Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroku VS SEMRush

Compare Heroku VS SEMRush 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.

SEMRush logo SEMRush

All-in-one Marketing Toolkit for digital marketing professionals.
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • SEMRush Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-08-24

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.

SEMRush features and specs

  • Comprehensive SEO Toolkit
    SEMRush provides a wide range of tools for keyword research, competitive analysis, backlink analysis, site audit, and more, making it a one-stop-shop for all SEO needs.
  • Accurate Data
    Known for providing accurate and updated data which is crucial for making informed SEO decisions.
  • Competitive Analysis
    Offers extensive competitor analysis features, helping businesses understand their competitors' strategies and improve their own.
  • In-depth Reports
    Creates detailed reports that offer valuable insights into performance metrics and areas for improvement.
  • User-friendly Interface
    The platform is designed with a user-friendly interface, making it accessible even for beginners in SEO.

Possible disadvantages of SEMRush

  • Pricing
    SEMRush pricing can be relatively high, especially for small businesses and freelancers.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite being user-friendly, the sheer depth of features can present a steep learning curve for new users.
  • Data Limits
    Certain features and data exports are limited based on the subscription plan, which can be restrictive for high-volume users.
  • Customer Support
    While customer support is generally good, some users have reported slow response times during peak periods.
  • Occasional Inconsistencies
    Some users have reported occasional inconsistencies in search volume and backlink data.

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.

Analysis of SEMRush

Overall verdict

  • SEMRush is considered an excellent tool for digital marketers due to its wide range of features and reliable data. It is especially beneficial for businesses and marketers who want to enhance their SEO strategies and gain a competitive edge in the digital space. While it can be on the pricier side, the value it provides in terms of actionable insights and enhanced marketing strategies justifies the investment for many users.

Why this product is good

  • SEMRush is a comprehensive digital marketing tool that is highly regarded for its robust features designed to improve online visibility and optimize content marketing strategies. It offers extensive SEO tools, including keyword research, site auditing, competitor analysis, and backlink tracking. Additionally, SEMRush provides tools for PPC campaigns, social media monitoring, and content optimization. Its user-friendly interface and detailed analytics make it a favorite among digital marketers seeking data-driven insights to boost their online performance.

Recommended for

    SEMRush is particularly recommended for SEO specialists, digital marketing agencies, content marketers, and businesses of all sizes who are serious about improving their search engine rankings and digital marketing strategies. It is also suitable for PPC managers and social media strategists who need comprehensive tools for campaign analysis and tracking.

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

SEMRush videos

SEMRush Review 2020 ☑️ Best Keyword Research Tool in 2020? 😱 SEMRush Tutorial

More videos:

  • Tutorial - SEMRush Review 2019 and Full SEMRush Tutorial on How to Use SEMRush
  • Tutorial - SEMRush Review and Tutorial: How Good Is It Really?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and SEMRush)
Cloud Computing
100 100%
0% 0
SEO
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud Hosting
100 100%
0% 0
SEO Tools
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 SEMRush

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.

SEMRush Reviews

  1. fraserstewart
    · CCO at Lyfeguard ·
    Fantastic platform but introduce a ‘starter tier’

    Can’t knock the platform - it’s great. I feel like they should have a paid-for offering at a lower price point, however. Strongly recommend!

  2. Mohit Gupta
    · Small Business Owner at SmokeHub ·
    Easy to use with limited trail but prices are high expensive - Semrush

    Semrush is very popular and next level performance tool which varies competitors, analyzes and tracking of any domain website, which provides you full information what's the position of the website, overall traffic, etc. This tool is easy to use with limited trial 7 days, after the trial ends, has limited features work on free plan. There plans are very expensive, not affordable at purchasing price plans.

    In my experience, semrush is very costly and high level of experience.

