Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroku VS Engine Yard Cloud

Compare Heroku VS Engine Yard Cloud 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.

Engine Yard Cloud logo Engine Yard Cloud

Deploy and scale Rails applications in the cloud
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • Engine Yard Cloud Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-17

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 Herokuโ€™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
    Herokuโ€™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 Herokuโ€™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 Herokuโ€™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.

Engine Yard Cloud features and specs

  • Managed Services
    Engine Yard provides fully managed services, which means that server and application maintenance tasks, such as scaling, backups, and patching, are taken care of by the platform, reducing the operational burden on development teams.
  • Ease of Use
    The platform is designed for simplicity and ease of use, featuring a user-friendly interface that enables developers to deploy and manage applications without needing deep expertise in infrastructure management.
  • Scalability
    Engine Yard offers automatic scaling capabilities, allowing applications to handle increased load by dynamically allocating resources, ensuring high availability and performance.
  • Support for Ruby on Rails
    Engine Yard has strong support for Ruby on Rails applications, providing optimized environments and tools specifically designed for Ruby developers, which can enhance productivity and deployment speed.
  • Expert Support
    Users have access to dedicated support from a team of cloud experts who can assist with troubleshooting, optimization, and best practices, ensuring smooth operation of applications.

Possible disadvantages of Engine Yard Cloud

  • Cost
    Engine Yard's managed services may be more expensive compared to some other cloud providers, especially for startups or smaller projects that might not require extensive managed support.
  • Limited Language Support
    The platform has a strong focus on Ruby and related technologies; however, it may not support as wide a range of programming languages and frameworks as some other cloud platforms.
  • Customization Constraints
    While Engine Yard offers robust managed services, the platform may limit certain customization options for infrastructure, making it less flexible for developers who need fine-grained control over their environments.
  • Potential Lock-in
    Using Engine Yard's services heavily can lead to vendor lock-in, as migration away from the platform might require considerable effort, especially if leveraging their specific tools and optimizations.
  • Performance Overhead
    Some users might experience performance overhead introduced by the abstraction layer of managed services, as opposed to bare-metal or more directly managed cloud solutions.

Analysis of Heroku

Overall verdict

  • Heroku is a solid choice for developers seeking a straightforward, cloud-based solution for deploying and managing applications. However, it may not be the most cost-effective option for large-scale or data-intensive applications.

Why this product is good

  • Heroku is a popular platform as a service (PaaS) due to its ease of use, fast deployment process, and robust support for multiple programming languages. It allows developers to focus on building applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Heroku offers scaling capabilities, a wide variety of add-ons, and a strong developer community.

Recommended for

    Heroku is recommended for startups, small to medium-sized applications, hobby projects, and developers who value ease of use and quick deployment cycles. It is particularly suited for those who are developing web applications in languages such as Ruby, Node.js, Python, and others supported by the platform.

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

Engine Yard Cloud videos

Rails Conf 2013 Engine Yard Cloud by Edward Chiu & PJ Hagerty

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and Engine Yard Cloud)
Cloud Computing
95 95%
5% 5
Cloud Hosting
93 93%
7% 7
Developer Tools
97 97%
3% 3
VPS
94 94%
6% 6

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 Engine Yard Cloud

Heroku Reviews

  1. Useful Cloud Platform

    Great service to build, run and manage applications entirely in the cloud!

    ๐Ÿ Competitors: Amazon AWS, Dokku on Digital Ocean, Firebase
    ๐Ÿ‘ Pros:    Easy user interface|Good customer service|Multi-language cloud application platform
    ๐Ÿ‘Ž Cons:    Limitation with some addons|Low network performance
  2. jamestelford
    ยท Full Stack Developer at OutDev ยท
    ๐Ÿ Competitors: Docker, Amazon AWS
    ๐Ÿ‘ Pros:    Powerful development environments|Great value for the money|Great customer support|Paas

10 Top Firebase Alternatives to Ignite Your Development in 2024
Herokuโ€™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 Herokuโ€™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 โ€“ 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.jsโ€™ 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 doesnโ€™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.

Engine Yard Cloud Reviews

We have no reviews of Engine Yard Cloud yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroku seems to be a lot more popular than Engine Yard Cloud. While we know about 73 links to Heroku, we've tracked only 1 mention of Engine Yard Cloud. 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)

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Engine Yard Cloud mentions (1)

  • How To Find Top Ruby on Rails Engineers In This Market
    Several early-on employees went on to start and work at exciting startups. One of our first Office Managers took on the first non-technical role at a startup called GitHub. Other alums went onto places like GitHub, EngineYard, Kongregate, Amazon Web Services, and Stripe to name a few. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Heroku and Engine Yard Cloud, you can also consider the following products

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

Jelastic - Jelastic is a cloud PaaS and CaaS for hosting providers, ISVs, DevOps and enterprises. It can be used for Public, Private, Hybrid and Multi-Cloud deployments.

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

Clever Cloud - Clever Cloud helps developers deploy and run their apps with bulletproof infrastructure, automatic scaling, fair pricing and other cool features.

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

Cloud Foundry - Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services, making it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications from an IDE or the command line.