Get Advice Icon

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

AppFog

7
24
+ 1
14
Google App Engine

10.3K
8K
+ 1
611
Heroku

25.6K
20.4K
+ 1
3.2K
Decisions about AppFog, Google App Engine, and Heroku

The Friendliest.app started on Heroku (both app and db) like most of my projects. The db on Heroku was on the cusp of becoming prohibitively expensive for this project.

After looking at options and reading recommendations we settled on Render to host both the application and db. Render's pricing model seems to scale more linearly with the application instead of the large pricing/performance jumps experienced with Heroku.

Migration to Render was extremely easy and we were able to complete both the db and application moves within 24 hours.

The only thing we're really missing on Render is a CLI. With Heroku, we could manage everything from the command line in VSCode. With Render, you need to use the web shell they provide.

See more

I'm transitioning to Render from heroku. The pricing scale matches my usage scale, yet it's just as easy to deploy. It's removed a lot of the devops that I don't like to deal with on setting up my own raw *nix box and makes deployment simple and easy!

Clustering I don't use clustering features at the moment but when i need to set up clustering of nodes and discoverability, render will enable that where Heroku would require that I use an external service like redis.

Restarts The restarts are annoying. I understand the reasoning, but I'd rather watch my service if its got a memory leak and work to fix it than to just assume that it has memory leaks and needs to restart.

See more
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More
Pros of AppFog
Pros of Google App Engine
Pros of Heroku
  • 4
    Allocate multiple instances to one app for free
  • 4
    The basic plan is free
  • 3
    Pricing by memory size
  • 2
    Great for startups
  • 1
    10 Free instances
  • 145
    Easy to deploy
  • 106
    Auto scaling
  • 80
    Good free plan
  • 62
    Easy management
  • 56
    Scalability
  • 35
    Low cost
  • 32
    Comprehensive set of features
  • 28
    All services in one place
  • 22
    Simple scaling
  • 19
    Quick and reliable cloud servers
  • 6
    Granular Billing
  • 5
    Easy to develop and unit test
  • 5
    Monitoring gives comprehensive set of key indicators
  • 3
    Really easy to quickly bring up a full stack
  • 3
    Create APIs quickly with cloud endpoints
  • 2
    No Ops
  • 2
    Mostly up
  • 703
    Easy deployment
  • 459
    Free for side projects
  • 374
    Huge time-saver
  • 348
    Simple scaling
  • 261
    Low devops skills required
  • 190
    Easy setup
  • 174
    Add-ons for almost everything
  • 153
    Beginner friendly
  • 150
    Better for startups
  • 133
    Low learning curve
  • 48
    Postgres hosting
  • 41
    Easy to add collaborators
  • 30
    Faster development
  • 24
    Awesome documentation
  • 19
    Simple rollback
  • 19
    Focus on product, not deployment
  • 15
    Natural companion for rails development
  • 15
    Easy integration
  • 12
    Great customer support
  • 8
    GitHub integration
  • 6
    Painless & well documented
  • 6
    No-ops
  • 4
    I love that they make it free to launch a side project
  • 4
    Free
  • 3
    Great UI
  • 3
    Just works
  • 2
    PostgreSQL forking and following
  • 2
    MySQL extension
  • 1
    Security
  • 1
    Able to host stuff good like Discord Bot
  • 0
    Sec

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of AppFog
Cons of Google App Engine
Cons of Heroku
    Be the first to leave a con
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 27
        Super expensive
      • 9
        Not a whole lot of flexibility
      • 7
        No usable MySQL option
      • 7
        Storage
      • 5
        Low performance on free tier
      • 2
        24/7 support is $1,000 per month

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      332
      407
      186
      8.7K
      35.3K
      47.1K
      6.4K
      1.8K
      43.6K

      What is AppFog?

      AppFog provides the infrastructure web developers need to build apps without worrying about IT tasks or having to wait days to get servers ready for writing code. AppFog’s web application technologies include PHP, NodeJS, Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

      What is Google App Engine?

      Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

      What is Heroku?

      Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      What companies use AppFog?
      What companies use Google App Engine?
      What companies use Heroku?

      Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

      What tools integrate with AppFog?
      What tools integrate with Google App Engine?
      What tools integrate with Heroku?

      Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

      Blog Posts

      Sep 29 2020 at 7:36PM

      WorkOS

      PythonSlackG Suite+17
      6
      3209
      GitHubPythonNode.js+47
      55
      72989
      GitHubPythonSlack+25
      7
      3256
      Jun 19 2015 at 6:37AM

      ReadMe.io

      JavaScriptGitHubNode.js+25
      12
      2542
      GitHubPythonDocker+24
      13
      17122
      What are some alternatives to AppFog, Google App Engine, and Heroku?
      Red Hat OpenShift
      OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
      NGINX
      nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
      Apache HTTP Server
      The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.
      Amazon EC2
      It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
      Firebase
      Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.
      See all alternatives