Azure SQL Managed Instance vs. Heroku Platform

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Azure SQL Managed Instance is a scalable cloud database service that combines SQL Server database engine compatibility with a fully managed and evergreen platform as a service.N/A
Heroku Platform
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
The Heroku Platform, now from Salesforce, is a platform-as-a-service based on a managed container system, with integrated data services and ecosystem for deploying modern apps. It takes an app-centric approach for software delivery, integrated with developer tools and workflows. It’s three main tool are: Heroku Developer Experience (DX), Heroku Operational Experience (OpEx), and Heroku Runtime. Heroku Developer Experience (DX) Developers deploy directly from tools like…
$25
per month
Pricing
Azure SQL Managed InstanceHeroku Platform
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Production
$25.00
per month
Advanced
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure SQL Managed InstanceHeroku Platform
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure SQL Managed InstanceHeroku Platform
Considered Both Products
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Chose Azure SQL Managed Instance
Azure to our enviironment where we have everything integrated stacks up far better than MySQL where we would have to reinvent and use everything to fit a MySQL environment including the data and the commands within that data. Furthermore, doesn't work really well on SQL …
Heroku Platform
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku was more extensive in terms of its operating and scaling from what we witnessed by looking into other options and trying to find the best operating system for a new platform.
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku Platform is much faster to setup, easy to maintain and in terms of ROI makes more sense.
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku Platform is cheaper to begin with compared to DigitalOcean or Amazon Fargate. The configuration user interface is also arguably easier to understand. With its user friendliness and cheaper tiers, Heroku Platform was our pick to host some of our applications that were …
Chose Heroku Platform
I believe Azure App Service is pretty similar to Heroku as you can in both deploy your backend applications.
However, the dyno concept and it's drastically simple web dashboard makes Heroku a much better and sane alternative to Azure app service. In Heroku, you get abstracted of …
Chose Heroku Platform
Kuberbetes is an easily scalable docker based option which should need minimal DevOps, however, it has a pretty high learning curve with many decisions that need to be addressed as well as monitoring, logging and security concerns.
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku has the advantage of simplifying the development and integration with some services (which in Heroku they call addon) wherein other platforms, certainly for those who don't have much experience, it will take much more development time.
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku, in my opinion, is the easiest platform to deploy and host web applications on. From collaboration to deployment, everything is well thought out and bulletproof. If you need advanced server functionality, like a VPC, machine-to-machine communication, etc., you will …
Chose Heroku Platform
We chose Heroku solely because we had an end goal of putting our data into Salesforce. The platform allowed us to simplify this.
Chose Heroku Platform
We also use Cloud 66 which provides some of Heroku's features, at a lower price. It still cannot compare to Heroku's ease of use and ability to easily deploy new staging environments though, so we will always use Heroku for at least some of our projects.
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku is an all in 1 package for deploying and running your services. It provides an easy to use setup and run for 90% of cases. If you have a more complicated infrastructure, you'd definitely need to move to another hosting provider. But if as long as you can operate within …
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku has advantages over Docker, Google App Engine and AWS products, but it depends largely on your use case. If you are already in AWS, it's probably in your best interest to stay with AWS products. However, other "Cloud Formation/Orchestration" products like Docker are …
Chose Heroku Platform
We kicked the tires on OpenShift before deciding on Heroku, and found the platform to be much less intuitive and well-documented than Heroku. It felt like we were constantly trying to implement workarounds for esoteric platform problems, and eventually the work became too …
Chose Heroku Platform
For a different project, Aptible surpassed Heroku when it came to meeting HIPAA-related requirements, though it offers much less flexibility with add-on services (for obvious reasons). Google App Engine had a much more complicated deployment model and seemed unnecessarily …
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku is much easier to get setup in and doesn't require strong DevOps knowledge. It's also a lot harder to mess up in.
Chose Heroku Platform
To this day no other PaaS matches Heroku in ease of use and maturity. If you want to stay 100% focused on your unique product/service rather than wasting time on boilerplate hosting issues, I can highly recommend Heroku. I personally use it for all of my own websites …
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku is the more expensive option for hosting compared to some of the cloud platforms we investigated, but it's worth it for us because of the plug-and-play nature of Heroku deployment. We can be up and running in a few minutes and know with precision how much it will cost us …
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku has the easy facility to deploy and host applications while others have to configure a lot. The price of the services is high for others. But within Heroku pricing and easy to maintain under the same roof.
Chose Heroku Platform
Some APIs are specifically developed to be deployed to certain platforms and usually decision which platform to use is not developer's. Another question is deployment cost and pricing model; in specific cases after price comparison Heroku is often selected among other cloud …
Chose Heroku Platform
AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Lambda
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku is a really great platform to get up and running QUICKLY and efficiently. What Heroku is really great at that other services are lacking is ease of use, documentation. It is really great for beginning developers and awesome to get up and running to take care of lots of …
Chose Heroku Platform
Heroku is a much better choice for small prototyping and small to medium size sites. It is easier to use than most other services/platforms.
