Heroku Platform vs. Moovweb XDN

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.

Incentivized

Depending on a site's structure, and a team's business flow, Moovweb could be a great fit for a business looking to optimize its desktop site for mobile and tablet devices. Given that more and more businesses are designing for "Mobile First" or at least making pages tap-friendly for tablet devices, there are cases where some businesses will find responsive or simplified designs as a good enough solution. However, for a large portion of sites, a unique experience is needed for mobile and a different experience is needed for tablet. Customer moments are different, and a single site that simply "fits" onto a smaller screen really doesn't address the change in the customer moment. Moovweb is able to transform the desktop site into optimized sites that streamline the experience into what is most impactful to the customer in that moment, based on business logic and with minimal support. After considering a responsive site, the Moovweb solution was the right choice for our business and for our customers, and the results are proving we made the right choice.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Moovweb takes the time to really understand your needs and challenges and is willing to work with and address them. They are partners during and AFTER implementation.
• Moovweb and their implementation partner 64Labs has a fantastic response time and work ethic. They really will do what it takes.
• Moovweb takes the time to share their product road map with customers.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Depending on how your site is built and maintained, there may be a different solution that will be a better option for your business and customer needs.
• At the end of the day, this is another layer that is added to your development plan and time to ensure updates work across multiple devices. Moovweb is really good about the turn-time for these updates, but there still needs to be the added QA step for M&T optimization per release.

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.

Incentivized

Personally as a Mobile Architect I am a huge proponent of building mobile-first responsive websites. I will always fight for a lobby for businesses to build sites with all devices in mind and not focus their attention on desktop driven sites which are then adaptively scaled to meet the demands of the business, in my opinion leading to a never ending cycle of building separate media queries to compensate for every device the business chooses to market to

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

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.

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.

Incentivized

Good set of customer success people combined with the flexibility to use high-quality onshore partners if workload increases at busy times. I think Moovweb's support efforts are pretty solid.

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.

Incentivized

1. Don't spend weeks in design. Because of the way the technology works nuances of design can change very quickly further down the line. We have changed the look of the product list for a client a week before launch.
2. Push for getting the project into UAT within four weeks of the kickoff of the project. There are few retailer projects that need to take more than that. In my experience the more concentrated the timeline the more effective the implementation.
3. Check that there are no major changes planned on desktop during the time of your implementation (another reason to keep the development to four weeks).
4. If you have custom mobile content requirements, get them to your implementer at the start. Moovweb is great at heavy-lifting existing content, but your implementer will need to recommend solutions for custom content that will need to be tested. Get these requirements out at the start.
5. Make a list of your desktop plugins. Moovweb can handle them all, but they can be handled in different ways
6. If you have Paypal/Google Wallet and want it on mobile as part of your project, talk about that early on.

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.

Incentivized

This is the only mobile technology we have used. We went through an extensive research and vetting process. In the end Moovweb was the best choice for technology and business needs. We considered the following companies: Moovweb,Mobify, Usablenet, Mad Mobile, SKAVA, Wompmobile. Forrester has a mobile infrastrucutre services report that could be very helpful.

Incentivized

• 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.

• The implementation was 4 months from start to finish. Mobile is about 10% of our visits today and our mobile revenue for the first half is about $200K so we will have a payback in 1 -2 years.
• Moovweb is not the most economical solution out there. It is one of the most comprehensive for sites needing all their content available for mobile.