Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroku VS Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

Compare Heroku VS Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and see what are their differences

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 RDS for PostgreSQL logo Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL as a Service
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-29

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 RDS for PostgreSQL features and specs

  • Managed Service
    Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is a fully managed service, meaning that AWS handles routine database tasks such as backups, patch management, and failover, reducing the operational burden on users.
  • Scalability
    The service allows for easy vertically scaling of database instances as application demands grow, without requiring downtime. This helps businesses to adapt to changing workloads efficiently.
  • High Availability
    With Multi-AZ deployments, Amazon RDS provides enhanced reliability and availability. It automatically creates a primary database instance and synchronously replicates data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone.
  • Security Features
    Amazon RDS integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for access control and offers encryption at rest and in transit capabilities, bolstering data security.
  • Backup and Recovery
    Automatic backups, snapshots, and point-in-time recovery simplify data recovery and help ensure that data can be restored to any given second during the retention period.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

  • Cost
    The cost of running a managed service like Amazon RDS can be higher than managing a database in-house, especially for smaller organizations or when optimal configurations are not utilized.
  • Limited Customization
    Since Amazon RDS is a managed service, there are certain limitations on access to the underlying operating system and database configurations, which may hinder some advanced customizations and optimizations.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Using RDS for PostgreSQL can lead to vendor lock-in, making it difficult for businesses to move away from AWS without incurring data transfer costs or requiring significant re-engineering efforts.
  • Maintenance Windows
    Updates and patches are applied during scheduled maintenance windows, which might cause disruptions if the timing is not properly managed or if unexpected performance issues occur during these periods.
  • Limited Extension Support
    While RDS for PostgreSQL supports a wide range of extensions, not all PostgreSQL extensions are available, potentially limiting additional functionality that might be needed for specialized use cases.

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL videos

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL/Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Operational Best Practices | AWS Events

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL)
Cloud Computing
100 100%
0% 0
Databases
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud Hosting
95 95%
5% 5
Developer Tools
98 98%
2% 2

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 RDS for PostgreSQL

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 RDS for PostgreSQL Reviews

We have no reviews of Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroku should be more popular than Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. 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 / 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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Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL mentions (16)

  • Kubernetes and Container Portability: Navigating Multi-Cloud Flexibility
    Amazon RDS for MySQL (for managed MySQL) or Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL (for managed PostgreSQL). - Source: dev.to / 28 days ago
  • Top 8 Managed Postgres Providers
    Amazon RDS is a managed service for relational databases that makes PostgreSQL setup, scaling, and management automatic. This lets developers concentrate on creating applications instead of handling database tasks. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Deploying Django Application on AWS with Terraform - Part 1
    Yay! We have now deployed our Django web application with ECS Service + Fargate on AWS. But now it works with SQLite file database. This file will be recreated on every service restart. So, our app cannot persist any data for now. In the next article we’ll connect Django to AWS RDS PostgreSQL. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • gactive: Active-active Replication Extension for PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS
    Today, AWS announces the general availability of pgactive: Active-active Replication Extension for PostgreSQL, available for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL. Pgactive lets you use asynchronous active-active replication for streaming data between database instances to provide additional resiliency and flexibility in moving data between database instances, including writers located in... Source: over 1 year ago
  • Hosting my Software
    Best practice would definitely be setting up a separately hosted database (I swear I'm not an AWS shill) for production as this ensures much better data integrity. Plus it manages backups etc. For you. Source: about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Heroku and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, you can also consider the following products

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

Application Load Balance - Automatically distribute incoming traffic across multiple targets using an Application Load Balancer.

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

Amazon Aurora - MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. Performance and availability of commercial-grade databases at 1/10th the cost.

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

Neon Database - Postgres made for developers. Easy to Use, Scalable, Cost efficient solution for your next project.