We switched from Heroku to Render about 6 months ago. It was a great experience initially, but there are a lot of sharp edges we've encountered since then, to the point that if I were switching away from Heroku today, I'd consider something else.
For example, we had a monitor set up in Papertrail that notifies us if it doesn't see our application's heartbeat log entry in a 10-minute period. We had to disable that monitor because Render will regularly have outages related to logging where logs simply don't make it to the log stream. Their status page is all green and I've unfortunately had to reach out to support on more than one Friday night.
Deploys take a little too long, around 5 minutes on the paid Pro Plus tier.
And, minor gripe, but the web UI feels like an SPA, and I think it's built to be one, but the frontend state isn't stable and will often show the wrong information. From time to time, you'll need to manually refresh the page to get the correct information.
The security issue that happened with Heroku back in April and the subsequent flubbing of communication around the issue made it so we had no choice but to migrate. But the platform itself was rock solid in my experience. I don't get that same feeling from Render.
I'm holding out hope that it improves in the coming months!
EDIT: I double checked the deploy times because of the comment below, and it's actually closer to 5 minutes, not 10, so I've updated my comment accordingly. 5 minutes is much more reasonable.
I'm sorry you ran into these issues and feel your frustration. The tl;dr is we hit completely unexpected scale overnight when Heroku's free tier news broke, and had to find and fix unpredictable bottlenecks quickly. We're in better shape now, and I feel confident about the rough edges fading away over the next few weeks.
For example, we've worked hard to get logging to a stable state over the last couple of weeks, and I hope you've noticed the improvements already.
Regarding deploys, I'm surprised they're taking this long on paid plans. I'd love to follow up if you could share details over email (address in profile). We have internal SLOs around build times and we've made (and observed) improvements recently, so I'm wondering if this is specific to how your build is being cached.
"Render’s free database plan allows you to run a PostgreSQL database that automatically expires 90 days after creation. Free databases are suspended after 90 days (unless they are upgraded to a paid plan), and are no longer reachable at this point."
The paid plans do start at $7, and you can share a database across many apps, though.
And if you have static site or a site without a database, it looks like it is forever free.
I tried out Render and I must say I was not impressed. Every deploy took 3-5 minutes even with a Hello world Node app. Maybe it was that slow because I was using the free tier? In comparison, fly's deploy was also slow the first time but was significantly faster for subsequent deploys.
-- fwiw had an awful interview process with railway - long call with the CEO - asked some follow up questions via email - got a reply to move forward - put in 6 hours of work - ghosted --
Oh man, that’s not at all what I’m aiming for here (Railway Founder)
Could you bump the email in my inbox? Even if you hate my guts and have no interest in the company, I‘d like to know cause I don’t recall this at all :(
We do a 30 minute screen with me (to protect our engineers time) and share the problem ahead of time (to not surprise the interviewee)
Is delta just ... free? I cant see any price anywhere on the site, which just leaves me suspicious.
They do seem to be pushing some sort of creative-focus, maybe they intend to just keep it really small user base, invite only, just people who actually make things vs a platform just to run your SaaS on?
I've been using deta for a (quite small) side project for a year now. It's free, but it has quite the limitations: max RAM of 512 MB (recently upgraded, before it was 128), and their database is a custom thingy, which doesn't have too many features.
https://northflank.com/ - The comprehensive developer platform to build and scale microservices, jobs and managed databases with a powerful UI, API & CLI.
I’ve run a couple Telegram bots on Fly’s free tier and it’s been very slick - I especially like the remote docker builders they added recently. Remote docker building is ideal vs. having to debug my local Podman install on Fedora.
I will say I’m not sure how the reporting is supposed to work. Fly thinks I’ve been running a failed process for the last couple days but it sure is working!
We have been using render in production for about 8 months (paid services).
Overall happy but some things are annoying:
- Latency of the oregon region is very high. A simple health endpoint is around 500ms from north america and europe, 1.3s from Asia/Australia (we have been monitoring it for many months with better uptime)
- Services tend to die at least once a week, so you do need at least two instances all the time
- Logs are often delayed for a long time, though it has been more severe recently.
- Build time is just horrible, our rust service takes around 40m to deploy. I get that it is free, but at least give me a docker registry so I can build it elsewhere and push the image
- No option to pay for support 24/7, so if there is an outage during the US night you are on your own
Glad to hear you're happy overall, and I want to add that we're working to address the things you mentioned. We also have paid 24/7 support with response and uptime SLAs: https://render.com/pricing#support
I'm surprised to hear about the service dying once a week: in my experience this is typically an application issue. Happy to help debug if you'd like to shoot me an email.
How does alwaysdata work? The pricing just references different storage tiers - how is that related to vCPUs or RAM or the number of apps, DBs etc. deployed? Couldn't really find anything on their site...
This topic came up a few weeks ago and I commented [0] that I started using Coolify (https://coolify.io), an open source self-hosted PaaS that's similar to CapRover and Dokku but in my opinion the developer experience is a lot simpler since it has a GUI unlike Dokku (non-Pro version, anyway) and the deployment was easier than CapRover since it connects directly to your GitHub/GitLab account via their API.
