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Glitch vs Heroku: What are the differences?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pros of Glitch
- Bang! App built12
- Instant APPification ;)9
- Auto commits7
- No no. limitation on free projects4
- Easy to use3
- Tons of usable code2
- Awesome support2
- Very fast API creation. Especially for small apps2
- Github Integration1
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 Glitch
- UI could be better / cleaner5
- Limited Support/Diffficult to use Non-JS Languages2
- Automatically suspends proxies1
- Not good for big projects1
- Cannot delete project, only the source code is1
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