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Rails Autoscale vs. Heroku’s autoscaler

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

• Rails Autoscale works on all dyno types—standard dynos as well as perf, private, and shield dynos.
• Rails Autoscale autoscales your worker dynos, so your job queues are never backed up.
• Rails Autoscale monitors request queue time instead of response time.
• Rails Autoscale’s autoscaling algorithm responds in seconds, not minutes.
• Rails Autoscale lets you set a custom scaling schedule.
• Rails Autoscale 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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Rails Autoscale vs. Judoscale

In 2022, Rails Autoscale rebranded as “Judoscale” so we could serve more than just the Ruby community. Today, both add-ons exist because Heroku doesn’t allow renaming an add-on, but behind the scenes it’s all Judoscale. It’s the same app, same pricing, same team, and of course, the same love for Ruby and Rails that started it all!

Autoscaling your Ruby job queues

We’ve integrated with the most popular Ruby job queues so you can be confident your queues never back up:

Sidekiq Resque Delayed Job Que Good Job

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 Rails Autoscale 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 Rails Autoscale?

We are developers like you. We built Rails Autoscale (now called Judoscale) 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 Rails Autoscale, 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!