I've used a lot of the alternatives listed here but each one had some drawback or another. In contrast, I got a cheap 5 dollar Hetzner server and it's more powerful than any of what the free options here give you (Hetzner gets you 2 AMD vCPUs and 2 GB RAM), plus unlike AWS I never have to worry about whether I'm gonna randomly pay $10k this month due to a traffic spike. The only thing that was missing before was a good PaaS solution for the server (and I used to use Dokku before primarily) but Coolify solves that neatly.
The part that worries me about managing your own server is the security aspect, it's just a much larger surface area than just running a docker image on fly.io, for example. Do self-hosted PaaS like Coolify/Dokku/CapRover handle this aspect? Or do you still have to take all the steps you'd usually take securing the server?
Thanks. This would be a lot more useful with a comparison of features or trade offs (e.g. how many resources do you get? does it suspend? what about databases? etc.) instead of just the marketing taglines for each service.
This is my main problem with "awesome lists". I appreciate all the work that goes into cataloging things but without any exploration functionality (i.e. search, filter, sort), it's nearly useless. Tbh I don't recall a single time I really got something from an awesome list and I definitely haven't ever referred back to any of the lists I've saved/starred
They might be fun for random exploration if you're killing time, but not really a tool
I don’t believe “awesome lists” are intended to make your decisions for you; rather, they’re intended as an input for a business analyst to gather that data (i.e. to thoroughly follow all the links, read entries for competitors in a solution-space, and build a feature-matrix themselves) and then make those decisions. In that use-case, they’ve been invaluable to me personally.
Of course, you could get that same discoverability from language-package manager tool/website, if such systems ever allowed users (not developers!) to tag or otherwise multiply categorize packages, the way that e.g. Spotify allows users to create discoverable public playlists.
They're far from useless, awesome-whatever is usually great for getting an overview of what kind of tools exist out there and what some popular choices are.
If you're already aware of all that, sure, they don't add much information. Concise comparison is pretty difficult...except in cases like this.
Agreed. I am looking for a very specific use case. These lists don't really provide much insight into whether or not a service fits.
For reference, my use case/requirements:
- I want to be able to deploy dockerized apps to an AWS region.
- I should be able to define different process types with different env vars/instance scale
- I don't want to have to worry at all about underlying infrastructure
- I want to be able to pipe the logs out to some other unified logging
- I want to be able to deploy from a CI pipeline.
So far nothing else I've seen besides heroku fits the bill.
I was very happy with fly.io - migrating my Rails app from Heroku was an absolute no brainer, took me like half an hour.
Then I tried Django, and all hell broke loose... Still some ways to go to catch up with Heroku on all fronts I suppose, but for Rails, clear recommendation.
I recently started the migration of my Django projects from Heroku to Fly. To test things out, I created this simple Django project. You might want to fork it and test whatever you need. I run into a few issues as well, all of them are described in the readme.
Sorry to hear Django was a pain. There’s a guide in the works for launching Django apps, but I can’t remember the exact status of that. https://community.fly.io/ is a good place to search for others who migrated or ask for help on there.
For me, I was mainly using the free Heroku Postgres for side projects. I tried some of those listed here but they were not a fit for me. I ended up going with cockroach db and am liking it so far, esp that I can easily create an unlimited number of clusters that are free to start.
https://www.cockroachlabs.com/
(I have no affiliation with cockroach labs)
The best alternative to Heroku is a cheap VPS with Digital Ocean or Linode. Throw on the open source PAAS software https://dokku.com/ and boom, cheap, simple and easy.
If interested in self hosted alternative, which can be hosted on Digital Ocean, Linode, Hetzner, check out Sailor[1].
Sailor[1] is a tiny PaaS to install on your servers/VPS that uses git push to deploy micro-apps, micro-services, sites with SSL, on your own servers or VPS, similar to Heroku
TejPage.com[https://TejPage.com] - currently in beta, supports heroku buildpacks and docker containers is providing services in India using baremetal servers located in India. We use dokku running on ubuntu to provide the services. We slowly rolling it out. Performance on baremetal is great!
We have redundancy, backups and standby instance for have ~100% uptime. We should be able to run the validators provided they are in the languages supported by us.
Readit News
https://render.com/ - One of the top Heroku alternatives with a free plan to get started.
https://fly.io/ - Run your full stack apps (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required.
https://railway.app/ - Railway is the cloud that takes the complexity out of shipping software.
https://www.cyclic.sh/ - Connect your GitHub repo. We will build, deploy and manage the hosting.
https://qoddi.com/ - Qoddi is a fully managed App Hosting Platform running on a tier 1 network at 10% of the cost of similar solutions.
https://www.deta.sh/ - Build & deploy your ideas on the universe's most developer friendly cloud platform.
https://adaptable.io/ - Just connect your GitHub repository and let Adaptable handle the rest.
https://www.alwaysdata.com/en/ - All your services in one place.
