AppHarbor vs Heroku

Overview

Heroku

Stacks25.8K

Followers20.5K

Votes3.2K

AppHarbor

Stacks17

Followers24

Votes28

AppHarbor vs Heroku: What are the differences?

Developers describe AppHarbor as "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. On the other hand, Heroku is detailed as "Build, deliver, monitor and scale web apps and APIs with a trail blazing developer experience". 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.

AppHarbor and Heroku can be categorized as "Platform as a Service" tools.

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, Heroku provides the following key features:

Agile deployment for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, Go and Scala.
Run and scale any type of app.
Total visibility across your entire app.

"Has a totally free account option" is the top reason why over 7 developers like AppHarbor, while over 694 developers mention "Easy deployment" as the leading cause for choosing Heroku.

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CLI (Node.js)

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Advice on Heroku, AppHarbor

Alex

Oct 20, 2020

Decided

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.

101k views101k

Comments

Ben

Web Designer & Developer at Self-employed

Apr 12, 2022

Decided

As I was running through freeCodeCamp's curriculum, I was becoming frustrated by Replit's black box nature as a shared server solution for Node app testing. I wanted to move into a proper workflow with Git and a dedicated deployment solution just for educational or non-commercial purposes. Heroku solved that for me in spades.

Not only does Heroku support free app deployment if you don't use their extra service handlers, but you can directly hook into your GitHub repos and automatically update the app whenever you commit to the main branch. It's a simple way to get an app running as fast as possible if you wish to share a proof of concept or prototype before moving to dedicated servers.

18.1k views18.1k

Comments

Alejandro

May 13, 2022

Review

I recently came across a training course on using Django and React together. That got me thinking about how to serve up the project and remember that Heroku had a great interface for serving up my Django/Python App so I would think it should work. Figured I would throw in my 2 cents, not sure if it helps.

1.26k views1.26k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Heroku	AppHarbor
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.	AppHarbor is a fully hosted .NET Platform as a Service. AppHarbor can deploy and scale any standard .NET application to the cloud.
Agile deployment for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, Go and Scala.;Run and scale any type of app.;Total visibility across your entire app.;Erosion-resistant architecture. Rich control surfaces.	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.
Statistics
Stacks 25.8K	Stacks 17
Followers 20.5K	Followers 24
Votes 3.2K	Votes 28
Pros & Cons
Pros 703 Easy deployment 459 Free for side projects 374 Huge time-saver 348 Simple scaling 261 Low devops skills required Cons 27 Super expensive 9 Not a whole lot of flexibility 7 Storage 7 No usable MySQL option 5 Low performance on free tier	Pros 8 Has a totally free account option 2 GitHub integration 2 Low cost 2 PostgreSQL 2 Relational database
Integrations
Mailgun Postmark Loggly Papertrail Redis Cloud Red Hat Codeready Workspaces Nitrous.IO Logentries MongoLab Gemfury	Blitz Cloudant Logentries Compose MongoLab New Relic Redis To Go Twilio SendGrid MemCachier Cloudinary

What are some alternatives to Heroku, AppHarbor?

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

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.

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.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

Hasura

An open source GraphQL engine that deploys instant, realtime GraphQL APIs on any Postgres database.

Cloud 66

Cloud 66 gives you everything you need to build, deploy and maintain your applications on any cloud, without the headache of dealing with "server stuff". Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Jamstack, Laravel, GoLang, and more.

Jelastic

Jelastic is a Multi-Cloud DevOps PaaS for ISVs, telcos, service providers and enterprises needing to speed up development, reduce cost of IT infrastructure, improve uptime and security.

Dokku

It is an extensible, open source Platform as a Service that runs on a single server of your choice. It helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications from building to scaling.

PythonAnywhere

It's somewhat unique. A small PaaS that supports web apps (Python only) as well as scheduled jobs with shell access. It is an expensive way to tinker and run several small apps.

Related Comparisons

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, Heroku provides the following key features:

Agile deployment for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, Go and Scala.
Run and scale any type of app.
Total visibility across your entire app.

"Has a totally free account option" is the top reason why over 7 developers like AppHarbor, while over 694 developers mention "Easy deployment" as the leading cause for choosing Heroku.

AppHarbor vs Heroku