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  5. Dokku vs Google App Engine vs Heroku

Dokku vs Google App Engine vs Heroku

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Heroku
Heroku
Stacks25.8K
Followers20.5K
Votes3.2K
Google App Engine
Google App Engine
Stacks10.5K
Followers8.1K
Votes611
Dokku
Dokku
Stacks180
Followers216
Votes69
GitHub Stars31.4K
Forks2.0K

Dokku vs Google App Engine vs Heroku: What are the differences?

## Introduction
These are the key differences between Dokku, Google App Engine, and Heroku.

1. **Deployment Control**: Dokku allows for more control over deployments compared to Google App Engine and Heroku. Developers can manually deploy applications and have more flexibility in managing the deployment process.
2. **Scalability**: Google App Engine offers automatic scalability with minimal configuration required, whereas Dokku and Heroku require more manual scaling adjustments. Heroku provides vertical scaling easily, while Dokku requires more configuration for horizontal scaling.
3. **Pricing**: Google App Engine has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, while Heroku and Dokku are based on the number of dynos/containers. Heroku tends to be more expensive than Dokku due to the added features and convenience it offers.
4. **Community support**: Heroku has a larger and more established community, providing extensive resources and support for developers. Dokku has a growing but smaller community, while Google App Engine's community support may not be as robust as the other two platforms.
5. **Platform Lock-In**: Google App Engine can have more vendor lock-in due to its proprietary nature, while Dokku is more open-source and can be self-hosted, providing more flexibility. Heroku falls in the middle, offering some vendor lock-in but also providing the option to export data and move to other platforms.
6. **Ease of Use**: Google App Engine is known for its ease of use with its simple deployment process and automatic scaling, making it beginner-friendly. Heroku also offers a user-friendly interface but may require more configuration for complex applications. Dokku, being a self-hosted platform, requires more setup and configuration but offers more customization options for advanced users.

In Summary, the key differences between Dokku, Google App Engine, and Heroku lie in deployment control, scalability, pricing, community support, platform lock-in, and ease of use.

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Advice on Heroku, Google App Engine, Dokku

Alex
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
Kevin
Kevin

Jun 29, 2021

Decided

The Friendliest.app started on Heroku (both app and db) like most of my projects. The db on Heroku was on the cusp of becoming prohibitively expensive for this project.

After looking at options and reading recommendations we settled on Render to host both the application and db. Render's pricing model seems to scale more linearly with the application instead of the large pricing/performance jumps experienced with Heroku.

Migration to Render was extremely easy and we were able to complete both the db and application moves within 24 hours.

The only thing we're really missing on Render is a CLI. With Heroku, we could manage everything from the command line in VSCode. With Render, you need to use the web shell they provide.

29.3k views29.3k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Heroku
Heroku
Google App Engine
Google App Engine
Dokku
Dokku

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.

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.

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.

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.
Zero to sixty: Scale your app automatically without worrying about managing machines.;Supercharged APIs: Supercharge your app with services such as Task Queue, XMPP, and Cloud SQL, all powered by the same infrastructure that powers the Google services you use every day.;You're in control: Manage your application with a simple, web-based dashboard allowing you to customize your app's performance.
Open source PAAS alternative to Heroku; No vendor lock-in; Getting started is extremely easy; Extensible & customizable
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
31.4K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
2.0K
Stacks
25.8K
Stacks
10.5K
Stacks
180
Followers
20.5K
Followers
8.1K
Followers
216
Votes
3.2K
Votes
611
Votes
69
Pros & Cons
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
Pros
  • 145
    Easy to deploy
  • 106
    Auto scaling
  • 80
    Good free plan
  • 62
    Easy management
  • 56
    Scalability
Pros
  • 23
    Simple
  • 12
    Open Source
  • 11
    Free
  • 11
    Built on Docker
  • 4
    Git deploy
Integrations
Mailgun
Mailgun
Postmark
Postmark
Loggly
Loggly
Papertrail
Papertrail
Redis Cloud
Redis Cloud
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Nitrous.IO
Nitrous.IO
Logentries
Logentries
MongoLab
MongoLab
Gemfury
Gemfury
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Twilio
Twilio
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Ubuntu
Ubuntu
Semaphore
Semaphore
Drone.io
Drone.io
CloudBees
CloudBees
Arch Linux
Arch Linux
GitLab CI
GitLab CI
Travis CI
Travis CI
CircleCI
CircleCI
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions
Debian
Debian

What are some alternatives to Heroku, Google App Engine, Dokku?

Clever Cloud

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.

Red Hat OpenShift

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

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

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

Hasura

An open source GraphQL engine that deploys instant, realtime GraphQL APIs on any Postgres database.

Cloud 66

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

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.

PythonAnywhere

PythonAnywhere

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.

CapRover

CapRover

It is an extremely easy to use app/database deployment & web server manager for your NodeJS, Python, PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby, MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres, WordPress (and etc...) applications! It's blazingly fast and very robust as it uses Docker, nginx, LetsEncrypt and NetData under the hood behind its simple-to-use interface.

Deis

Deis

Deis can deploy any application or service that can run inside a Docker container. In order to be scaled horizontally, applications must follow Heroku's 12-factor methodology and store state in external backing services.

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