Heroku vs AWS vs Firebase

This article will compare Heroku vs AWS vs Firebase and cover the core differences and similarities between these cloud platforms.

Cloud computing has been playing an active role in the business world and offering a wide array of features and capabilities.

As a result, developers are coming up with exciting applications using their favorite tools. This ascertains the need for an intuitive developer experience in both web and app development. 

However, now that you have chosen to opt for the serverless route, you need to ascertain the right cloud platform for you. 

Choosing the right platform is challenging, often leaving developers pondering upon the ideal choice. Before you make the pick, read through the information given below to choose the right cloud services for your need. It discusses the three platforms in depth, while exploring its features, pricing and more.

What is Heroku?

Heroku is a cloud service provider and software development platform, facilitating an efficient building, deploying, and scaling of web applications.

It is popularly known for running apps in dynos. Offering 140 inbuilt add-ons, from analytic tools and security services to alters, it is used for monitoring, mailing, and caching.

Heroku has gained immense popularity due to its managed infrastructure and rapid development cycles. 

The tool provides users with built-in instant run-time application services. There is no need to think about infrastructure as it is managed automatically by the software.

It is designed with the aim to boost productivity while rolling out processes a lot more efficiently and conveniently. Heroku poses direct competition to AWS, allowing you to deploy web apps in the AWS cloud without worrying about infrastructure. 

Features of Heroku

Data services

Heroku offers managed database services for Redis, Apache, Redis, and Kafka. The benefits include easy scaling, data backup, and performance. 

• Heroku Postgres

Heroku Postgres is a managed SQL database. Postgres databases can be easily accessed through PostgreSQL drivers across all languages supported by Heroku. 

• Heroku Redis

Referred to a key-value data store, it is an add-on. It can be easily accessed from Redus driver, encompassing Heroku-supported languages and frameworks. 

• Apache Kafka

It offers a low latency platform for real-time use cases. 

Built for integration and delivery

Heroku can be plugged into the most popular CI systems along with servers for achieving an automated delivery of the application. 

Trusted application operations

The global operations, along with the security team, is trusted and reliable on duty round the clock. It frees the development team to focus on creating improved user experiences. 

Supports open-source languages

Heroku supports multiple languages such as Ruby, Node, Clojure, Java, Go, Scala, Python, and PHP from the same platform. The user can use the technologies as needed for the application. 

Ready environment and app servers

Heroku offers app servers and ready set-up to ease the tasks of the development. In addition, it also offers Command Line Interface, popularly known as CLI, helps manage the app’s processes through an intuitive dashboard with seamless incorporation of the tools. 

Pricing of Heroku

Heroku offers an extensive range of services for users. All the services are available at distinct price ranges, offering diverse resources. Hence, it is viable to choose the best option as per the application requirement. 

• Free and Hobby: $0 and $7 per month 

In order to start the estimate, it is necessary to choose the kind of app that best represents what you are eyeing to build. This is ideal for non-commercial applications, such as MVPs.

• Production: $25 and above 

This plan is apt for business-focused applications, such as internal web apps. 

• Advanced: $250 and above 

This plan is ideal for mission-critical applications comprising complex functionality and requires low latency, high availability, while handling a high volume of concurrent requests. 

• Enterprise: 

This is apt for apps that meet the collaboration, compliance and control needs of large-scale organizations. 

What is Firebase?

Firebase refers to a robust cloud platform ideally designed to authorize real-time collaborative applications. With Firebase, users can have SDK for web, Android, and iOS.

It is an advanced technological solution offering texts to voice APIs, images, and more, the platform offers varied unique features.

It is mainly beneficial for front-end developers and does not require backend skills. Additionally, users can also enjoy the privilege of using a REST API, allowing them to create a custom API. 

Features of Firebase

Supports callable functions

Offering callable functions enables you to easily create Cloud functions and triggers by setting the URL to the database. On triggering the function, an API gateway needs to be arranged while adding a logic that approves. 

Strong built-in analytics

The analytics dashboard is one of the most interesting features of Firebase. It is free and equipped to report 500 event types, each comprising 25 attributes. T

he dashboard is renowned for observing and analyzing user behavior while measuring the varying user characteristics.

It also helps to understand the way in which individuals use the applications to optimize them further in the future. 

 Audience segmentation

Custom audiences in the Firebase console can be identified based on custom events, device data, or user properties. Then the audiences, as specified, can be used while targeting new notifications and features. 

Growth and user engagement

One of the most significant aspects of application development is the ability to develop and engage with users over time.

Offering diverse built-in features, it promises growth and considerable user engagement. Here are some of the popular interaction aspects making development easy: 

AdWords

Linking AdWords is easy; with this, users can segment and define the user base. Additionally, it incurs improved targeting in marketing advertising campaigns.

App indexing

You can easily re-engage with the app, especially by surfing in-app content with Google search results. It also helps to rank the application in Google search results. 

Notifications

The campaigns can be managed easily, along with the ability to schedule messages to engage users at specific intervals. In addition, the notifications are free and unlimited for both Android and iOS. 

