My FeedDiscussionsHeadless CMS
New
Sign in
Log inSign up
Learn more about Hashnode Headless CMSHashnode Headless CMS
Collaborate seamlessly with Hashnode Headless CMS for Enterprise.
Upgrade ✨Learn more

Heroku Alternative - How Back4App is a great alternative to Heroku

oseto John's photo
oseto John
·Mar 15, 2018

HEROKU ALTERNATIVE.jpg If you’re a developer or software architect and you have been around within the developer community for a while, you don’t need any introduction to Heroku, it’s a cloud platform as a service provider, even before they were acquired by Saleforce in 2010, they have existed for a couple years. Being among the early cloud service provider PaaS (Platform as a Service) they pioneer the cloud services, they came into the scene and revolutionize the way we build, scale and deploy our applications.

They change a whole lot of things from the technical challenges of building and configuring servers to the drawback experience from shared hosting and the various complexities that comes with cloud hosting and deployment--It brought a solution that made app building, scaling and deployment a breeze, it didn’t take much time before they became the favorite platform for developers and I.T professionals to build and host their applications.

When it comes to commercially sustainable cloud services like PaaS Heroku is a reliable name, you can’t take it away from them, they had and still fulfilling so many business needs. They’re still a great way to build and deploy a wide range of web-based applications with minimal challenges. Despite the wide appeal and tremendous value it provides, Heroku has not always been the best bet for every developer for every project, there are a lot of concerns with Heroku, which include sleeping apps on the free tier, exorbitant rate on the paid tier, lack of support for some languages, non-flexible pricing options, vendor lock-in and many more technical limitations, therefore it’s important to know when to search for Heroku alternative.

So, if you’re one of those users searching for Heroku alternatives and a reliable backend for your applications, then hang on for a second, I have a good news for you, out of the numerous alternatives to Heroku available, I single-handedly picked a close rival and analyze it in details, how its stand as the best alternatives to Heroku along with its pros and cons.

Back4App is a Backend as a service (BaaS) provider which comes with the same flexibility and solution of a PaaS-like-Heroku services. Being one of the most popular and reliable parse hosting and serverless database platform solutions available today--its delivers a fully robust backend. With its user-friendly dashboard, 24/7 monitoring and alerting, web-based management tools, backup and recovery features, automated provisioning and its ability to scale applications up to 20,000 requests per second.

It utilizes a complete serverless approach to deploy and scale your backend, giving you the freedom to focus and develop apps at lightning speed, build your own backend without any code, host your apps with no infrastructure hassles, and scale apps without any technical challenges. For over some time now, it has consistently proven to be the biggest serverless database and parse platform in operation with more than forty thousand (40,000) happy users worldwide, over five hundred million (500,000,000) devices connected and Processing over 10 billion API requests every month it surely has a competitive edge and it’s an impeccable replacement for Heroku, when it comes to developing, scaling and deploying robust applications.

With the brief introduction of the above, let us look into details to the pros and cons of both platforms:

Heroku:

Pros:

Getting started is easy: Getting started with Heroku is easy and straightforward for beginners, in approximately two minutes you can set up your first app with a simple git commands. The documentation on its official site makes it seamlessly easy.

Accurate error logs messages: Heroku display a standard error log messages when your application fails, this makes debugging a breeze, and this feature is not available in other PaaS platforms, most of them give nondescript messages which make debugging and deployment relatively painful.

Add-ons make it easy to add features: Heroku comes with a massive list of plugins and services that can be added to make instances easy to scale. These plugins remove the task of manually installing and setting up services such as databases and email systems.

Easy scaling: Scaling in Heroku is very easy and simple; its instances can easily be scaled up and down by increasing or decreasing the number of available dynos for that particular instance through the CLI (Command Line Interface)

Many dedicated servers: Heroku has a lot of dedicated servers which gives you the freedom to build application dependencies that ensure, you won't have an error like "out of memory" when scaling your applications.

Heroku is matured: Heroku is one of the pioneers of PaaS. They had a lot of time to grow over the years, so, they have reached that maturity stage, you can attest to this with the massive number of articles and tutorials on their platform.

Free Tier: Heroku comes with a free tier that contains a single dyno instance, 512MB of memory and 100MB swap space for trying things out for both hobbyist and full-time developers.

Availability of standard SQL: Heroku offers a standard SQL while others PaaS service provider offers noSQL.

Pricing model: Heroku cloud service unit is priced in Dyno which is used to scale applications. All other price option is listed under Salesforce App Cloud, which is available in four pricing options. A free trial version for every package is also available, Force.com Enterprise App: $25/user/month (billed annually) Powerful apps with access to 10 custom objects per user Force.com App Bundle: $80/user/month (billed annually)

Cons

Heroku is expensive: Heroku is really expensive once you’re out of the free tier. This is one of the reasons users are searching for Heroku alternative. Even the addons as well are also very expensive.

Sleeping Apps: On Heroku free tier your app will always go to sleep after a period of inactivity; it can only wake up when your app gets a web request which can take 10 to 20 seconds to start running again.

Heroku is hosted on AWS Platform: AWS platforms are known for unexpected service outages which also affect Heroku.

Limitation by Addons : If you want to fully customize your production environment in Heroku platform, you’ll encounter some limitations, because Installing libraries and any other features can only be done through Heroku plugin, If there is no Heroku plugin for a task it will be a huge challenge, unless you’re a full stack developer.

Larger deployments are slower: The initial deployment in Heroku is very fast, but subsequent larger application deployments tend to be slower, it takes some time for the dynos to restart thereby loses some seconds of application runtime.

Vendor-lock-in: The ease of migrating apps to other platforms is difficult with Heroku because it’s hosted on AWS infrastructures.

Back4app:

Pros:

No vendor lock-in: The ease of migrating to and from Back4app is very easy because is an open source platform; you don’t need to write any server code to do this. It’s pretty straightforward.

Flexible pricing option: The pricing structure in Back4app is based on API calls consumption and is pre-paid. It comes with the flexibility of your function running in both100 ms and 10s without paying any additional charges

Simple and smooth migration from Parse: The best and the most popular platform for parse, it has all the parse features and even added more features that were not available in parse.

Parse hosting in any cloud environment: Back4app allows you to host your parse in any cloud environment.

Open source: It’s built around a large developer community of parse server framework and they’re always active and have contributed to the open source parse platform.

No Infrastructure to maintain: The need to maintain servers and other infrastructure is completely eliminated; you don’t need to install any software or runtime. The infrastructure management hassles are completely taken away from your Development team.

Flexible and automatic scaling: This serverless database platform has flexible and automatic scaling on demand for your app; you only make payments for resources used even when your workload grows.

Built-in availability: Back4app serverless database architecture running your applications provides built-in availability by default, and they’re fault tolerant. You do not need to make any provisioning.

An automated backup and recovery system: They have automated backup and recovery system that keeps your data secure and accessible anytime you are in need of it.

A dedicated support team: A dedicated support team of experienced developers and software engineers is always available to attend to your query 24/7.

Free tier: Back4app also comes with a free tier for both hobbyist and skilled developers who want to experience the full flexibility of the robust platform.

Cons:

Lack of Documentation: Recently this has been taken care off by a dedicated support team

Non-standardized UI inside the documentation page

Conclusion:

In the world of Application development, we all have different needs; each project comes with its own challenges, there’s never a time when one cloud solution became the best bet for every project, but your ability to spot the right one for every project will make the difference and save you the apple time to build, deploy and get to the market faster.