Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

UpCloud VS Heroku

Compare UpCloud VS Heroku and see what are their differences

UpCloud logo UpCloud

World's fastest cloud servers with a 100% uptime SLA!

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.
  • UpCloud Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-14
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05

UpCloud

Release Date
2011 January
Startup details
Country
Finland
City
Helsinki
Founder(s)
Joel Pihlajamaa
Employees
10 - 19

UpCloud features and specs

  • High Performance
    UpCloud offers high-performance cloud servers with faster-than-SSD storage, which improves application speed and reliability.
  • Customization
    Users have a wide range of customization options for their server configurations, allowing tailored solutions for different needs.
  • Global Data Centers
    UpCloud has data centers in multiple locations around the world, providing global reach and redundancy.
  • 99.99% Uptime SLA
    UpCloud guarantees a 99.99% uptime SLA, ensuring high reliability and availability for hosted services.
  • Flexible Pricing
    The platform offers flexible pricing models, including pay-per-hour billing, which can be economical for certain use cases.
  • Free Trial
    New users can take advantage of a free trial to test the service before committing financially.

Possible disadvantages of UpCloud

  • Limited Managed Services
    UpCloud primarily provides infrastructure as a service, which means fewer managed services compared to competitors.
  • Smaller Ecosystem
    Compared to larger competitors, UpCloud has a smaller ecosystem of third-party integrations and community support.
  • Complexity for Beginners
    The platform may be complex for beginners or small businesses without technical expertise to set up and manage.
  • Higher Cost at Scale
    While flexible, the pricing can become higher compared to competitors when scaled to larger infrastructure needs.

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.

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.

UpCloud videos

UpCloud - Review and Introduction (Best Cloud Service Provider)

More videos:

  • Review - Deploy UpCloud server instance

Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

More videos:

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to UpCloud and Heroku)
Cloud Computing
9 9%
91% 91
VPS
27 27%
73% 73
Cloud Hosting
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud Infrastructure
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare UpCloud and Heroku

UpCloud Reviews

8 Best Free VPS Trials In 2024 [No Credit Card Required]
UpCloud started its journey in 2012 from Helsinki. They are a European cloud-based hosting service provider with a fast and reliable cloud platform.
13 Best Windows VPS and Cloud Hosting Platform
UpCloud is a European cloud service provider that provides on an hourly billed infrastructure-as-a-service. You can choose to host your Windows VM in their following 10 datacenters.
Source: geekflare.com
Best Vultr Alternatives and Competitor Cloud Services of 2022
UpCloud claims to offer the fastest cloud with a 100% SLA uptime guarantee otherwise, you’ll be rewarded with 50x payback for any downtime longer than 5 minutes. The infrastructure is backed by an N+1 protocol to avoid a single point of failure, which means redundant networking. If you’re moving from your old provider to Upcloud, there are no charges for data migration, it’s...

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.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroku seems to be a lot more popular than UpCloud. While we know about 73 links to Heroku, we've tracked only 7 mentions of UpCloud. 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.

UpCloud mentions (7)

  • Beyond the Buzzwords: The Relevance of DORA Metrics in Contemporary Cloud Hosting for Developers
    UpCloud: Performance for Developers. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2024)
    UpCloud | https://upcloud.com | Helsinki, Finland or UTC+/-2 UpCloud is a leading European cloud service provider with a global cloud platform spanning four continents. We're hiring for our Managed Kubernetes (https://upcloud.com/products/managed-kubernetes) platform: * Senior Software Engineer — Kubernetes Infrastructure: https://jobs.upcloud.com/o/senior-engineer-kubernetes * Lead Software Engineer — Kubernetes... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • How we built a 1% website in 3 days for €7
    Plus finally, €7 per month on servers from UpCloud - Simply an amazing cloud provider I've worked with for years. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • What is the easiest cloud server provider to get started with?
    Another one for smaller and easier clouds is UpCloud (https://upcloud.com/). Source: over 3 years ago
  • Vantage Launches AWS Cost Saving Recommendations
    Did a quick search and didn't see UpCloud mentioned. Having used AWS, GCP, Azure and DigitalOcean, one of the strong points of UpCloud (except for their pricing and product offerings) have been their customer interaction. Hands down the best experience I've ever had both from support and sales. I reached out to support 2:15AM in their live chat and got my issues resolved as we spoke. Good luck getting that with... - Source: Hacker News / almost 4 years ago
View more

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
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What are some alternatives?

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

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

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

Vultr - VULTR Global Cloud Hosting - Brilliantly Fast SSD VPS Cloud Servers. 100% KVM Virtualization

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

OVH Cloud - OVHcloud provides cloud solutions to meet all of your IT needs. With cutting edge cloud technology, come view our solutions by industry or use case.

GoDaddy - GoDaddy makes registering Domain Names fast, simple, and affordable. Find out why so many business owners chose GoDaddy to be their Domain Name Registrar.