Chose Heroku Platform
Slicker UX. More tightly integrated with Salesforce. Process oriented DX.
Chose Heroku Platform
I feel Heroku is lightyears ahead of all other PaaS offerings. To me the competition is between PaaS and self-hosted cloud, not between Heroku and other PaaS providers.
Chose Heroku Platform
I have not evaluated Engine Yard in years, but at the time the starting price point and supported integrations could not begin to compete with Heroku.
Features
Azure SQL Managed InstanceHeroku Platform
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Azure SQL Managed Instance
8.4
Ratings
5% above category average
Heroku Platform
8.1
Ratings
1% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces10.00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Scalability8.00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Platform management overhead8.00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Workflow engine capability8.00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Platform access control9.00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Services-enabled integration7.00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Development environment creation8.00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Development environment replication8.00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification9.00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Issue recovery9.00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes8.00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure SQL Managed InstanceHeroku Platform
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure SQL Managed InstanceHeroku Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
6.0
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure SQL Managed InstanceHeroku Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
Runs the supply chain workload well. Able to provide proper alerts when the cpu is not enough to run the workload. Is able to run the update stats automatically as the data changes. Scales very well for most oltp apps. Has good dashboards to show what is going on the database.
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Heroku is very well-suited to early stage and/or rapidly changing projects. It is great for getting moving quickly or changing direction quickly. In scenarios where there is already scale or well-defined requirements, it may be preferable to set things up directly on AWS or another cloud provider to avoid the additional costs of Heroku as the middleman.
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Pros
  • executes the queries efficiently
  • has tools/dashboards to show where the query problems lie
  • alerting for problems
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  • Amazingly clear and straightforward documentation (versus the quagmire of AWS docs).
  • Deploy your entire site in one command.
  • Setting up asynchronous job processing for long running operations (e.g. sending emails, making external API calls).
  • A wonderful portfolio of tightly-integrated add-ons in their marketplace.
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Cons
  • hard to use without Microsoft knowledge
  • Intimidating CLI
  • Commands are not intuitive
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  • Could be less expensive, although you get what you pay for
  • Sleeping apps can be an annoyance: Heroku automatically puts your apps in sleep mode and they have to spin back up after periods of inactivity. Much of this can be solved but it requires working around the built-in functionality. I understand why they do it but it's an area that could be improved.
  • Restrictions to server access means you can't customize as much as you could if you owned the server. But again, this is also a benefit because it's about convention over configuration. So you can't configure as much, but then, you typically don't have to.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
Heroku is a critical and core part of our infrastructure that is serving our customers well. We are very satisfied with the cost of our solution. While it would be difficult to move away from Heroku, we have no plans to do so. We have had no major issues with it and it is a pleasure to use. Other products on the market might offer comparable functionality, but until we expose a need that Heroku cannot satisfy, we'll stay the course.
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Usability
it runs the workload very well without causing any issues to the business. there are many applications running on Azure SQL Managed Instances in my organization. Most users are happy with its performance. Is able to provide good dashboard for the visibility of the workload. Can add cpu without a downtime to deal with high workload.
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If you have basic backend and Git knowledge, deploying to Heroku is a breeze. It now supports many types of backends, including hybrid backends (ex: nginx + application server) through its build pack system. The dashboard is easy to use, and the CLI tools are well designed. Accessing the add-ons is also easy. It uses an SSO-type system so you don't have to re-sign in to view the add-on dashboards.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
Heroku availability correlates pretty strongly to AWS US EAST availability. We had a couple of times where there was a Heroku-specific issue but not for the last 7-8 months.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
The only issue that I ever have is that about 1 out of 20 deployments (git push) will hang and need to be cancelled and done again.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
I've used it for many years without facing any major problem. It's not hard at all to get used to it, it's documentation is outstanding and simple. We are close to 2020 and I don't think most of the existing companies or startups should still face old problems such as wasting time deploying code and calculate computing resources.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Be ready to pay a bit more than expected in the beginning if you're migrating from a big server. The application is probably not ready for the change and you have to keep improving it with time.
It's also important to consider that you can't save anything to the disc as it will be lost when your application restarts, so you have to think about using something like S3.
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Alternatives Considered
Azure to our enviironment where we have everything integrated stacks up far better than MySQL where we would have to reinvent and use everything to fit a MySQL environment including the data and the commands within that data. Furthermore, doesn't work really well on SQL Management Studio which makes it completely useless for what we are trying to do.
Read full review
Heroku has advantages over Docker, Google App Engine and AWS products, but it depends largely on your use case. If you are already in AWS, it's probably in your best interest to stay with AWS products. However, other "Cloud Formation/Orchestration" products like Docker are typically lacking the ease-of-use factor that allows you to get up and running with Heroku quickly.
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Return on Investment
  • Decision Driven decisions have been quicker
  • Negatively cumbersome at start when training
  • Positive use of PaaS services instead of devoting VMs
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  • It has been critical in seamlessly operating our platform with runs all of our programs.
  • It has been impressive with its ability to scale quickly which results in the growth of our work.
  • It allows for tracking of different features which allows for quick problem solving which saves us time.
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ScreenShots