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Judoscale vs. Heroku’s autoscaler

Heroku offers their own autoscaler for free, so why use Judoscale?

• Judoscale works on all dyno types—standard dynos as well as perf, private, and shield dynos.
• Judoscale autoscales your worker dynos, so your job queues are never backed up.
• Judoscale monitors request queue time instead of response time.
• Judoscale’s autoscaling algorithm responds in seconds, not minutes.
• Judoscale lets you set a custom scaling schedule.
• Judoscale offers an API for your autoscale settings.
• You can tweak your autoscaling behavior using simple, powerful controls.

Worried about the cost?

Autoscaling almost always saves more than it costs, so you’re essentially getting it for free. Most of our customers see their dyno bill cut in half!

And our “White Belt” plan is free forever for any number of dynos. It’s limited to 20 autoscale events per month, so it’s perfect as a trial for your production app. Most customers keep their staging and test environments on the free plan for the convience of spinning down all their worker dynos when not in use. That’s right—you can scale your worker dynos down to zero!

How does it work?

Our lightweight framework adapters run async in your app, collecting web and worker queue metrics. We send these metrics to our API every 10 seconds, where our autoscaling algorithm goes to work. When we determine scaling is needed, we use the Heroku API to adjust the number of dynos.

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Platforms we support

We’ve integrated with several web frameworks to measure request queue time for web autoscaling:

Ruby on Rails Sinatra (Rack) Django Flask Node JS

For worker autoscaling, we support the following job queues:

Sidekiq Resque Delayed Job Que Good Job Celery RQ

If you don’t see support for your stack above, you can still use Judoscale! Any web application (PHP, Java, Go, etc.) can use our response time autoscaling for web dynos.

When do you need autoscaling?

Autoscaling is crucial for apps with variable traffic or job workloads. It helps your app to gracefully handle increased load, while ensuring that you’re not overscaled with a massive Heroku bill.

We think of autoscaling as a tool to help you sleep at night, no longer worried about whether your app might be crushed under unexpected load. Autoscaling lets you focus on dev, not ops—that’s why you use Heroku in the first place!

Get started in minutes

Trying Judoscale is fast and costs you nothing. Start on our free plan, and stay there as long as you like! Check the the video below for a full walk-through.

Who is Judoscale?

We are developers like you. We built Judoscale (originally called Rails Autoscale) in 2016 because we were fed up with the unreliable and confusing autoscaling options available. With seven years of tackling every edge case, we’re still the best, and we’re here to stay.

Over 1,000 dev teams use and love Judoscale, and we autoscale their applications over 2.5 million times every month. We’re a small, committed team, here to help you scale your apps with ease.

Want to chat? Book a call with us!