Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroku VS CoCalc

Compare Heroku VS CoCalc and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

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.

CoCalc logo CoCalc

Collaborative Calculation and Data Science
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • CoCalc Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-29

CoCalc is a sophisticated online workspace that supports Jupyter notebooks, SageMath worksheets and LaTeX. It is a fully managed Python and R Statistics environments provide a lot of packages/libraries out of the box. It is also possible to edit LaTeX files and R documents right inside your browser. A full Linux terminal and an environment to run graphical applications complete CoCalc as a very versatile platform. Beyond that, CoCalc is made for teaching a class online! Avoid the hassle of installing software on every student's machine and help your students more precisely by collaborating on their notebooks.

Heroku

Website
heroku.com
$ Details
-
Platforms
-
Release Date
-

CoCalc

Website
cocalc.com
$ Details
freemium $14.0 / Monthly
Platforms
Browser Docker
Release Date
2013 April

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.

CoCalc features and specs

  • Collaboration
    CoCalc offers real-time collaboration, allowing multiple users to work on the same project simultaneously, making it ideal for group projects and teaching.
  • Integration with Jupyter Notebooks
    It supports Jupyter Notebooks, which are popular for data analysis and scientific computing, allowing users to easily share and execute their code.
  • Reproducibility
    CoCalc provides tools to help ensure that computational results can be easily reproduced, supporting both academic research and educational settings.
  • Wide Range of Tools
    The platform supports several programming languages and tools, including LaTeX, Python, R, and SageMath, offering a versatile working environment.
  • Accessibility
    As a cloud-based platform, CoCalc is accessible from anywhere with an internet connection, allowing users to work remotely.

Possible disadvantages of CoCalc

  • Performance Limitations
    As CoCalc is a cloud-based service, computational resources are shared, which can lead to performance limitations compared to local execution.
  • Cost
    While CoCalc offers a free version, advanced features and more computational resources require a subscription, which may not be affordable for all users.
  • Learning Curve
    New users might face a learning curve when getting started with CoCalc, especially if they are unfamiliar with similar platforms or the supported technologies.
  • Internet Dependency
    Since CoCalc is an online platform, a stable internet connection is necessary, which can be a disadvantage in areas with poor connectivity.
  • Limited Customization
    Compared to setting up a local environment, CoCalc may offer less flexibility in configuring the available software and environment settings.

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

CoCalc videos

Real-time collaboration with Jupyter notebooks using CoCalc- William Stein (SageMath, Inc)

More videos:

  • Review - An overview of CoCalc
  • Review - CoCalc: Making open source data analysis software more collaborative

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and CoCalc)
Cloud Computing
100 100%
0% 0
Mathematics
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud Hosting
100 100%
0% 0
Python IDE
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Heroku and CoCalc. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

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

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.

CoCalc Reviews

Jupyter Notebook & 10 Alternatives: Data Notebook Review [2023]
CoCalc (previously called SageMathCloud) is a cloud-based collaborative platform that includes many of the same features as Jupyter Notebooks as well as a number of new ones.
Source: lakefs.io
12 Best Jupyter Notebook Alternatives [2023] – Features, pros & cons, pricing
CoCalc (formerly known as SageMathCloud) is a cloud-based platform for collaborative computing that offers many of the same features as Jupyter Notebooks, as well as a number of additional capabilities. It supports a wide variety of programming languages, including Python, R, and Julia, and provides access to powerful hardware resources, including GPUs. In addition to its...
Source: noteable.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroku should be more popular than CoCalc. 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
View more

CoCalc mentions (31)

  • Hetzner introduces GPU server for AI training
    CoCalc offers On-Demand GPU servers with H100s starting at $2.01 per hour (metered per second) through its integration with Hyperstack... It also has more budget-friendly options, like RTX A4000s at $0.18 per hour. https://cocalc.com/features/compute-server In case you are not familiar, CoCalc is a real-time collaborative environment for education and research that you can access via your web browser at... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Show HN: Adding Mistral Codestral and GPT-4o to Jupyter Notebooks
    Thank you for the list - I think I've come across all of these in my research! I'll try highlight the differences for each. - https://noteable.io/ - as you say, it doesn't exist anymore - https://deepnote.com - I actually mentioned this in the post but in my experience, the UX and features far behind what we've built already. I'd love to hear from anyone who's tried jupyter-ai to give us a shot and let me know... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Show HN: Adding Mistral Codestral and GPT-4o to Jupyter Notebooks
    - https://cocalc.com -- very extensive AI integration everywhere with all the main hosted models, mostly free or pay as you go; also has realtime collaboration. (Disclaimer: I co-authored this.). - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Show HN: I made a better Perplexity for developers
    Is there something like this (maybe this?) that provides an API so I can integrate it like any other model into my own website (in this case, https://cocalc.com)? I tried asking the Phind.com devs, but got ignored. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Cocalc.com — (formerly SageMathCloud at cloud.sagemath.com) — Collaborative calculation in the cloud. Browser access to full Ubuntu with built-in collaboration and lots of free software for mathematics, science, data science, preinstalled: Python, LaTeX, Jupyter Notebooks, SageMath, scikitlearn, etc. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Overleaf - The online platform for scientific writing. Overleaf is free: start writing now with one click. No sign-up required. Great on your iPad.

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

ShareLaTeX - An online LaTeX editor that's easy to use. No installation, real-time collaboration, version control, hundreds of LaTeX templates, and more. Log InRegister - Reset Password - Documentation - .

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

Colaboratory - Free Jupyter notebook environment in the cloud.