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Dokku vs Google App Engine vs Heroku: What are the differences?
## Introduction
These are the key differences between Dokku, Google App Engine, and Heroku.
1. **Deployment Control**: Dokku allows for more control over deployments compared to Google App Engine and Heroku. Developers can manually deploy applications and have more flexibility in managing the deployment process.
2. **Scalability**: Google App Engine offers automatic scalability with minimal configuration required, whereas Dokku and Heroku require more manual scaling adjustments. Heroku provides vertical scaling easily, while Dokku requires more configuration for horizontal scaling.
3. **Pricing**: Google App Engine has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, while Heroku and Dokku are based on the number of dynos/containers. Heroku tends to be more expensive than Dokku due to the added features and convenience it offers.
4. **Community support**: Heroku has a larger and more established community, providing extensive resources and support for developers. Dokku has a growing but smaller community, while Google App Engine's community support may not be as robust as the other two platforms.
5. **Platform Lock-In**: Google App Engine can have more vendor lock-in due to its proprietary nature, while Dokku is more open-source and can be self-hosted, providing more flexibility. Heroku falls in the middle, offering some vendor lock-in but also providing the option to export data and move to other platforms.
6. **Ease of Use**: Google App Engine is known for its ease of use with its simple deployment process and automatic scaling, making it beginner-friendly. Heroku also offers a user-friendly interface but may require more configuration for complex applications. Dokku, being a self-hosted platform, requires more setup and configuration but offers more customization options for advanced users.
In Summary, the key differences between Dokku, Google App Engine, and Heroku lie in deployment control, scalability, pricing, community support, platform lock-in, and ease of use.
Decisions about Dokku, Google App Engine, and Heroku
Kevin Williams
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.
Alex Parker
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.
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn MorePros of Dokku
Pros of Google App Engine
Pros of Heroku
Pros of Dokku
- Simple23
- Open Source12
- Built on Docker11
- Free11
- Yay, it works like a charm4
- Git deploy4
- HTTP proxy from public hostname to container IP address2
- Zero downtime deploys2
Pros of Google App Engine
- Easy to deploy145
- Auto scaling106
- Good free plan80
- Easy management62
- Scalability56
- Low cost35
- Comprehensive set of features32
- All services in one place28
- Simple scaling22
- Quick and reliable cloud servers19
- Granular Billing6
- Easy to develop and unit test5
- Monitoring gives comprehensive set of key indicators5
- Really easy to quickly bring up a full stack3
- Create APIs quickly with cloud endpoints3
- No Ops2
- Mostly up2
Pros of Heroku
- Easy deployment703
- Free for side projects459
- Huge time-saver374
- Simple scaling348
- Low devops skills required261
- Easy setup190
- Add-ons for almost everything174
- Beginner friendly153
- Better for startups150
- Low learning curve133
- Postgres hosting48
- Easy to add collaborators41
- Faster development30
- Awesome documentation24
- Simple rollback19
- Focus on product, not deployment19
- Natural companion for rails development15
- Easy integration15
- Great customer support12
- GitHub integration8
- Painless & well documented6
- No-ops6
- I love that they make it free to launch a side project4
- Free4
- Great UI3
- Just works3
- PostgreSQL forking and following2
- MySQL extension2
- Security1
- Able to host stuff good like Discord Bot1
- Sec0
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Cons of Dokku
Cons of Google App Engine
Cons of Heroku
Cons of Dokku
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Cons of Google App Engine
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Cons of Heroku
- Super expensive27
- Not a whole lot of flexibility9
- No usable MySQL option7
- Storage7
- Low performance on free tier5
- 24/7 support is $1,000 per month2
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- No public GitHub repository available -
- No public GitHub repository available -
What is 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.
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.
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Jobs that mention Dokku, Google App Engine, and Heroku as a desired skillset
What companies use Dokku?
What companies use Google App Engine?
What companies use Heroku?
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What tools integrate with Dokku?
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What are some alternatives to Dokku, Google App Engine, and Heroku?
Flynn
Flynn lets you deploy apps with git push and containers. Developers can deploy any app to any cluster in seconds.
Docker
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
Rancher
Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.
Docker Compose
With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.