About Heroku Review Apps
Heroku Review Apps is a feature that Heroku offers its users to spin up a temporary test app for every opened pull request (PR). According to Heroku’s documentation, each review app is a disposable Heroku app environment that allows developers and their teams to automatically build and test any pull request at a temporary, shareable URL. When the pull request is closed or merged, the Review app is deleted.
Recent Concerns About Heroku Review Apps
Last year, Heroku users reported receiving a “Heroku security notification” regarding a security breach that seemingly affected the database that stores pipeline-level config variables for Review Apps. Users were reporting that the Heroku GitHub integrations were temporarily disabled, blocking them from using the Review app functionality and leaving them to look for alternatives.
This was followed by headlines made by Heroku GM and Salesforce EVP Bob Wise, who announced that Heroku will be shutting down its free tier in the coming months. As Wise wrote in his blog post announcement:
Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services. We will be sending out a series of email communications to affected users.
(And let’s not forget about how people were saying that Heroku had already lost its steam).
Alternatives to Heroku Review Apps
The net effect of these events has been folks looking for alternatives. Some people are looking for free alternatives to replace their current Heroku arrangement. While others are willing to consider a paid setup and are leaving Heroku due to security concerns or other issues and limitations.
All of this has been interesting and important to us, because we’ve built a devtools product that works hand in hand to help users get the most out of PR preview environments like Heroku Review Apps.
And in fact, we’ve collected a solid list of Heroku alternatives that you might consider. Some of these are household names that are well known. And some are smaller companies that are just getting started. Check out the full list here.
How Livecycle Extends the Collaborative Value of ANY Preview Environment Solution Like Heroku Review Apps
Livecycle is a platform that enables contextual collaboration on top of PR preview environments. Our main value prop is in that we turn “view only” deploy previews into live collaborative playgrounds where all stakeholders - developers, designers, PMs, QA and more - can review actionable feedback, in cotntext on top of the product UI. We also offer the option to build the preview environments themselves for teams that are haven’t yet found a pipeline that works for them.
Livecycle’s SDK Extends the Collaborative Value of ANY Preview Environment Solution
We’ve packaged our contextual collaboration capabilities as a self-serve SDK that installs to a preview environment pipeline like Heroku (or any other pipeline you use within your CI for that matter) and turns each preview environment into a collaborative playground where teams can review the latest PR.
Livecycle adds a Figma-like contextual review experience that makes the PR review process clearer and faster for everyone. And since we support integrations like Slack, Jira, and Linear, no extra steps are added to your current workflow (it’s free to install. So feel free to see it for yourself).
And since our SDK is compatible with any preview environment platform, we’ve collected a solid list of Heroku alternatives that you might consider. Some of these are household names that are well known. And some are smaller companies that are just getting started. Check out the full list here.
Why Livecycle Can Also Be an Ideal Alternative to Heroku Review Apps
As mentioned, in addition to the collaboration layer, Livecycle can also provide the preview environments for teams who aren’t yet using a solution from another provider. In this configuration Livecycle provides an end-to-end experience: Building automatic preview environments for every pull request, and facilitating the contextual collaboration by inviting teammates to join and enabling everyone to review and comment in context, on top of the product UI.
For those considering an end-to-end offering, here are a few more details about why Livecycle might be compelling to teams that don’t want to work with one of the other preview environment platforms that are out there:
- Easy setup and robust workload compatibility - Livecycle provides ready-to-deploy templates based on your Docker files that allow users to get started with the platform regardless of the back-end provider and front-end frameworks that are in use. You can expect the first ephemeral environment to be spin up within minutes. And they will be generated automatically per-PR as you go. Migrating from Heroku or your current pipeline is a quick and easy part of the process.
- Built-in collaboration and annotation tools - Livecycle offers much more than just a link to a stand-alone preview environment per-PR. Each Livecycle environment is a live, collaborative “playground” that includes a rich layer of built-in collaboration and annotation tools. These collaboration tools allow all collaborators to join the PR review and leave their comments visually, on top of the product UI. These comments are maintained in Livecycle and also synced back to Git as review comments so that developers can see the issues faster, understand them better and address them sooner than ever before. Livecycle enables a truly frictionless workflow - not just visibility of the front end. Since all stakeholders run their reviews concurrently, asynchronously and contextually on top of the same PR, there is an up to 10x increase in development velocity and build quality.
- Free for open source - Livecycle is free-forever for open source projects who want to install and benefit from Livecycle’s inclusive collaboration. We are privileged to be assisting opens source projects to streamline their workflow between maintainers, contributors and users. Using Livecycle directly impacts the efficiency of maintaining projects, the contributor experience and the number of users who try to fork and adopt the product.
So weather you’re using preview environments already or you’re just getting started in setting up your pipeline, Livecycle can be a great option to consider for facilitating a more collaborative workflow for your team, to speed up your feedback loops, reduce workflow friction, and make your whole team a lot happier.
