Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroku VS Elixir

Compare Heroku VS Elixir 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.

Elixir logo Elixir

Dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • Elixir Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-07-20

We recommend LibHunt Elixir for discovery and comparisons of trending Elixir projects.

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.

Elixir features and specs

  • Concurrency
    Elixir leverages the Erlang VM (BEAM) for exceptional concurrency support, making it suitable for scalable and fault-tolerant applications.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Built-in supervision trees in Elixir allow for robust fault tolerance, enabling applications to recover gracefully from errors.
  • Performance
    Elixir boasts impressive performance characteristics, especially for I/O-bound operations, thanks to its efficient concurrency model.
  • Ecosystem
    Elixir’s ecosystem, including the Phoenix framework, provides a rich set of libraries and tools for web development and more.
  • Syntax
    Elixir’s syntax is clean and modern, making it more approachable for developers coming from Ruby or other high-level languages.
  • Metaprogramming
    Elixir supports powerful metaprogramming capabilities, enabling DSLs and macros to add custom functionalities in a seamless manner.
  • Scalability
    Elixir applications can scale vertically and horizontally with ease, making it a good choice for growing applications that need to handle increased load.

Possible disadvantages of Elixir

  • Learning Curve
    Despite its approachable syntax, Elixir’s concurrency and fault-tolerant models can be challenging for developers to master.
  • Ecosystem Maturity
    While growing, the Elixir ecosystem isn’t as mature or extensive as that of languages like Python or JavaScript, which might limit available libraries or community support.
  • Tooling
    The tooling around Elixir, while adequate, may not be as polished or feature-rich as in more established languages.
  • Performance
    Although strong in handling concurrent operations, Elixir may not outperform languages like C++ or Go in CPU-bound tasks.
  • Hiring
    Finding experienced Elixir developers can be difficult compared to more prevalent languages like JavaScript or Python, potentially limiting hiring pools.
  • Resource Usage
    Applications built with Elixir can consume more memory compared to applications written in more low-level languages.
  • Framework Dependency
    Reliance on the Phoenix framework means that projects are often tightly coupled to it, which might limit flexibility.

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

Elixir videos

Product Review: Elixir - Finally, something good?

More videos:

  • Review - REVIEW SENAR GITAR AKUSTIK TERMAHAL (ELIXIR NANOWEB PHOSPOR BRONZE) ORIGINAL
  • Review - As Seen on IG | Episode 1 | KO Elixir Cream | One Month Update | Product Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and Elixir)
Cloud Computing
100 100%
0% 0
Programming Language
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud Hosting
100 100%
0% 0
OOP
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 Elixir

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.

Elixir Reviews

Top 10 Rust Alternatives
Elixir is a functional and all-purpose programming language. It is believed to operate on BEAM and uses the imposition of a programming language known as Erlang. This language is typed dynamically and strongly.

Social recommendations and mentions

Elixir might be a bit more popular than Heroku. We know about 83 links to it since March 2021 and only 73 links to Heroku. 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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Elixir mentions (83)

  • Contributing to Elixir Documentation: A Step-by-Step Guide
    Elixir is a functional, concurrent, and dynamically typed language built on top of the Erlang VM. Since its release in 2012, Elixir has gained popularity due to its friendly syntax, scalability, and fault tolerance. - Source: dev.to / 2 days ago
  • Exploring elixir processes using merge sort
    Elixir runs on the Erlang VM, known for creating low latency, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. Elixir Docs. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Building a Simple REST API with Elixir
    This guide will walk you through creating a basic REST API using Elixir and Phoenix Framework with thorough comments explaining each piece of code. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • An overview of Elixir from C# developer
    Recently, I discovered a programming language called Elixir. Elixir is described as a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • ABEND dump #15
    The first time I saw and used something similar was using doctests in Elixir 3 years ago, but cram tests are much more versatile. In dune, you can use whichever executable binary. You can make your documentation executable. How cool is that!? - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

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

Rust - A safe, concurrent, practical language

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

Python - Python is a clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.

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

Clojure - Clojure is a dynamic, general-purpose programming language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming.