When comparing Heroku vs ZEIT Now, the Slant community recommends Heroku for most people. In the question“What are the best website hosting providers?” Heroku is ranked 4th while ZEIT Now is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Heroku is:
Getting started with Heroku is very easy. It's a very straightforward procedure and a beginner can set up their first app in two minutes. Often it's just a matter of a couple of `git` commands and it's all set up and running. The official Heroku [docmentation](https://devcenter.heroku.com/) also helps a lot.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to start with
Getting started with Heroku is very easy. It's a very straightforward procedure and a beginner can set up their first app in two minutes. Often it's just a matter of a couple of git
commands and it's all set up and running. The official Heroku docmentation also helps a lot.
Pro Excellent error logs
When your deploy fails you see a legitimate error log. Many of the other PaaS give you nondescript messages and debugging is a pain. Debugging Heroku wins by comparison.
Pro Add-ons let you easily add features and technologies
Heroku has a vast list of plugins and services that can be added to an instance. These plugins cover things from databases to email systems. This remove the task of having to install services and setting them up manually. Heroku does it all for you.
Pro Simple scaling
Heroku instances can easily be scaled up or down by increasing or decreasing the number of available dynos for that instance. This can be done through the CLI or through Heroku's web UI.
Pro Dedicated build servers
Heroku has dedicated servers for building app dependencies, to ensure that you won't have issues like "out of memory" errors when deploying your app.
Pro Mature
Heroku is one of the oldest PaaS providers. The fact that it's been around for such a long time means that it had a lot of time to mature over the years. There's also a massive number of articles, guides and tutorials on Heroku out there for beginners and advanced users.
Pro Free option
Heroku offers a free tier which contains a single dyno instance. It offers 512MB of memory and 100MB swap space.
Pro Deployments via a simple command line command
Installing their CLI and calling "now" inside your project's root will automatically build your project, whether it may be a Node.js or a Docker app , or maybe a static website, it works on the platform.
Pro Custom domain support
ZEIT Now supports custom domains, if that doesn't ring your bell, they also allow you to buy a domain directly from ZEIT, and even from the CLI.
Pro From the developers of Hyper Terminal and Next.js
The renowned developers of the Hyper Terminal and Framework for React applications develops and maintains this platform.
Pro Good support
You can talk to the staff anytime via their slack real-time, or mail them. They provide good assistance and will help you on any questions or issues on the platform.
Pro In-depth documentation
The documentation is very in-depth and can help you understand on how to make your application work on the platform.
Cons
Con Constrained by addons
If you want to fully customize your production environment, then Heroku can be seriously constraining. Installing libraries or services can not be done unless there is already a Heroku plugin for it.
Con Further deployments are slow
While starting with Heroku is fast and easy, and the first few deployments are actually very fast, larger applications tend to have slower deployments. It takes some time for the dynos to restart and while they are restarting the application is completely offline. Which means that you can lose precious seconds of application time.
Con Really expensive
Heroku starts getting really expensive once you leave that free tier. It's not just the bare Heroku service that is costly, the addons as well are very pricey.
Con Docker builds can only execute at the CMD Layer
ZEIT Now executes everything using docker run, so whatever was defined in the CMD Layer, is what will ZEIT will only execute.
Con Node.js apps has no access to the instance's filesystem
Once the Node.js build has completed, the only accessible directory is /tmp, which makes any file operation impossible outside the /tmp directory.
Con Free plan makes your code public
Unless you upgrade to a paid plan, the source code can be easily viewed by others.