Easy app development

Firebase facilitates easy and hassle-free focus of time and attention to developing the best applications. The internal functions and operations are rock solid and have taken care of Firebase Interface.

As a result, it can easily develop various features such as cloud messaging, test lab, hosting, authentication, remote configuration, and much more. 

Pricing of Firebase

The good news is that Firebase and its cost are flexible, suiting enterprises and startups that operate on a budget. Google offers a free tier, commonly known as the ‘Spark plan.’

However, as expected, this plan has specific limitations in place. Usage tends to continue at all levels for a few products; however, for others, you will need to switch to a paid-tier pricing plan. 

Accessing features such as app distribution, analytics, indexing, A/B testing, crashlytics, performance monitoring, in-app messaging, dynamic links, predictions, etc., are free in both plans. The cost, however, tends to vary on the product and usage. 

Plans

1. Spark plan: It is a free tier and offers generous limits to get started with Firebase. 

2. Blaze plan: This is a paid tier, offering pricing for apps at scale.

What is AWS?

Gaining immense popularity worldwide, AWS or Amazon Web Services offers 170 AWS services to developers for them to access anywhere and at any time required.

The platform offers scalable, flexible, easy-to-use, reliable, and cost-effective cloud computing solutions.

The easy-to-use platform is offered by Amazon and is a blend of power-packed offerings, including platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offering. 

AWS is available extensively across 190 countries and utilized at 5000 ed-tech organizations and 2000 government institutions. It offers a wide array of global cloud-based products, including databases, storage, mobile, enterprise applications, analytics, networking, and more.

AWS can be easily broken down into three distinct products: EC2, Amazon’s virtual machine service, low-cost storage service Glacier, and S3, a storage system of Amazon. Being far outpaced by the competitors, it is spread out in the computing world in large terms. 

Features of AWS

Scalable and adaptable

As the cost is modified based on customers’ usage, small businesses and start-ups can witness the obvious effects of using Amazon for their computing needs.

AWS is ideal for developing a business right from the bottom, providing all tools necessary for companies to get started with the cloud.

In addition, Amazon offers low-cost migration services for the existing infrastructure to move to AWS seamlessly. 

Secured and reliability

AWS comprises dozens of data centers continually monitored and well maintained.

This diversification ensures that any disaster does not cause permanent data loss. Localizing data in an identifiable location where people can realistically obtain access is highly unwise. AWS has always tried to keep the data centers hidden while offering access only on an essential basis.

The data centers and the data within is completely safe from intrusions, and with the experience of Amazon, any potential attack can be identified and prevented. 

Cost-effective

Traditionally, companies are looking for a large amount of storage needed to build and maintain storage space. Storing on a cloud signifies signing an expensive contract for significant storage space.

However, with AWS, companies can pay for what they use. There is no cost involved in building a storage system due to no necessity for estimate the usage. AWS customers are prepared to use what they need while scaling the costs automatically. 

Improved flexibility

In AWS, you can choose the operating system, database type, programming language, the location to deliver the content while paying only for what you use without any commitments.

This assists you in focusing more on businesses and development instead of learning technologies for what you lack expertise in. It allows users to choose among python, java, ruby, go, C Sharp, JSON, etc. This also enables users to easily migrate to the cloud without incurring a high cost. 

 Omnipresence

AWS spans globally and is spread across 69 availability zones within 22 geographic regions. With an offering of 170+ services, it is divided into varying groups such as storage, compute, analytics, security, etc. 

Pricing of AWS

AWS offers new customers the ability to use multiple services for free for a duration of a year until the allotted quota is reached.

In order to ensure the right leveraging of free resources, the budget must be planned. AWS offers a pricing calculator to help you estimate the costs. 

The prices vary and depend on the service you are using. They can be easily calculated using different methods; however, the primary plan is paying for the time of usage.

Therefore, hours are the primary factor, followed by minutes and seconds of using the services. 

Storage: EBS-$0.010 GB per hour 

S3: $0.023 GB per month 

• Computing power

This refers to the services and servers that are going to be beneficial to processing the information of the application. 

• EC2 (price depends on the server type, starting from 5 USD and goes up to 150 USD x month) 

Elastic IP 

Load Balancer (15 USD x 750 hours) 

• Networking: 

Amazon charges the data transferred outside the network. This is one of the primary services that reflect the bill, and the costs are mentioned below:

Inbound traffic- It is free 

Outbound traffic- Starts from 0.09 per GB <10 TB 

Heroku vs Firebase vs AWS Comparison

Conclusion

This article compared Firebase vs AWS vs AWS according to its features and pricing structure.

Firebase is Google’s application development platform. It’s a backend as a service platform, provides a fully managed and scalable service, and works with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. The core services include scalable NoSQL databases, cloud functions, and analytics.

Heroku is Salesforce’s platform for building, deploying, and running applications. It’s a platform as a service offering, supports multiple programming languages, and works with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. The core services include a container platform, managed databases, and continuous integration.

AWS is the largest cloud provider worldwide and the most flexible option for creating any sort of application. It offers IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and BaaS services, supports 26 regions, and works with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. The core services include EC2 instances, S3 storage, and serverless functions.

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