AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Heroku

Overview

Heroku

Stacks25.8K

Followers20.5K

Votes3.2K

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Stacks2.1K

Followers1.8K

Votes241

AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Heroku: What are the differences?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Heroku are both Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions that simplify application deployment and management. Here are the key differences between AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Heroku:

Platform and Flexibility: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS offering from AWS. It allows developers to deploy and manage applications in various programming languages, including Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, and more. It provides more control over the underlying infrastructure, allowing users to configure and customize their environment settings. In contrast, Heroku is a cloud-based PaaS platform. While Heroku supports multiple programming languages, it abstracts much of the infrastructure management, focusing on ease of deployment and scalability. It provides a more streamlined experience for developers but may have limitations on customizing the underlying infrastructure.
Deployment and Scaling: Elastic Beanstalk provides more options for environment configurations, including the ability to choose different instance types and network settings. It also offers features like Auto Scaling and Load Balancing to automatically adjust resources based on traffic. Heroku, on the other hand, follows a more opinionated approach to scaling. It automatically scales applications based on the selected dyno (unit of computing capacity), simplifying the scaling process for developers.
Pricing and Cost Control: AWS Elastic Beanstalk pricing is based on the resources consumed by the underlying infrastructure, such as instances, storage, and data transfer. In contrast, Heroku pricing is more straightforward, with a pay-as-you-go model based on the number of dyno hours used. While Heroku offers simplicity in pricing, it may become more cost-effective or expensive depending on the application's specific resource needs.
Ecosystem and Integration: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is part of the larger AWS ecosystem, which means it seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as Amazon RDS for databases, Amazon S3 for storage, and more. Heroku, while not as tightly integrated with AWS, offers its own ecosystem of add-ons and extensions through the Heroku Elements marketplace, providing developers with a variety of third-party services and tools.

In summary, AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides more control and customization over the underlying infrastructure, making it suitable for developers who want a flexible and configurable environment within the AWS ecosystem. Heroku, on the other hand, offers a streamlined and developer-friendly experience with automatic scaling and easy deployment, making it an excellent choice for developers seeking simplicity and rapid application deployment without worrying about infrastructure management.

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Advice on Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk

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

Mehdi

Managing Director at Gigadrive

Sep 17, 2022

Decided

Platform.sh has great out-of-the-box support for PHP apps (especially Symfony, as it was made by the same people). Elastic Beanstalk does not have a lot of compelling PaaS features like Platform.sh. There, you have to install a lot of PHP extensions manually for example, while Platform.sh just handles it for you based on your config. Elastic Beanstalk also has terrible version updates (see link).

13.6k views13.6k

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

Detailed Comparison

Heroku	AWS Elastic Beanstalk
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.	Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.
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.	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;Impossible to outgrow – Elastic Beanstalk automatically scales your application up and down based on default Auto Scaling settings;Complete control – Elastic Beanstalk lets you "open the hood" and retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application;Flexible – You have the freedom to select the Amazon EC2 instance type that is optimal for your application based on CPU and memory requirements, and can choose from several available database options;Reliable – Elastic Beanstalk runs within Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters, and provides an environment where developers can run applications requiring high durability and availability.
Statistics
Stacks 25.8K	Stacks 2.1K
Followers 20.5K	Followers 1.8K
Votes 3.2K	Votes 241
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 No usable MySQL option 7 Storage 5 Low performance on free tier	Pros 77 Integrates with other aws services 65 Simple deployment 44 Fast 28 Painless 16 Free Cons 2 Charges appear automatically after exceeding free quota 1 Lots of moving parts and config 0 Slow deployments
Integrations
Mailgun Postmark Loggly Papertrail Redis Cloud Red Hat Codeready Workspaces Nitrous.IO Logentries MongoLab Gemfury	Docker Papertrail

What are some alternatives to Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

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.

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.

CapRover

It is an extremely easy to use app/database deployment & web server manager for your NodeJS, Python, PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby, MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres, WordPress (and etc...) applications! It's blazingly fast and very robust as it uses Docker, nginx, LetsEncrypt and NetData under the hood behind its simple-to-use interface.

Related Comparisons

Platform and Flexibility: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS offering from AWS. It allows developers to deploy and manage applications in various programming languages, including Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, and more. It provides more control over the underlying infrastructure, allowing users to configure and customize their environment settings. In contrast, Heroku is a cloud-based PaaS platform. While Heroku supports multiple programming languages, it abstracts much of the infrastructure management, focusing on ease of deployment and scalability. It provides a more streamlined experience for developers but may have limitations on customizing the underlying infrastructure.
Deployment and Scaling: Elastic Beanstalk provides more options for environment configurations, including the ability to choose different instance types and network settings. It also offers features like Auto Scaling and Load Balancing to automatically adjust resources based on traffic. Heroku, on the other hand, follows a more opinionated approach to scaling. It automatically scales applications based on the selected dyno (unit of computing capacity), simplifying the scaling process for developers.
Pricing and Cost Control: AWS Elastic Beanstalk pricing is based on the resources consumed by the underlying infrastructure, such as instances, storage, and data transfer. In contrast, Heroku pricing is more straightforward, with a pay-as-you-go model based on the number of dyno hours used. While Heroku offers simplicity in pricing, it may become more cost-effective or expensive depending on the application's specific resource needs.
Ecosystem and Integration: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is part of the larger AWS ecosystem, which means it seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as Amazon RDS for databases, Amazon S3 for storage, and more. Heroku, while not as tightly integrated with AWS, offers its own ecosystem of add-ons and extensions through the Heroku Elements marketplace, providing developers with a variety of third-party services and tools.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Heroku