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Heroku Connect is a popular tool for synchronizing data between Salesforce and a Heroku Postgres database. While useful, many businesses eventually encounter significant Heroku Connect bottlenecks. These issues can lead to frustrating data delays, exhausted API limits, and operational headaches that slow down your entire team.
This article will explore the common causes of these bottlenecks and introduce Stacksync as a superior, real-time alternative. We'll show you how to eliminate these frustrations and power your applications with live, consistent data.
Performance issues are a frequent complaint among Heroku Connect users, especially as data volumes grow. These aren't just minor annoyances; they are fundamental problems rooted in its architecture. Let's break down the most prevalent issues.
Heroku Connect uses a polling mechanism, which means it checks for new data changes roughly every 10 minutes. This creates a built-in delay, so your Postgres database is never truly synchronized in real-time. For modern applications, this latency can be a deal-breaker, causing sales teams to work with outdated lead information or customer-facing apps to show incorrect data, leading to operational friction and poor user experiences [1].
Think of your Salesforce API calls like a daily budget. To check for and sync data, Heroku Connect continuously spends from this budget. For businesses with large amounts of data or frequent updates, this can quickly use up the entire day's allowance, causing the sync to stop and creating even bigger backlogs [2]. This is a critical bottleneck for data-intensive applications and a major source of unexpected costs.
Heroku Connect’s performance often degrades when syncing tables with millions of rows. The initial sync for a large dataset can take hours or even days. More importantly, ongoing synchronization in high-transaction environments struggles to keep up, creating a perpetual queue of unsynced data. This makes it an unreliable choice for building a scalable enterprise data warehouse or any application that needs a complete and timely view of your business data [3].
Troubleshooting sync errors in Heroku Connect can be a difficult and time-consuming process for engineering teams [4]. The error messages are often cryptic, and finding the root cause requires developers to spend hours digging through logs. This manual approach to fixing problems wastes valuable time that could be spent building new features instead of just maintaining brittle data pipelines.
Stacksync is a modern data synchronization platform designed to overcome the limitations of traditional tools like Heroku Connect. As an event-driven, scalable, and developer-friendly solution, Stacksync is the ideal Heroku Connect alternative for businesses that need reliable, live data.
Unlike Heroku Connect's 10-minute polling, Stacksync uses an event-driven architecture that syncs data in milliseconds. When a record is updated in Salesforce, an event is captured and propagated to your database instantly. This true two-way, real-time synchronization guarantees data is always consistent across all your connected systems—perfect for mission-critical use cases like internal tools or customer-facing applications that depend on live data.
Stacksync includes a "Smart API Rate Limits" feature that intelligently manages API calls to prevent you from hitting your quotas. It adapts to your data traffic and dynamically batches updates, ensuring your sync runs continuously without interruptions. This means no more backlogs or unexpected costs from exhausted API limits. See how Stacksync compares to other Workato and Heroku Connect alternatives for real-time data sync.
Engineered for scale, Stacksync handles millions of records from day one without performance degradation. It also simplifies troubleshooting with a dedicated sync issue management dashboard that provides clear, actionable insights into any problems. Features like real-time alerts and the ability to retry or revert issues with a single click save valuable engineering time and give you confidence in your data infrastructure. Stacksync is the clear choice when you need to replace Heroku Connect with affordable real-time sync that scales.
The differences between the two platforms become clear when you compare them side-by-side.
This table highlights Stacksync's technical advantages, which translate into a more reliable, scalable, and cost-effective solution. For a deeper dive, check out our comparative analysis of pricing models.
Heroku Connect's polling architecture, API limitations, and scalability issues create significant bottlenecks for any modern business. These problems lead to outdated data, frustrated teams, and missed opportunities.
Stacksync provides the definitive solution with the real-time speed, scalability, and robust management features needed to support your most critical operations. If you're tired of dealing with Heroku Connect bottlenecks, it's time to upgrade your data infrastructure.
Book a demo or sign up for a free 14-day trial to see how Stacksync can transform your data workflows.
