Heroku vs Patr: Picking the right PaaS Platform for your infrastructure

Since time memorial, the delivery and operations of software have always occurred in silos. It began as an effort between the development and operations teams working individually but ended up consuming twice as much time and work.

That’s when the concept of DevOps took birth. It was built on the premise of simultaneous management of software development and delivery so that applications could be released at the earliest.

As DevOps revolutionized the IT industry, several players big and small, expensive and expansive joined the game and started developing various tools to simplify DevOps. But over a period of time, most of these tools started becoming complicated and cumbersome to use and lost track of their main intent — to DevOps easy.

So today, we’re going to delve deep into 2 popular DevOps tools — Heroku & Patr — and compare their features, and the flexibility they offer and decide which could be a better fit for you and your organization.

Infrastructure

1. When it comes to response times, Patr allows for responses to take as long as required for HTTP requests, while Heroku has an initial 30-second window to respond with a single byte back to the client and this hard response timeout of 30 seconds cannot be configured or changed.
2. Patr will ensure that your deployments don’t sleep in case of activity, while Heroku pushes them to sleep after the deployment stays inactive for 30 minutes.
3. With Patr, you get complete control over how your application is built — from running a single build command to a complex shell script. Deploying to production is no more difficult than running your code locally. Heroku requires buildpacks, which can be hard to understand and customize. Patr removes the complexity of buildpacks, while retaining many of their other benefits.
4. Even though Heroku allows you to build your code from any GitHub repository automatically, the build process is more suitable for deployments than continuous integration efforts. It builds the code to deploy on their servers and that’s pretty much it. Patr, on the other hand, offers a more general-purpose CI/CD solution that is entirely based on docker images, and can be customized to any general-purpose pipeline, including not using Patr to deploy at all!
5. Patr’s deployments and databases have a built-in IP access control as an additional layer of security. You also get free, unlimited DDoS protection from industry leader Cloudflare, at no additional cost to you! Heroku offers basic DDoS protection and recommends using a dedicated provider for more sophisticated attacks.
6. Heroku applications are forcefully restarted every 24 hours, losing in-memory state (e.g. caches) and disrupting WebSocket connections. Heroku application restarts can also create downtime, and avoiding them requires signing up for more expensive plans. In contrast, Patr does not have scheduled (or unscheduled) restarts, and every Patr application comes with zero-downtime deploys.

Developer Experience

1. Even though Heroku might seem easier to use compared to AWS, our customers tell us Patr is even easier. Simply connect your GitHub or Gitea repository on your Patr Dashboard and the platform will auto-suggest commands to build and start your app. Once deployed, every Git push automatically builds and updates your app.
2. Patr offers native support for Docker with multi-stage layer caching; all you need is a Dockerfile in your Git repository; Patr automatically builds the Docker image and deploys it on every push.
3. Patr offers fully automated and completely free TLS certificates for custom domains, including wildcard domains, a common feature still missing on Heroku.

Team Management

1. The free plan of Heroku only allows you to have one member in your team, and any additional member is charged. Patr, on the other hand, allows you to add more members for no additional cost.
2. Heroku also places a limit on the number of users that can be added to your team with a maximum of ten, post which you will be prompted to upgrade to custom pricing with an enterprise plan. Patr allows you to add as many members as you require to your account, at no additional cost.
3. Heroku allows you to add members to your team for paid plans, but it restricts the access to finer permission models unless you’re ready to spend thousands of dollars for an enterprise plan. Patr, in contrast, will give you a fully-featured Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for any account, regardless of the size.

Pricing

1. Heroku’s pricing is exceptionally high and a hassle to navigate through. Heroku customers running production and staging workloads have seen cost reductions of over 50% after switching to Patr, saving thousands of dollars every month.
2. In fact, Patr charges you exactly for what you consume. For example, if you experience a surge in traffic, we’ll autoscale your deployments accordingly and retain your bill to the specific plan you’ve chosen, avoiding all the hidden costs and providing you maximum transparency.
3. Here’s a comparison of the massive cost differences between both platforms.

Patr provides you significant savings, while your applications scale.

4. Heroku’s Hobby tier instances do not support horizontal scaling or zero downtime deploys, whereas Patr provides both of these features across its plans.

5. Heroku does not allow you to run any other services on dynos. To purchase additional dynos/workers, you need to pay $35 a month, which proves to be quite expensive for large and high-traffic apps.

Customer Focus

1. Patr offers all its customers instant support, directly delivered by the engineers who’re building and developing the platform. In fact, the VP of Engineering is readily available via chat, to directly resolve your queries. Compared to Patr, Heroku directs users to community support channels like Stack Overflow multiple times before they can even file a ticket.
2. Time and again, Heroku’s users have faced discrepancies and difficulties, when it comes to their pricing. A few of their hidden costs have led to ambiguity and losses like these.
3. Customers also need to pay an additional $1,000/month to chat with a Heroku support engineer; on Patr, they can schedule a weekly/monthly call for free!

Both Heroku and Patr, provide a suite of services which can optimise and uplift your DevOps pipeline. But when it comes to granularity, flexibility, scale, control and especially pricing, Patr undoubtedly takes the lead. Its ease of use, coalesced with the efficiency it brings to your infrastructure while being easy on your pockets makes it the most ideal platform for you to manage your entire infrastructure.