Parse vs Heroku | What are the differences?

Overview

Parse

Stacks507

Followers479

Votes601

Heroku

Stacks25.8K

Followers20.5K

Votes3.2K

Heroku vs Parse: What are the differences?

Heroku: Build, deliver, monitor and scale web apps and APIs with a trail blazing developer experience. 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; Parse: The complete mobile app platform. With Parse, you can add a scalable and powerful backend in minutes and launch a full-featured app in record time without ever worrying about server management. We offer push notifications, social integration, data storage, and the ability to add rich custom logic to your app’s backend with Cloud Code.

Heroku can be classified as a tool in the "Platform as a Service" category, while Parse is grouped under "Mobile Backend".

Some of the features offered by Heroku are:

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.

On the other hand, Parse provides the following key features:

Store basic data types, locations, photos
Update over the air
Data browser lets you manage, search, and update content without writing a single line of code

"Easy deployment", "Free for side projects" and "Huge time-saver" are the key factors why developers consider Heroku; whereas "Easy setup", "Free hosting" and "Well-documented" are the primary reasons why Parse is favored.

According to the StackShare community, Heroku has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1496 company stacks & 937 developers stacks; compared to Parse, which is listed in 92 company stacks and 44 developer stacks.

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Advice on Parse, Heroku

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

rohan

founder at self

May 11, 2020

Needs adviceon

React

The current project is on firebase and uses some of database rules within firestore. My entire code is in React (node) and uses firestore to store information in NOSQL structure. I feel a little worried that i have a vendor lock-in. Is there any thing that is open source that i can deploy on my own infrastructure that offers similar or develop-able capabilities.

12.3k views12.3k

Comments

Chuck

Product Owner, UX Lead, UI Dev at EQUA START

Sep 23, 2020

Review

I haven't used Strapi (which looks REALLY COOL), but I've done some non-production hobby-work in NextJS, KeystoneJS, and Parse. For what you're doing - the thin stack of Strapi/Gatsby/Netlify might be enough - but if you ever get beyond basic CMS integration & content display, and need more robust data-sharing, login management, and customized usage tracking or display logic - you might need something a little more robust like Next.js, Keystone, and/or a backend like Parse.

For the "thin-stack" model - you'd likely need to generate a common config/ENV file that sits at the root of each of your sites. These should likely contain generation / CMS access keys (unique to each site) to request data for each deploy build to collect page/site content from the (presumably centralized) CMS.

If you're looking at high-volume of sites, with limited staff, you're going to want to automate access generation and deployment at some point. You might want to look into some orchestration tools to help with some of the deploy / generation / API / CMS key stuff. I've used Azure DevOps in production, and Vercel has an interesting approach I use for hobby/prototype work, and I think Heroku might have some options as well.

Good luck! Hope you kill it!

1.15k views1.15k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Parse	Heroku
With Parse, you can add a scalable and powerful backend in minutes and launch a full-featured app in record time without ever worrying about server management. We offer push notifications, social integration, data storage, and the ability to add rich custom logic to your app’s backend with Cloud Code.	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.
Store basic data types, locations, photos;Update over the air;Data browser lets you manage, search, and update content without writing a single line of code;Push Console allows you to send notifications directly from the Parse web interface;Connect your users via traditional logins or third party social networks with just a few lines of code;Add rich, custom logic to your app’s backend without servers with Cloud Code;Integrate with virtually any third-party service using Cloud Modules	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.
Statistics
Stacks 507	Stacks 25.8K
Followers 479	Followers 20.5K
Votes 601	Votes 3.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros 118 Easy setup 78 Free hosting 62 Well-documented 52 Cheap 47 Use push notifications in 3 lines of code	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
Integrations
New Relic Mailgun Mandrill CrowdFlower Twilio SendGrid Stripe Twilio Trigger.io	Mailgun Postmark Loggly Papertrail Redis Cloud Red Hat Codeready Workspaces Nitrous.IO Logentries MongoLab Gemfury

What are some alternatives to Parse, Heroku?

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.

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.

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.

built.io

Built.io Backend is an mBaaS that allows you to avoid designing, building, and supporting a custom backend for your mobile & web applications. Enterprises can dramatically reduce cost, lower risk and accelerate time-to-market for apps.