deployment scenarios.
  • Deploy Time
    Deployments can sometimes be slow, especially for large applications or when multiple environment updates are required. This can impact development and iteration cycles.
  • Debugging Complexity
    While Elastic Beanstalk manages the environment, diagnosing and debugging issues can sometimes be more complex due to the abstracted infrastructure. Developers may need to delve deeper into AWS logs and metrics for troubleshooting.

Heroku features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Heroku offers an extremely user-friendly interface and a high level of abstraction, making it easy for developers to deploy, manage, and scale applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
  • Quick Deployment
    One of Heroku’s strongest points is the ability to deploy applications quickly using Git. Developers can push their code to Heroku with a simple command, streamlining the entire process.
  • Scalability
    Heroku provides effortless scaling options by allowing developers to add more dynos (containers) with a single command to handle increased traffic and workload.
  • Add-Ons Ecosystem
    Heroku offers a rich ecosystem of add-ons, such as databases, caching, monitoring, and more, which can be easily integrated into applications to extend their functionality.
  • Automatic Updates
    Heroku automatically handles operating system and server updates, allowing developers to focus solely on their application code rather than maintenance tasks.
  • Free Tier
    Heroku offers a free tier with sufficient resources to host small projects and learn the platform without incurring costs, making it accessible for beginners and small-scale applications.

Possible disadvantages of Heroku

  • Cost
    While Heroku offers a free tier, the costs can quickly add up for larger applications and professional use. Paid plans and additional dynos or add-ons can become expensive.
  • Performance
    Heroku’s performance can sometimes be suboptimal compared to other cloud providers, particularly when running high-performance or resource-intensive applications.
  • Limited Control
    Heroku abstracts away a lot of infrastructure management, which can be a downside for developers who need fine-grained control over their environments and configurations.
  • Dyno Sleeping
    Applications running on Heroku’s free tier experience 'dyno sleeping,' where the application goes to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, causing a delay when it wakes up after receiving a new request.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Relying heavily on Heroku’s ecosystem and platform-specific features can lead to vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate to another platform if needed.
  • Add-On Costs
    The costs for add-ons can also become significant, as many useful features and integrations require paid add-ons, increasing the overall expense.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk videos

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Tutorial | What Is AWS Elastic Beanstalk? | AWS Tutorial | Simplilearn

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Heroku)
Cloud Computing
18 18%
82% 82
Cloud Hosting
28 28%
72% 72
Backend As A Service
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Heroku

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Reviews

We have no reviews of AWS Elastic Beanstalk yet.
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Heroku Reviews

  1. mark-mercer
    Useful Cloud Platform

    Great service to build, run and manage applications entirely in the cloud!

    🏁 Competitors: Amazon AWS, Dokku on Digital Ocean, Firebase
    👍 Pros:    Easy user interface|Good customer service|Multi-language cloud application platform
    👎 Cons:    Limitation with some addons|Low network performance
  2. jamestelford
    · Full Stack Developer at OutDev ·
    🏁 Competitors: Docker, Amazon AWS
    👍 Pros:    Powerful development environments|Great value for the money|Great customer support|Paas

