# One v One

## Heroku vs Cyclic

Take a look at how Cyclic compares to Heroku.

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Heroku is one of the best known PaaS (Platform as a Service) vendors. It was founded in 2007 (two years before Node.js was first released). Both Heroku and Cyclic offer a similar set of standard basic features.

Heroku is built around a concept of "Dynos". These are lightweight containers that are priced like servers but have some attributes of on-demand serverless style runtimes with elastic scale up. The downside is that you still pay for idle.

Cyclic is a good alternative to Heroku if you are looking for a modern cloud architecture, serverless hosting infrastructure, easy onboarding experience, a bursty or inconsistent workload. Or if self-hosting is required (BYO cloud account). Pay for the requests you use, auto-scale from the start.

Here is a breakdown of Heroku compared to Cyclic on individual features:

vs

| Feature | Heroku | Cyclic |
|---------|--------|--------|
| Always on | ✔︎ | Paid |
| Inactivity Delay | ~200ms | ~30s |
| Global app deployment | 22 regions | 2 regions |
| Self hosting option (Bring Your Own Cloud) | ✔︎ | **X** |
| Integrated database | DynamoDB | PostgreSQL |
| Integrated object storage | S3 | Extra addon |
| Push to deploy | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| GitHub app integration | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Zero-config | ✔︎ | **X** |
| Free tier | ✔︎ | **X** |
| Consumption based pricing (stop paying for idle capacity) | ✔︎ | **X** 1 |

[1] Heroku free tier discontinued as of 11/28/2022

## Full Stack Serverless Apps

Deploy a full stack serverless app on Cyclic in seconds. Bring your own repo or fork and install a starter from our library:

[Deploy on Cyclic 🚀](https://app.cyclic.sh/api/login) [Read the Docs 📒](https://docs.cyclic.sh/docs/intro)