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Glitch

83
177
+ 1
42
Heroku

25.5K
20.3K
+ 1
3.2K
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Glitch vs Heroku: What are the differences?

  1. Hosting Platform: Glitch is primarily designed for hosting web applications and provides a more user-friendly interface for beginners to get started with coding and hosting their projects. Heroku, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive platform that offers a wider range of hosting options, including support for various programming languages and different types of web applications such as databases, APIs, and worker processes.

  2. Deployment Process: In Glitch, the deployment process is extremely simple and straightforward. Users can easily deploy their projects within seconds by just clicking on the "Show Live" button. Heroku, on the other hand, requires a more detailed and complex deployment process, including setting up a Procfile and configuring various environment variables.

  3. Developer Tools and Customization: While Glitch provides a user-friendly interface and easy-to-use tools, it lacks some advanced developer features and customization options. Heroku, on the other hand, offers more robust developer tools, including the ability to configure buildpacks, add-ons, and scale resources according to the application's needs.

  4. Pricing and Scalability: Glitch offers free hosting with some limitations on usage and resources. It also provides a paid subscription plan, "Glitch for Teams," which offers additional benefits such as increased resource limits and enhanced support. Heroku, on the other hand, has a more complex pricing structure based on dyno hours and additional add-ons. It also offers scalability options with multiple dynos to handle increased traffic and workload.

  5. Community and Support: Both Glitch and Heroku have active communities and provide support for developers. However, Glitch has a more beginner-friendly community with a focus on education and collaboration, while Heroku has a larger community and more extensive documentation, making it easier to find solutions to specific problems.

  6. Integration and Ecosystem: Heroku has been around for a longer time and has built a strong ecosystem of integrations and partnerships. It integrates well with other popular tools and services used by developers, such as GitHub, Docker, and various databases. Glitch, being a relatively newer platform, has a smaller ecosystem but provides integrations with services like GitHub, Slack, and Trello.

In Summary, Glitch is a beginner-friendly hosting platform with a simple deployment process and limited customization options, while Heroku offers a more comprehensive hosting solution with advanced developer tools, scalability options, and a larger ecosystem for integration with other tools and services.

Decisions about Glitch and Heroku

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 Glitch
Pros of Heroku
  • 12
    Bang! App built
  • 9
    Instant APPification ;)
  • 7
    Auto commits
  • 4
    No no. limitation on free projects
  • 3
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Tons of usable code
  • 2
    Awesome support
  • 2
    Very fast API creation. Especially for small apps
  • 1
    Github Integration
  • 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

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Cons of Glitch
Cons of Heroku
  • 5
    UI could be better / cleaner
  • 2
    Limited Support/Diffficult to use Non-JS Languages
  • 1
    Automatically suspends proxies
  • 1
    Not good for big projects
  • 1
    Cannot delete project, only the source code is
  • 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

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What companies use Glitch?
What companies use Heroku?
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What tools integrate with Glitch?
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What are some alternatives to Glitch and Heroku?
CodePen
It is a social development environment for front-end designers and developers.. It functions as an online code editor and open-source learning environment, where developers can create code snippets, creatively named "pens", and test them.
GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
Apache HTTP Server
The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.
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