Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroku VS Amazon Web Services Lambda

Compare Heroku VS Amazon Web Services Lambda 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 Web Services Lambda logo Amazon Web Services Lambda

Amazon Web Services Lambda is a platform for easy building of data processing triggers for AES services of all types.
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • Amazon Web Services Lambda Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-09

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 Web Services Lambda features and specs

  • Scalability
    AWS Lambda automatically scales your application by running your code in response to each trigger, handling scaling from a few requests per day to thousands per second.
  • Cost Efficiency
    Lambda charges you only for the compute time you consume, without the need to pay for idle server time, which helps optimize cost efficiency.
  • No Server Management
    You don't have to manage any servers or infrastructure, allowing you to focus on writing code and developing functionality rather than maintaining hardware.
  • Event-driven Model
    Lambda integrates seamlessly with other AWS services and can be triggered using AWS events, making it highly suitable for building event-driven and serverless architectures.
  • Flexible Scaling and Processing
    AWS Lambda provides flexibility in resource allocation, allowing you to adjust memory and execution timings to optimize performance for different workloads.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon Web Services Lambda

  • Cold Start Latency
    The first invocation of a Lambda function can experience a delay known as 'cold start,' which can affect applications sensitive to latency.
  • Execution Timeout
    Lambda functions have a maximum execution timeout of 15 minutes, which may not be suitable for long-running processes or tasks.
  • Resource Limitations
    Lambda has limitations on memory, disk space, and other resources, which can restrict the functions it can perform depending on application requirements.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Using AWS Lambda heavily can lead to vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate to different platforms without significant re-architecting.
  • Complexity in Large Systems
    For large systems with numerous functions and dependencies, managing and orchestrating Lambda functions can become complex and challenging.

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

Amazon Web Services Lambda videos

No Amazon Web Services Lambda videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and Amazon Web Services Lambda)
Cloud Computing
97 97%
3% 3
Development
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud Hosting
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Heroku and Amazon Web Services Lambda. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Heroku and Amazon Web Services Lambda

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 Web Services Lambda Reviews

We have no reviews of Amazon Web Services Lambda yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Heroku might be a bit more popular than Amazon Web Services Lambda. We know about 73 links to it since March 2021 and only 49 links to Amazon Web Services Lambda. 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
View more

Amazon Web Services Lambda mentions (49)

  • 4 Cognito User Pools features you might not know about
    We can set up Cognito to trigger a Lambda function at various stages of the sign-up and sign-in processes. These functions can enrich both the ID token and the access token. - Source: dev.to / 30 days ago
  • Building a Real-Time Serverless Chat App with AWS: A Scalable Approach
    You will learn the following in this lesson: Learn how to set up AWS AppSync to handle messages in real time. This article explains how to store messages in DynamoDB, a NoSQL database that can grow as needed. This article explains how to use AWS Lambda to build your own business code. This article explains how to use React to make a simple front end that talks to the chat back end. By the end of this... - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Stop bringing old practices to the cloud
    This is often due to a lack of training and knowledge about cloud-native services or capabilities. Many legacy workloads were built on top of 3-tier architecture since this was the common way most IT/developers knew for many years. Architectures were centralized and monolithic, and organizations had to consider scale, and deploy enough compute resources, many times in advance, failing to predict spikes in... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Parameter Management at Scale: How Multi-Region Configurations Saved My Application
    Without going into details, I enable versioning when I use Lambda. Each version makes the Lambda immutable, ensuring that code and configuration do not change once published. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Time to move on to Day 2 cloud operations
    On Day 1, it may be ok to take traditional architectures (such as manually maintaining VMs), but on Day 2 it is time to take the full benefit of cloud-native services. The easiest way is to replace any manual maintenance of infrastructure with managed services – in most cases, switching to a managed database, storage, or even load-balancers and API gateways, will provide a lot of benefits (such as lower... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Heroku and Amazon Web Services Lambda, you can also consider the following products

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

Amazon API Gateway - Create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale

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

Go Programming Language - Go, also called golang, is a programming language initially developed at Google in 2007 by Robert...

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

AWS Secrets Manager - AWS Secrets Manager to Rotate, Manage, Retrieve Secrets