Google App Engine vs Heroku vs Red Hat OpenShift

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Google App Engine

10.1K
7.9K
+ 1
611
Heroku

25.5K
20.3K
+ 1
3.2K
Red Hat OpenShift

1.5K
1.4K
+ 1
517
Decisions about Google App Engine, Heroku, and Red Hat OpenShift

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.

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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.

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Pros of Google App Engine
Pros of Heroku
Pros of Red Hat OpenShift
  • 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
  • 99
    Good free plan
  • 63
    Open Source
  • 47
    Easy setup
  • 43
    Nodejs support
  • 42
    Well documented
  • 32
    Custom domains
  • 28
    Mongodb support
  • 27
    Clean and simple architecture
  • 25
    PHP support
  • 21
    Customizable environments
  • 11
    Ability to run CRON jobs
  • 9
    Easier than Heroku for a WordPress blog
  • 8
    Easy deployment
  • 7
    PostgreSQL support
  • 7
    Autoscaling
  • 7
    Good balance between Heroku and AWS for flexibility
  • 5
    Free, Easy Setup, Lot of Gear or D.I.Y Gear
  • 4
    Shell access to gears
  • 3
    Great Support
  • 3
    High Security
  • 3
    Logging & Metrics
  • 2
    Cloud Agnostic
  • 2
    Runs Anywhere - AWS, GCP, Azure
  • 2
    No credit card needed
  • 2
    Because it is easy to manage
  • 2
    Secure
  • 2
    Meteor support
  • 2
    Overly complicated and over engineered in majority of e
  • 2
    Golang support
  • 2
    Its free and offer custom domain usage
  • 1
    Autoscaling at a good price point
  • 1
    Easy setup and great customer support
  • 1
    MultiCloud
  • 1
    Great free plan with excellent support
  • 1
    This is the only free one among the three as of today

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Cons of Google App Engine
Cons of Heroku
Cons of Red Hat OpenShift
    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
    • 2
      Decisions are made for you, limiting your options
    • 2
      License cost
    • 1
      Behind, sometimes severely, the upstreams

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

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    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.

    What is 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.

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

    What companies use Google App Engine?
    What companies use Heroku?
    What companies use Red Hat OpenShift?

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    What tools integrate with Google App Engine?
    What tools integrate with Heroku?
    What tools integrate with Red Hat OpenShift?

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    What are some alternatives to Google App Engine, Heroku, and Red Hat OpenShift?
    DigitalOcean
    We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.
    AWS Lambda
    AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.
    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.
    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.
    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.
    See all alternatives