Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroku VS NotificationAPI

Compare Heroku VS NotificationAPI 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.

NotificationAPI logo NotificationAPI

A managed and scalable solution for easily creating and managing user notifications.
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • NotificationAPI Website
    Website //
    2025-02-04

Design your notifications in our dashboard, then integrate them into your software with a few lines of code. No other third-parties, no email HTML, no A2P registrations, no websocket management.

NotificationAPI comes with:

Heroku

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

NotificationAPI

$ Details
freemium
Platforms
Node JS Python Java JavaScript .Net TypeScript PHP Go Ruby ReactJS React Native Angular Vue Android iOS
Release Date
2020 May
Startup details
Country
Canada

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.

NotificationAPI features and specs

  • Email
    Built-in email delivery, comprehensive email editor, dedicated IP
  • SMS / Voice
    Built-in SMS delivery, automatic A2P 10DLC registration
  • Realtime In-App
    Low code in-app notifications widget in your front-end
  • Push (iOS, Android, RN, Browser)
    Built-in management of push tokens
  • Less Code
    Notification batching, digest, scheduling
  • Less Bugs
    Notification throttling and deduplication
  • Compliance
    Built-in compliance with Google bulk sender policy, managed A2P 10DLC registration and requirements for other regions
  • Back-End SDKs
    Node, PHP, .NET, Python, Go
  • Front-End Support
    JavaScript, React, Next, Angular, React Native, Vue, Astro

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:

NotificationAPI videos

No NotificationAPI videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and NotificationAPI)
Cloud Computing
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
96 96%
4% 4
Cloud Hosting
100 100%
0% 0
Push Notifications
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Heroku and NotificationAPI.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

NotificationAPI's answer:

Our happy users (developers) are those who don't want to spend weeks or a fortune to get their notification project done.

How would you describe your primary audience?

NotificationAPI's answer:

Technical managers and developers who care about their team's velocity and shipping their roadmap asap.

What makes your product unique?

NotificationAPI's answer:

NotificationAPI is the fastest way to implement user notifications in your product. Some B2B SaaS products roll out all their notification requirements in a couple of days using NotificationAPI.

What's the story behind your product?

NotificationAPI's answer:

In 2015, I (Sahand) was the CTO of this successful VC-backed B2B SaaS company in Canada, where the notification system was both critical and problematic. Between complex infra and logic, messaging policies and regulations, and many notification items on the roadmap, nobody was happy with notifications. Not users, developers, or the non-technical team.

"There must be a 3rd-party for this," I thought, so I googled "Notification API" and found nothing. Am I missing something here? Isn't this a big enough problem? I queried Jira and found that notifications comprised 5% of our Done tasks. We had spent 5% of our WHOLE productivity on something that was already broken.

Over the next few years, as we solved each of these challenges, we learned about all sorts of bottlenecks and pain points, realizing the need for a developer tool to solve user notifications for developers.

After successfully exiting that company, we officially started NotificationAPI as an independent company in 2020.

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

NotificationAPI's answer:

  • Hydac
  • Spellbook
  • Bluedrop

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 NotificationAPI

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.

NotificationAPI Reviews

We have no reviews of NotificationAPI yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroku seems to be more popular. 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)

View more

NotificationAPI mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of NotificationAPI yet. Tracking of NotificationAPI recommendations started around Mar 2024.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Knock App - Power your product notifications with Segment and Hightouch.

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

Novu - The ultimate library for managing multi-channel transactional notifications with a single API.

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

SuprSend - Single Notification API for Every Channel (SMS, Slack, Whatsapp, Email, SMS, Push, App Inbox)