For example, we had a monitor set up in Papertrail that notifies us if it doesn't see our application's heartbeat log entry in a 10-minute period. We had to disable that monitor because Render will regularly have outages related to logging where logs simply don't make it to the log stream. Their status page is all green and I've unfortunately had to reach out to support on more than one Friday night.
Deploys take a little too long, around 5 minutes on the paid Pro Plus tier.
And, minor gripe, but the web UI feels like an SPA, and I think it's built to be one, but the frontend state isn't stable and will often show the wrong information. From time to time, you'll need to manually refresh the page to get the correct information.
The security issue that happened with Heroku back in April and the subsequent flubbing of communication around the issue made it so we had no choice but to migrate. But the platform itself was rock solid in my experience. I don't get that same feeling from Render.
I'm holding out hope that it improves in the coming months!
EDIT: I double checked the deploy times because of the comment below, and it's actually closer to 5 minutes, not 10, so I've updated my comment accordingly. 5 minutes is much more reasonable.
For example, we've worked hard to get logging to a stable state over the last couple of weeks, and I hope you've noticed the improvements already.
Regarding deploys, I'm surprised they're taking this long on paid plans. I'd love to follow up if you could share details over email (address in profile). We have internal SLOs around build times and we've made (and observed) improvements recently, so I'm wondering if this is specific to how your build is being cached.
However, they delete your database after 90 days if you do not have a paid plan. From https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases
"Render’s free database plan allows you to run a PostgreSQL database that automatically expires 90 days after creation. Free databases are suspended after 90 days (unless they are upgraded to a paid plan), and are no longer reachable at this point."
The paid plans do start at $7, and you can share a database across many apps, though.
And if you have static site or a site without a database, it looks like it is forever free.
It’s still behind the waitlist but it’s coming off in a few weeks. Also if you onboard via hasura.io there is no gate.
Could you bump the email in my inbox? Even if you hate my guts and have no interest in the company, I‘d like to know cause I don’t recall this at all :(
We do a 30 minute screen with me (to protect our engineers time) and share the problem ahead of time (to not surprise the interviewee)
They do seem to be pushing some sort of creative-focus, maybe they intend to just keep it really small user base, invite only, just people who actually make things vs a platform just to run your SaaS on?
https://northflank.com/ - The comprehensive developer platform to build and scale microservices, jobs and managed databases with a powerful UI, API & CLI.
I will say I’m not sure how the reporting is supposed to work. Fly thinks I’ve been running a failed process for the last couple days but it sure is working!
- Latency of the oregon region is very high. A simple health endpoint is around 500ms from north america and europe, 1.3s from Asia/Australia (we have been monitoring it for many months with better uptime)
- Services tend to die at least once a week, so you do need at least two instances all the time
- Logs are often delayed for a long time, though it has been more severe recently.
- Build time is just horrible, our rust service takes around 40m to deploy. I get that it is free, but at least give me a docker registry so I can build it elsewhere and push the image
- No option to pay for support 24/7, so if there is an outage during the US night you are on your own
I'm surprised to hear about the service dying once a week: in my experience this is typically an application issue. Happy to help debug if you'd like to shoot me an email.
I wrote about the experience here: https://onlineornot.com/on-moving-million-uptime-checks-onto...
https://fly.io/docs/about/healthcare/
I've used a lot of the alternatives listed here but each one had some drawback or another. In contrast, I got a cheap 5 dollar Hetzner server and it's more powerful than any of what the free options here give you (Hetzner gets you 2 AMD vCPUs and 2 GB RAM), plus unlike AWS I never have to worry about whether I'm gonna randomly pay $10k this month due to a traffic spike. The only thing that was missing before was a good PaaS solution for the server (and I used to use Dokku before primarily) but Coolify solves that neatly.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33077118#33077464
They might be fun for random exploration if you're killing time, but not really a tool
Of course, you could get that same discoverability from language-package manager tool/website, if such systems ever allowed users (not developers!) to tag or otherwise multiply categorize packages, the way that e.g. Spotify allows users to create discoverable public playlists.
If you're already aware of all that, sure, they don't add much information. Concise comparison is pretty difficult...except in cases like this.
Put it in an airtable. Done.
https://github.com/agamm/awesome-developer-first#deployment-...
I might add the limits too - a cool idea.
For reference, my use case/requirements:
So far nothing else I've seen besides heroku fits the bill.Then I tried Django, and all hell broke loose... Still some ways to go to catch up with Heroku on all fronts I suppose, but for Rails, clear recommendation.
https://github.com/tomwojcik/django-fly.io-example-project
Sorry to hear Django was a pain. There’s a guide in the works for launching Django apps, but I can’t remember the exact status of that. https://community.fly.io/ is a good place to search for others who migrated or ask for help on there.
Also, dokku author is very responsive in GitHub issues list.
[1] https://github.com/mardix/sailor.