Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroku VS Amazon Aurora

Compare Heroku VS Amazon Aurora and see what are their differences

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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.

Amazon Aurora logo Amazon Aurora

MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. Performance and availability of commercial-grade databases at 1/10th the cost.
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • Amazon Aurora Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-17

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.

Amazon Aurora features and specs

  • High Performance
    Amazon Aurora is designed to provide up to five times the throughput of standard MySQL and three times the throughput of standard PostgreSQL databases.
  • Scalability
    Aurora scales storage automatically, growing from 10GB up to 128TB with no downtime. This automatic scaling makes it ideal for applications with fluctuating workloads.
  • High Availability and Durability
    Aurora automatically replicates six copies of data across three availability zones and continuously backs up data to Amazon S3, ensuring durability.
  • Security
    Aurora offers multiple layers of security including network isolation using Amazon VPC, encryption at rest using keys that you create and control through AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and encryption of data in transit using SSL.
  • Fully Managed
    Aurora is fully managed by AWS, which automates time-consuming administrative tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
  • Compatibility
    Aurora is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, making it easier to migrate existing applications to Aurora with minimal changes.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon Aurora

  • Cost
    Aurora can be more expensive than traditional RDS instances, particularly for workloads that do not fully utilize its high performance and scalability features.
  • Complexity
    The numerous features and configurations can make Aurora complex to manage and tune, especially for those who are not familiar with AWS services.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Adopting Aurora ties you into the AWS ecosystem, which can make it difficult to migrate to other cloud providers or on-premises systems.
  • Cold Start Latency
    Aurora Serverless can experience latency during cold starts, which can be problematic for applications requiring instant scalability.
  • Limited to AWS Environment
    Aurora is only available within the AWS environment, which can be limiting if your infrastructure spans multiple cloud providers.

Analysis of Heroku

Overall verdict

  • Heroku is a solid choice for developers seeking a straightforward, cloud-based solution for deploying and managing applications. However, it may not be the most cost-effective option for large-scale or data-intensive applications.

Why this product is good

  • Heroku is a popular platform as a service (PaaS) due to its ease of use, fast deployment process, and robust support for multiple programming languages. It allows developers to focus on building applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Heroku offers scaling capabilities, a wide variety of add-ons, and a strong developer community.

Recommended for

    Heroku is recommended for startups, small to medium-sized applications, hobby projects, and developers who value ease of use and quick deployment cycles. It is particularly suited for those who are developing web applications in languages such as Ruby, Node.js, Python, and others supported by the platform.

Analysis of Amazon Aurora

Overall verdict

  • Amazon Aurora is generally regarded as an excellent database service for businesses that require robust performance and high availability. It strikes a balance between cost-effectiveness and advanced database features, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.

Why this product is good

  • Amazon Aurora is considered a good choice for many applications due to its high performance, scalability, and compatibility with popular database systems like MySQL and PostgreSQL. It offers features like automated backups, quick failover, and replication capabilities. Aurora is designed to be fault-tolerant and highly available, providing a fully managed solution that relieves users from the operational burden associated with on-premise database management.

Recommended for

    Amazon Aurora is recommended for organizations that need reliable, scalable, and high-performance databases. It is well-suited for web and mobile applications, e-commerce platforms, real-time analytics, and other use cases requiring high availability and fault tolerance. It's ideal for businesses looking to modernize their database infrastructure and take advantage of cloud-native capabilities.

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

Amazon Aurora videos

Introduction to Amazon Aurora - Relational Database Built for the Cloud - AWS

More videos:

  • Review - Amazon Aurora Global Database Deep Dive
  • Review - What's New in Amazon Aurora - AWS Online Tech Talks

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and Amazon Aurora)
Cloud Computing
100 100%
0% 0
Databases
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud Hosting
100 100%
0% 0
Relational Databases
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 Heroku and Amazon Aurora

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.

Amazon Aurora Reviews

We have no reviews of Amazon Aurora yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroku should be more popular than Amazon Aurora. 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.

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 / 8 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 / 12 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 / almost 2 years 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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Amazon Aurora mentions (23)

  • Building a RAG System for Video Content Search and Analysis
    Using Amazon Bedrock to invoke Amazon Titan Foundation Models for generating multimodal embeddings, Amazon Transcribe for converting speech to text, and Amazon Aurora postgreSQL for vector storage and similarity search, you can build an application that understands both visual and audio content, enabling natural language queries to find specific moments in videos. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Everyone Uses Postgres… But Why?
    Cloud deployment: PostgreSQL can be deployed in the cloud with AWS RDS, Amazon Aurora, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, or Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Announcing the public beta for dedicated clusters
    Today, our Postgres databases are Amazon Aurora instances. You can trust that your database will have the scalability, reliability and security that AWS is known for. With dedicated clusters you can configure both the Postgres engine version, cluster class and number of replicas for failover and query distribution. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Vector database is not a separate database category
    As far as the big players are concerned, Google offers AlloyDB (https://cloud.google.com/alloydb) while Amazon offers Aurora (https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/). - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Building realtime experiences with Amazon Aurora
    Aurora is a managed database service from Amazon compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. It allows for the use of existing MySQL code, tools, and applications and can offer increased performance for certain workloads compared to MySQL and PostgreSQL. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Heroku and Amazon Aurora, you can also consider the following products

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

PostgreSQL - PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system.

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

MySQL - The world's most popular open source database

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

Oracle DBaaS - See how Oracle Database 12c enables businesses to plug into the cloud and power the real-time enterprise.