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Heroku VS Azure Web Apps

Compare Heroku VS Azure Web Apps 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.

Azure Web Apps logo Azure Web Apps

Create and deploy mission critical Web apps that scale with your business
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • Azure Web Apps Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-05

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.

Azure Web Apps features and specs

  • Scalability
    Azure Web Apps support automatic scaling based on demand, ensuring that your application can handle increased load without manual intervention.
  • Managed Platform
    Microsoft handles the underlying infrastructure, management, and maintenance, allowing developers to focus on building and deploying applications.
  • Integration
    Seamlessly integrates with other Azure services such as Azure SQL Database, Azure Storage, and Azure Functions, providing a comprehensive ecosystem for your application.
  • Security
    Advanced security features including SSL certificates, authentication with Azure Active Directory, and compliance with various industry standards.
  • Continuous Deployment
    Supports continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines from popular sources including GitHub, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps.
  • Global Reach
    Azure's global network of data centers allows you to deploy your web apps closer to your users, reducing latency and improving performance.

Possible disadvantages of Azure Web Apps

  • Cost
    Can be expensive compared to other hosting options, especially for larger applications with significant traffic and resource requirements.
  • Complexity
    The wide range of features and services can be overwhelming for new users, requiring a learning curve to fully utilize the platform.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Relying heavily on Azure-specific services can make it challenging to migrate to other platforms or cloud providers in the future.
  • Performance
    Shared infrastructure can occasionally lead to inconsistent performance, particularly during peak times or maintenance windows.
  • Customization Limitations
    Lacks some of the customization options available with traditional virtual machines or other hosting solutions, which can be a limitation for specialized requirements.
  • Service Outages
    Like any cloud service, Azure Web Apps can experience occasional outages, which can impact accessibility and availability of your application.

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

Azure Web Apps videos

Comparing Azure Web Apps, VMs and Cloud Services

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and Azure Web Apps)
Cloud Computing
89 89%
11% 11
Cloud Hosting
81 81%
19% 19
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Backend As A Service
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 Azure Web Apps

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.

Azure Web Apps Reviews

We have no reviews of Azure Web Apps yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroku seems to be a lot more popular than Azure Web Apps. While we know about 73 links to Heroku, we've tracked only 5 mentions of Azure Web Apps. 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

Azure Web Apps mentions (5)

  • How is TLS/HTTPS working and when do you need it
    Do we even need to set up TLS if our back and front end are hosted on services like https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/web/ or other web hosting platforms? Source: over 3 years ago
  • The 2021 Software Developer Shortage Is Coming
    Https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/web/ Https://cloud.google.com/appengine. Source: almost 4 years ago
  • Azure DevOps Dashboard
    The solution runs on as a single Azure Web App, it uses a background WebJob to collect all the data needed to present in the web dashboard. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
  • Generate PDF files with asp.net core on Azure
    There are many libraries and services to generate PDF files for asp.net core web applications. There are excellent commercial solutions out there, but if you need a free solution, it gets harder. Some libraries are hard to use, or others are limited in functionality. I need a free, easy to use, and quick solution to generate PDF files on an Azure Web App. - Source: dev.to / about 4 years ago
  • Multitenant server
    You can host multiple Web Apps on the same App Service Plan. That's the easiest way to do it. With Azure SQL you can just create multiple databases to have isolation. Source: about 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Heroku and Azure Web Apps, you can also consider the following products

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

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

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

Salesforce Platform - Salesforce Platform is a comprehensive PaaS solution that paves the way for the developers to test, build, and mitigate the issues in the cloud application before the final deployment.

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

Dokku - Docker powered mini-Heroku in around 100 lines of Bash