Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroku VS Smallstep SSH

Compare Heroku VS Smallstep SSH 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.

Smallstep SSH logo Smallstep SSH

Single Sign-on SSH
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • Smallstep SSH Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-04

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.

Smallstep SSH features and specs

  • Enhanced Security
    Smallstep SSH enables strong authentication practices by integrating with identity providers, reducing the chances of compromised passwords and ensuring secure connections.
  • Centralized Access Management
    The platform centralizes user access management, allowing admins to easily manage and revoke user access across multiple servers and services from a single point of control.
  • Ease of Integration
    Smallstep SSH integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructure and identity providers like Okta and Google Workspace, simplifying the onboarding process for enterprises.
  • Improved Compliance
    With detailed logging and custom policies, Smallstep SSH helps organizations meet various compliance requirements by offering traceability and accountability for user actions.
  • Scalability
    Designed with scalability in mind, Smallstep SSH can efficiently handle growing organizational needs without sacrificing performance or security.

Possible disadvantages of Smallstep SSH

  • Complexity of Setup
    For organizations unfamiliar with identity provider integrations or certificate-based authentication, the initial setup can be complex and may require specialized knowledge.
  • Dependence on External Identity Providers
    Reliance on external identity providers for authentication means that downtime or disruptions with these services can impact Smallstep SSH functionality.
  • Limited Offline Access
    Because the solution is designed to work with identity providers, offline mode functionality is limited, which might be a concern for systems that require constant availability.
  • Cost Considerations
    For small organizations or startups, the cost of implementing and maintaining an enterprise-level authentication system like Smallstep SSH might be prohibitive.
  • Learning Curve
    There is a learning curve associated with transitioning from traditional SSH management to Smallstep SSH's certificate-based approach, which might necessitate training for IT staff.

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

Smallstep SSH videos

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

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and Smallstep SSH)
Cloud Computing
100 100%
0% 0
Identity And Access Management
Cloud Hosting
100 100%
0% 0
Productivity
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 Smallstep SSH

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.

Smallstep SSH Reviews

We have no reviews of Smallstep SSH yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

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

Smallstep SSH mentions (1)

  • SSH With SSO
    Through a combination of the properties that are in an SSH certificate and configuration on the hosts, you'll be able to realize RBAC. If you're using the open source step-ca, this will require you to configure things yourself on the hosts. We also have an offering where this capability and management/auditing of the rules is hosted for you, which makes that specific part easier: https://smallstep.com/sso-ssh/. Source: almost 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Keystash.io - Centralized Linux user and SSH key management software

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

BastionXP - BastionXP Identity Based Infrastructure Access Platform is a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) / Certificate Authority (CA) that creates, signs and distributes SSH, SSL X.509 certificates to servers and users upon successful SSO login via OAuth or SAML

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

Keyfactor Command - Keyfactor Command is a web-based platform that offers you AI-based tools to manage and handle the identity of the organization and allows you to access the data from any remote location as it is a cloud-based platform.