Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroku VS Travis CI

Compare Heroku VS Travis CI 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.

Travis CI logo Travis CI

Simple, flexible, trustworthy CI/CD tools. Join hundreds of thousands who define tests and deployments in minutes, then scale up simply with parallel or multi-environment builds using Travis CI’s precision syntax—all with the developer in mind.
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • Travis CI Travis CI for Simple, Flexible, Trustworthy CI/CD Tools
    Travis CI for Simple, Flexible, Trustworthy CI/CD Tools //
    2024-10-22

Founded in Berlin, Germany, in 2011, Travis CI grew quickly and became a trusted name in CI/CD, gaining popularity among software developers and engineers starting their careers. In 2019, Travis CI became part of Idera, Inc., the parent company of global B2B software productivity brands whose solutions enable technical users to work faster and do more with less.

Today, developers at 300,000 organizations use Travis CI. We often hear about the pangs of nostalgia these folks feel when they use Travis CI, as it was one of the first tools they used at the beginning of their career journey. We are still much here, supporting those who have stuck with us along the way and remaining the best next destination on your CI/CD journey, whether you’re building your first pipelines or trying to bring some thrill back into work that’s become overloaded with AI and DevSecOps complexity.

Our Mission:

We deliver the simplest and most flexible CI/CD tool to developers eager for ownership of their code quality, transparency in how they problem-solve with peers, and pride in the results they create—one LOC at a time.

Our Promise:

We aim for nothing less than to guide every developer to the next phase of their CI/CD adventure—even if that means growing beyond our platform.

Travis CI

$ Details
paid Free Trial $13.75 / Monthly (Per Month, Per User)
Release Date
2011 January

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.

Travis CI features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Travis CI offers a very user-friendly interface and straightforward setup process, making it accessible even for those new to CI/CD.
  • Integration with GitHub
    Seamlessly integrates with GitHub, allowing for automatic builds and tests triggered on pull requests and commits.
  • Wide Range of Language Support
    Supports numerous programming languages out of the box, providing built-in configurations for many common languages such as Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and Java.
  • Extensive Documentation
    Offers comprehensive and well-organized documentation, which can help users troubleshoot and understand complex setups.
  • Build Matrix
    Run your unit and integration tests across any combination of environments for comprehensive automation and absolute quality guarantees on your way to production.

Possible disadvantages of Travis CI

  • Pricing for Private Repositories
    Can become expensive for private repositories and larger teams, especially compared to some competitors that offer more generous free tiers.
  • Performance Issues
    Users have reported occasional performance issues, including slower build times and longer wait periods for queued jobs.
  • Limited Advanced Features
    Might lack some advanced features and customizations that are available in other CI/CD platforms, making it less suitable for very complex workflows.
  • Concurrency Limits
    Has limitations on the number of concurrent builds that can run, which can slow down development cycles for larger projects with many contributors.
  • Complex Configuration for Large Projects
    Configuration can become cumbersome and complex for large projects with intricate dependencies and multiple build steps.

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 Travis CI

Overall verdict

  • Travis CI is a widely used continuous integration service that is generally considered good for many development projects.

Why this product is good

  • Travis CI integrates seamlessly with GitHub, which allows for automated testing and deployment processes. It is simple to set up for open-source projects and supports multiple programming languages and operating systems. The platform's intuitive interface and extensive documentation make it accessible to both beginners and experienced developers.

Recommended for

  • Open-source projects
  • Teams looking for easy GitHub integration
  • Projects that require regular automated testing
  • Developers who value extensive community support
  • Projects with varying tech stacks, due to its multi-language support

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

Travis CI videos

Setting Up Your First Build

More videos:

  • Tutorial - CI/CD Core Concepts
  • Tutorial - How to Get Started with Travis CI in 0 to 5 Minutes

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroku and Travis CI)
Cloud Computing
100 100%
0% 0
Continuous Integration
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud Hosting
100 100%
0% 0
DevOps 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 Travis CI

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.

Travis CI Reviews

The Best Alternatives to Jenkins for Developers
Travis CI is another popular cloud-based CI/CD solution that integrates well with GitHub. Known for its simplicity and ease of setup, Travis CI is a great choice for open-source projects or teams that primarily work with GitHub repositories. Its configuration is based on a YAML file, making it easy to define and manage build workflows.
Source: morninglif.com
Top 10 Most Popular Jenkins Alternatives for DevOps in 2024
Travis CI is known for its simple setup, quick parallel builds, and support for multiple architectures, including popular enterprise options like IBM PowerPC and IBM Z. It’s claimed that pipelines require approximately 33% less configurable code than other CI/CD solutions, which helps make the platform more approachable. Use it instead of Jenkins when you want a fast...
Source: spacelift.io
10 Jenkins Alternatives in 2021 for Developers
You might find that Travis CI proudly promotes the fact that they have more than 900,000 open-source projects and 600,000 users on their platform with Travis CI. Automated deployment can be quickly established by following the tutorials and documentation that are currently available on their website.
The Best Alternatives to Jenkins for Developers
Travis CI is a continuous integration and testing CI/CD tool. It is free of cost for open source projects and provides seamless integration with GitHub. It supports more than 20 languages, like Node.js, PHP, Python, etc. along with Docker.
Continuous Integration. CircleCI vs Travis CI vs Jenkins
Travis CI is recommended for cases when you are working on the open-source projects, that should be tested in different environments.
Source: djangostars.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroku seems to be a lot more popular than Travis CI. While we know about 73 links to Heroku, we've tracked only 6 mentions of Travis CI. 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

Travis CI mentions (6)

  • Front-end Guide
    We used Travis CI for our continuous integration (CI) pipeline. Travis is a highly popular CI on Github and its build matrix feature is useful for repositories which contain multiple projects like Grab's. We configured Travis to do the following:. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Flutter
    CI/CD for autobuild + autotests (Codemagic or Travis CI). Source: over 2 years ago
  • How To Build Your First CI/CD Pipeline With Travis CI?
    Step 2: Log on to Travis CI and sign up with your GitHub account used above. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • What does a DevOps engineer actually do?
    Some other hosted CI products, such as CircleCI and Travis Cl, are completely hosted in the cloud. It is becoming more popular for small organizations to use hosted CI products, as they allow engineering teams to begin continuous integration as soon as possible. Source: almost 4 years ago
  • Hosting an Angular application on GitHub Pages using Travis CI
    1. Let's create the account. Access the site https://travis-ci.com/ and click on the button Sign up. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Jenkins - Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server with 300+ plugins to support all kinds of software development

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

CircleCI - CircleCI gives web developers powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment with easy setup and maintenance.

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

Codeship - Codeship is a fast and secure hosted Continuous Delivery platform that scales with your needs.