    🏁 Competitors: Ahrefs, Moz, SE Ranking, Marketing Miner
    👍 Pros:    Real-time analytics|Excellent features|Simple yet powerful and efficient tool
    👎 Cons:    Pricing is too high|Limited features with free plan.
  3. Dorian Leone
    · Webmaster at Competitive Insight ·
    Great keyword tracking platform, shame they removed the display advertising report

    SEMrush provides a great central hub for adding your websites as projects which can be tracked, audited and measured for visibility over time. I've used the platform across many roles and found the only recent drawback was the removal of their display advertising competitor reports.

    🏁 Competitors: Serpstat

The 16 Best Moz Alternatives for Every Budget 
If you run local SEO campaigns, Semrush has a whole set of tools called Semrush Local that are just for that purpose. You can add this tool kit on to a standard Semrush subscription or purchase it separately.
10 SE Ranking Alternatives in 2025 [Free and Paid]
SEMrush is ideal for users who need a comprehensive suite that goes beyond SEO, including content marketing and PPC management, making it perfect for digital marketers with diverse needs. Its extensive feature set offers a broader range of capabilities compared to SE Ranking.
10 Moz Pro Alternatives in 2025 [Free and Paid]
SEMrush is an all-in-one marketing platform that offers a broader range of tools compared to Moz Pro. SEMrush includes features such as keyword research, site audits, and backlink analysis, but it also extends into content marketing, social media management, and PPC.
Top 5 SEO Automation Tools for Agencies
By now, you’ve seen how each of these top SEO automation tools can help your agency thrive in 2025. The right choice for you depends on your agency’s focus and challenges. If you need to quickly optimize on-page elements at scale, a tool like ClickRank or Alli AI might be your best bet for automating those tasks. If you’re looking for a complete done-for-you AI assistant,...
Screaming Frog Alternative
SemRush - SemRush’s technical SEO tools will allow you to crawl your website similar to Screaming Frog. SemRush also provides comprehensive keyword research tools of course, and a powerful toolset for any SEO. Pricing starts at $139.95 per month for one user.
Source: metamonster.ai

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroku should be more popular than SEMRush. 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 / 8 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 / 12 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 / almost 2 years 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

SEMRush mentions (18)

  • SEO 101: A Fun and Easy Guide to Crushing It in Digital Marketing
    Unveiling the Advanced SEO Strategies: 1. Strategic Keyword Domination: Identify high-value, long-tail keywords relevant to your niche. Leverage keyword mapping to align content with specific stages of the customer journey. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush offer advanced keyword research capabilities. 2. Content Excellence Beyond Basics: Craft content that not only targets keywords but provides value and... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Research tools for niche/product competition?
    I use SEMRush (semrush.com/) a lot when researching a niche. I would input the URL of a competitor, and then examine "competitors of organic key words" -- to find related websites that compete with the input URL website. I would spent hours and hours in researching and documenting a list of competitors in different niches. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • The blackout isn’t just for subreddits. Users need to participate too.
    Https://www.similarweb.com/ and https://semrush.com they are not 100% accurate but they are a good indicator. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • How is your content production workflow?
    Each day that I write, I create the post directly in Wordpress. I use Surfer for Content optimization and sometimes SEMrush to help with keyword research, but I’m not super strict about following the suggestions. I try to keep it as natural as possible. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Need to up my SEO game.
    If you're looking to up your SEO game, there are several strategies you can try. One approach is to conduct thorough keyword research to identify the phrases and terms your target audience is using to search for businesses like yours. Tools like SEMrush and SurferSEO can be helpful. From there, you can optimize your website content, including titles, meta descriptions, and body copy, to incorporate these keywords... Source: about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Ahrefs - Ahrefs is a toolset for SEO and marketing. We have tools for backlink research, organic traffic research, keyword research, content marketing & more. Give Ahrefs a try!

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

Moz - Backed by industry-leading data and the largest community of SEOs on the planet, Moz builds tools that make inbound marketing easy.

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

SE Ranking - All-in-One cloud-based SEO software for agencies, marketing teams and webmasters