AppHarbor vs AWS Elastic Beanstalk: What are the differences?

What is AppHarbor? Instantly deploy and scale .NET applications. AppHarbor is a fully hosted .NET Platform as a Service. AppHarbor can deploy and scale any standard .NET application to the cloud.

What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk? Quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

AppHarbor and AWS Elastic Beanstalk belong to "Platform as a Service" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by AppHarbor are:

• You push .NET and Windows code to AppHarbor using Git, Mercurial, Subversion or Team Foundation Server with the complimentary Git service or through integrations offered in collaboration with Bitbucket, CodePlex and GitHub.
• When AppHarbor receives your code it will be built by a build server. If the code compiles all unit tests contained in the compiled assemblies will be run. The result and progress of the build and unit test status can be monitored on the application dashboard. AppHarbor will call any service hooks that you add to notify you of the build result.
• If everything checks out the application is deployed and configured on AppHarbor application servers. AppHarbor can scale an application vertically and horizontally within seconds for better request throughout, performance and failover. AppHarbor balance load across all instances running that application. Scaling an application gives higher request thoughput, redundancy in case of instance failure and better performance.

On the other hand, AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides the following key features:

• Elastic Beanstalk is built using familiar software stacks such as the Apache HTTP Server for Node.js, PHP and Python, Passenger for Ruby, IIS 7.5 for .NET, and Apache Tomcat for Java
• There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk - you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications.
• Easy to begin – Elastic Beanstalk is a quick and simple way to deploy your application to AWS. You simply use the AWS Management Console, Git deployment, or an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Eclipse or Visual Studio to upload your application

"Has a totally free account option" is the primary reason why developers consider AppHarbor over the competitors, whereas "Integrates with other aws services" was stated as the key factor in picking AWS Elastic Beanstalk.