Heroku Postgres vs Realm: What are the differences?
What is Heroku Postgres? Heroku's Database-as-a-Service. Based on the most powerful open-source database, PostgreSQL. Heroku Postgres provides a SQL database-as-a-service that lets you focus on building your application instead of messing around with database management.
What is Realm? Realm makes it easy to build reactive apps, realtime collaborative features, and offline-first experiences. The Realm Mobile Platform is a next-generation data layer for applications. Realm is reactive, concurrent, and lightweight, allowing you to work with live, native objects.
Heroku Postgres belongs to "PostgreSQL as a Service" category of the tech stack, while Realm can be primarily classified under "Mobile Database".
Some of the features offered by Heroku Postgres are:
- High Availability
- Rollback
- Dataclips
On the other hand, Realm provides the following key features:
- Feels like Home - Realm’s data structures look like the Objects and Arrays of your language, but provide additional features such as: querying, relationships & graphs, thread safety, and more.
- Memory-Efficient - Realm is not built on SQLite. Instead, a custom C++ core is used to provide memory-efficient access to your data by using Realm objects, which usually consume less RAM than native objects.
- F-F-Fast! - Realm offers extraordinary performance compared to SQLite and other persistence solutions.
"Easy to setup" is the primary reason why developers consider Heroku Postgres over the competitors, whereas "Good" was stated as the key factor in picking Realm.
Realm is an open source tool with 13.3K GitHub stars and 1.71K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Realm's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Heroku Postgres has a broader approval, being mentioned in 74 company stacks & 38 developers stacks; compared to Realm, which is listed in 38 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.