10 Top Firebase Alternatives to Ignite Your Development in 2024
Heroku’s focus on simplicity and developer experience makes it a perfect fit for those who want to focus on building their apps, not babysitting servers. Startups and small businesses, in particular, can benefit from Heroku’s ability to accelerate development and deployment, allowing them to get their ideas to market faster.
Source: genezio.com
2023 Firebase Alternatives: Top 10 Open-Source & Free
Heroku Postgres – Majority of businesses like Heroku because of its SQL database support. Yes, PostgreSQL as a service is an appealing product of this PaaS vendor with quick deployment approaches.
5 Free Heroku Alternatives with Free Plan for Developers
Koyeb is a decent alternative to Heroku that you can consider for hosting or deploying your web apps and APIs. It has all the features of Heroku that you will need for your projects. So far, I have not encountered an importer tool for migrating Heroku deployments but I am sure doing that manually will not be that hard. Just like Heroku it offers you an intuitive web UI as...
Choosing the best Next.js hosting platform
However, there are a few disadvantages to Heroku. First of all, despite its build pack, Heroku will run your project as a Node.js application. As a result, you will lose some of Next.js’ most interesting features, such as Incremental Static Regeneration. Analytics are replaced by metrics and measured throughput, response time, and memory usage (only on paid plans).
Top 10 Netlify Alternatives
Heroku is another alternative to Netlify that doesn’t only host static websites but has the ability to host dynamic websites. This PaaS platform was launched in 2007 and conferred highly scalable features to deploy, host and launch applications.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroku should be more popular than AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It has been mentiond 73 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk mentions (38)

  • Deploying a Rails 7 + React app to AWS via Dokku
    My previous workplace was run by a team that lacked experience in getting an app from zero to production. We had a starter react + rails app in our hands, but the details of the final step--putting our app online for users to consume--was amorphous at best. Our whiteboard was inked with a "let's use Elastic Beanstalk," so I was told to do just that. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Ask HN: How are you hosting multiple small apps?
    Based on the fact that your ideal is to have a similar experience to heroku than managing your own server setting up reverse proxies take a look at these options: 1) https://dokku.com - lets you turn your light sail instance basically into heroku 2) https://render.com 3) https://fly.io above is not what I do but would be the options I would pursue if I understand your preference and requirement correctly. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Deploying a Django Application to Elastic Beanstalk
    Elastic Beanstalk (EB) is a cloud deployment service provided by Amazon Web Services. It facilitates the deployment and scaling of web applications and services by automating the creation of individual infrastructure components, including EC2 instances, auto-scaling, ELBs, security groups, and other infrastructure components. Using the AWS Management Console and command-line interface, deployment with EB is quick... - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Fortifying Your Three-Tier Application: Proactive Measures for Strengthening Your Application Security
    This Terraform code snippet can be used to deploy an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment:. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • So many options, getting confused
    K8s isn't going to play well with your deployment pattern without some advanced cluster management. Honestly it seems like you would be better serviced with something like https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/ . Source: almost 2 years ago
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Heroku mentions (73)

  • How to deploy your web application? 3 different approaches to consider (+1 bonus)
    Providers include Digital Ocean, Heroku or Render for example. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Heroku Reviews Apps prevent delivering bugs on production
    Review Apps run the code in any GitHub PR in a complete, disposable Heroku application. Review Apps each have a unique URL you can share. It’s then super easy for anyone to try the new code. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • How to keep an HTTP connection alive for 9 hours
    The app is deployed to Heroku and when it came time to switch the mode to email-on-account-creation mode, it was a very simple environment change:. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • How to Process Scheduled Queue Jobs in Node.js with BullMQ and Redis on Heroku
    Heroku is a cloud platform that makes it easy to deploy and scale web applications. It provides a number of features that make it ideal for deploying background job applications, including:. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • I made a Bot.. How do I use it?
    Once you've created it you can host it locally (this means leaving the program running on your computer) or host it through a service online. I haven't personally tried this yet, but I believe you can use a site like heroku.com or other similar services. Source: almost 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Heroku, you can also consider the following products

Google App Engine - A powerful platform to build web and mobile apps that scale automatically.

DigitalOcean - Simplifying cloud hosting. Deploy an SSD cloud server in 55 seconds.

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

Linode - We make it simple to develop, deploy, and scale cloud infrastructure at the best price-to-performance ratio in the market.

Amazon S3 - Amazon S3 is an object storage where users can store data from their business on a safe, cloud-based platform. Amazon S3 operates in 54 availability zones within 18 graphic regions and 1 local region.

Amazon AWS - Amazon Web Services offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. Free to join, pay only for what you use.