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Syncing Salesforce data with a Heroku Postgres database is a common requirement for many SaaS companies. For applications serving a single customer, Heroku Connect can seem like a straightforward solution.
However, as your SaaS business grows and adopts a multi-tenant model, the limitations of Heroku Connect become significant roadblocks. For any company using heroku connect for multi-tenant apps, issues with scalability, data management, and real-time performance can slow down growth and consume valuable engineering time. Stacksync offers a purpose-built integration platform designed to overcome these exact challenges, providing a scalable and reliable foundation for your application to thrive.
A multi-tenant architecture is a software design where a single version of an application serves multiple customers, known as "tenants." Think of it like an apartment building: one building serves many residents, but each has their own private, secure apartment. In this model, the application keeps each tenant's data separate and secure. Heroku Connect supports this structure by allowing different Salesforce organizations to link to a single Heroku application and its database [1].
This feature is often why developers choose Heroku Connect when first building a SaaS application. It appears to offer a direct way to integrate customer data from Salesforce into the app's backend. While this works on a small scale, Heroku Connect's design creates major operational problems and performance issues as your customer base and data volumes increase.
Managing sync settings for a handful of tenants might be doable, but this approach doesn't scale. Each new customer requires a manual setup in the Heroku Connect user interface, a repetitive task that is prone to human error. Trying to apply unique filtering or mapping rules for each tenant quickly becomes a tangled mess. Furthermore, the lack of version control makes it difficult to track configuration changes or roll back to a stable state if an error occurs.
Heroku Connect's architecture relies on polling, meaning it checks for updates periodically rather than processing them instantly. This design leads to sync delays, a problem that gets worse across many tenants. A single "noisy" tenant with a large amount of data can consume shared resources and slow down data synchronization for everyone else [2].
This is made worse by the platform's built-in limitations. For example, Heroku Connect has a strict limit of 100 objects per connection, which is a major hurdle for applications with sophisticated data models. As your app grows, these limits force difficult compromises. Stacksync offers a more scalable solution so you can beat Heroku Connect object sync limits with Stacksync by supporting an unlimited number of standard and custom objects.
Today's users expect data to be updated instantly. Heroku Connect checks Salesforce for changes at set intervals, with a minimum delay of 10 minutes [3]. This means your application's data is always lagging, which is a critical flaw for features that need immediate information, such as live dashboards or interactive user workflows. The built-in delay creates a poor user experience and operational headaches. A real-time sync showdown between Heroku Connect and an event-driven platform like Stacksync clearly shows the difference in speed and reliability.
Troubleshooting sync problems in a multi-tenant environment with Heroku Connect is notoriously hard. When an issue happens, figuring out which tenant is causing the problem is like searching for a needle in a haystack. "Silent failures," where a sync breaks without a clear warning, are common and can lead to data inconsistencies that go unnoticed for days. Fixing these errors often involves complex, manual troubleshooting across various logs. In contrast, Stacksync offers a clear solution to Heroku Connect's limited observability, transforming an opaque process into a transparent and manageable one.
Stacksync is an enterprise-grade data integration platform built from the ground up for scalable, real-time, and bi-directional synchronization. Unlike Heroku Connect, which was made for simpler tasks, Stacksync is designed to handle the complexity and scale of modern multi-tenant applications.
With Stacksync, you can manage all your tenant connections from a single, unified dashboard. Our platform features Configuration as Code (CaC), allowing you to define, version, and deploy tenant sync configurations directly from a Git repository. This enables full automation, strong governance, and easy integration into your existing development workflows. Crucially, Stacksync's architecture isolates each tenant's sync process, so an issue with one customer's data won't affect the performance or reliability of others.
Stacksync’s event-driven architecture provides millisecond-level data sync, eliminating the frustrating delays of polling systems. This ensures your application always runs on the most current data. To manage API usage across all your tenants, our platform includes Smart API Rate Limiting, which automatically optimizes Salesforce API calls to prevent you from hitting quotas. By switching to an event-driven model, you can overcome Heroku Connect polling limits using Stacksync and build truly responsive applications.
Stacksync provides an Issue Management Dashboard that gives you one central place to view, diagnose, and resolve sync errors for any tenant. Instead of digging through logs, your team can see problems instantly and use one-click "retry" or "revert" buttons to fix them in seconds. With advanced logging and real-time alerts via Slack, email, or PagerDuty, you are immediately notified of any issues, preventing silent failures. These powerful tools ensure that fixing issues is no longer a manual, time-consuming task.
While Heroku Connect may be a decent starting point for simple projects, it simply cannot meet the performance, scalability, and management needs of growing multi-tenant applications. Its limitations create technical debt, drain engineering resources, and ultimately hold back your ability to deliver a reliable, enterprise-ready product.
Stacksync provides the modern infrastructure you need to scale with confidence. With a real-time event-driven architecture, superior management through Configuration as Code, and powerful observability, Stacksync empowers you to build sophisticated, high-performance applications without being limited by your integration tool.
Ready to solve your multi-tenant data sync challenges for good? Book a demo with our team or start a free trial to see how Stacksync can transform your data operations.
