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Heroku vs PythonAnywhere: What are the differences?
What is 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.
What is PythonAnywhere? Micro PaaS for Python web apps. Develop and host Python from your browser. It's somewhat unique. A small PaaS that supports web apps (Python only) as well as scheduled jobs with shell access. It is an expensive way to tinker and run several small apps.
Heroku and PythonAnywhere can be primarily classified as "Platform as a Service" tools.
"Easy deployment" is the top reason why over 694 developers like Heroku, while over 4 developers mention "Web apps" as the leading cause for choosing PythonAnywhere.
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 Heroku
- Easy deployment704
- 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
Pros of PythonAnywhere
- Web apps13
- Easy Setup10
- Great support8
- Free plan8
- Shell access8
- Super-easy to use7
- Libraries5
- Many things like Python are pre-installed2
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Cons of Heroku
- Super expensive24
- Not a whole lot of flexibility7
- No usable MySQL option5
- Storage5
- Low performance on free tier4
- 24/7 support is $1,000 per month1
Cons of PythonAnywhere
- No root access1
- Really small community1