Cloudflare vs Heroku – Which is the best option?

This article will compare Cloudflare vs Heroku. It will explore the differences and similarities between these two cloud providers regarding features and pricing.

Whether your business is small or large, it needs the best software to meet its IT management needs. It is the only way you can compete in this digital world.

Cloudflare and Heroku are the 2 enterprise-grade software service providers that can meet all your IT management requirements. While selecting one of them can be a little tricky for you, you can assess both by reading this comparison between them.

So, here you can check which one of these brings better value for your money and fulfills your requirements best.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare brings the foundation for your infrastructure. It ensures better reliability, performance, stability, and security of your team and applications.

Cloudflare also brings the reliability of external resources, including websites and APIs. Along with the external resources, it protects the internal resources like users, devices, and applications behind the firewall at your end.

So, with the help of Cloudflare, you can build enterprise-grade globally-scalable apps for your business

Cloudflare Features

Cloudflare brings the following features for you:

1.     Shared intelligence

Cloudflare provides its intelligent services across the globe. Its network spreads over 270 cities in over 100 countries across the globe.

2.     Unified control panel

The unified control panel comes with all the utility products and services in one place. Thus, it enhances the overall performance of your application as well as the security.

3.     No-code

Configuration on Cloudflare is quick. You do not need to code anything for changing or configuring anything on Cloudflare.

4.     Browser isolation

It is a privacy solution from Cloudflare that runs in the cloud. So, your browser is away from your private networks and endpoints. It also brings better security and performance.

Cloudflare Pricing

When you need Cloudflare’s services for your application, you get 4 different pricing plans. These plans range from individual users to small and large businesses. You can go all the way up to the Enterprise level. So, below are the details of pricing plans at Cloudflare:

Free

If you are developing something that is not business critical, you can go for a free plan with $0 charged monthly. However, if you need an add-on, you can get it with the price charged monthly.

Pro

Professional websites that may not be business-critical but need top-notch services are the best use case for the Pro plan. It costs $20 per month.

Business

The Business plan is for small businesses starting in the online world. Cloudflare ensures that its features and technicalities fulfill all your business requirements at $200 per month.

Enterprise

Cloudflare also offers enterprise-grade services with its Enterprise plan. This plan is for the application that forms the core of a business across the globe. The enterprise plan is the only one with Annual billing, and you can contact the Cloudflare team for demo and pricing according to your requirements.

Remember that these price plans are for running your app on the Cloudflare platform. There are some additional services offered by Cloudflare that may cost extra.

What is Heroku?

Heroku is a cloud-based PaaS(Platform as a Service) that helps developers build, deploy, run, and operate their business applications entirely in the cloud.

It comes with reliability and security for your company’s website. So, with Heroku, your company can build and monitor applications with their performance, providing a scalability option.

Using Heroku can resolve all the infrastructure issues that your company faces.

Heroku Features

The following are some features that you can enjoy using Heroku.

1.     Extensibility

Heroku brings innovation and customization to you. You can use Buildpacks or make custom ones with all the functionalities you need. In the huge community at Heroku, there will rarely be a case that you do not find the Buildpacks that you need.

2.     Scale

Scaling is buttery smooth with Heroku. It scales horizontally and vertically in an instant while everything runs elegantly like usual. Thus, you can enjoy an enterprise-grade handling experience under heavy traffic.

3.     Smart containers

Heroku runs your apps in dynos which are the smart containers. The stacks and the system of your apps are under continuous monitoring, and if there is any error, that is upgraded or patched by the Heroku team.

4.     Continuous delivery

Using Heroku Pipelines with GitHub integrations makes the whole thing very easy, quick, and efficient. Here iterating, staging, shipping, and iterating are made easier.

5.     Runtime environment

The apps running on Heroku run in a runtime environment. For production, configuration, load balancing, security, logging, and many things, Heroku manages and handles everything for you.

Heroku Pricing

Heroku also comes with 4 different pricing plans to power your infrastructure’s digital needs. Here are the details of each of its pricing plans

Free and Hobby

The free plan is for noncommercial use cases, including personal projects. Its price starts at $0 per month. The Hobby plan starts at $7 per month.

Production

If you are dealing with a business-focused application, then the Production plan is the best option. It powers customer-facing websites along with internal web apps for your business. The Production plan starts at $25 per month.

Advanced

Advanced plan is for the applications that need to provide a top-notch experience to any visitor. These apps are mission-critical and need higher availability, high volume, and low latency. The Advanced plan starts at $250

Enterprise

Heroku also offers enterprise-grade services. You can contact the sales team at Heroku to know about the price for the Enterprise plan according to your requirements.

Remember that these prices are for running your app on the platform. There are some other services offered by Heroku that will cost extra.  Overall, it’s a good choice and you can have good features in fair prices.

Heroku vs Cloudflare Comparison

Cloudflare’s primary product offering relates to CDN – Content Delivery Network and DDoS mitigation. The company also offers other cloud-related to build serverless applications, JAMstack websites, and serverless storage for applications.

Heroku’s primary product offering relates to a scalable container platform. Heroku’s CDN offerings happen via add-ons. For example, Expedite CDN integrates with Heroku and offers CDN services. ​

Heroku and Cloudflare are not direct competitors but have some feature overlap with Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare Pages. With Cloudflare Workers, users can run serverless functions, and Cloudflare Pages an environment to build sites using the JAMstack platform.

Cloudflare and Heroku can also work together. Although I could not find an out-of-the-box Cloudflare add-on available on Heroku, this article from Josh McArthur helps in understanding how both platforms can operate together.

Conclusion

This article explored the differences and similarities between Cloudflare and Heroku. It compared the core features and pricing structure and highlighted featured customers.

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