Northflank Reviews & Product Details

The team are extremely helpful, from the moment we considered moving to Northflank, Will & Frederik jumped on a call with us, walked us through the onboarding process and even helped us to migrate sites from Heroku. From there the tools they have available meant it was seamless & time friendly to migrate all our applications to them. Anytime we need help or have an issue they take no hesitation in responding almost immediately. I'd 10/10 recommend them to anyone considering migrating or setting up with the team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only downside I can think of is that in the initial phases the dashboard can be slightly difficult to find what you need, this is always the case though when getting setup with a new application. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Northflank let's me not think about my app deployment most of the time. It let's me have my app split into whatever services I want and organises them all in a way that makes sense. Scaling up and down is super simple and quick.

Easy to set up, I chose to use Dockerfiles to describe my services and once they're working locally they work on Northflank as well.

Basically it's like Heroku used to be (except a little better) before Heroku got rubish and unreliable.

Support has always been fast and incredibly helpful. There's no fighting your way past level 1 support, you get people who know what they're talking about right away. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Builds are a bit slow, they don't support local docker caching. I know that's something they're planning on fixing soon though. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The platform "just works", build your services and deploy them with ease. Runs on our own cloud using GKE, which allows us to save on costs.

The support from the team is phenomenal, with them being proactive in reaching out to us when things aren't working well in our cluster, which is rare.

I would recommend this platform to anyone wishing to set up a quick and easy modern cloud cluster. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While the Northflank platform abstracts away all implementation details of a Kubernetes cluster, when wishing to dive deeper into the cluster status or, for example, investigating why services are not able to start when the cluster is out of capacity, one still needs to use native kubernetes tools such as kubectl Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Northflank just makes it easy to deploy & manage the various parts of a modern web application. The ability to spin up any kind of service just by pointing at a Docker image allows us to rapidly evolve and scale our applications without limitations.

The thoughtful UX of the web dashboard takes away the complexity of having to manage everything - they have clearly thought hard about how to make developers' lives easier.

And whenever I run into something I can't handle myself, I get very rapid support from the Northflank team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main tradeoff with a platform like Northflank as compared to going with a VPS or dedicated server is that you'll pay more for the equivalent amount of resources. This is fair in my opinion - with Northflank you get so many features for the price, which if you wanted to replicate on a VPS would mean many, many hours of setup and maintenance assuming you even have the expertise to do so (I don't). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

You can easily deploy your app using their buildpack or coming from an external container registry. I also like their feature to bring your own cloud which you can connect your AWS and Google cloud and just pay a fix monthly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

They have limited regions to deploy your service. You need to email to enable other regions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Northflank allows me to run a writing platform as a single person, along with a number of client projects. It's really easy to keep an overview. I haven't spent any time on dev ops since. When I had questions regarding a new deployment the support has been amazing! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

MinIO doesn't run on a custom domain without a proxy, but a solution for that is being worked on. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I must say Northflank has exceeded my expectations in several ways. From its reliability to comprehensive features and outstanding customer service, Northflank has proven to be an exceptional choice for hosting our applications.

The platform is extremely user-friendly, both the interface and API are easy to use and navigate whether you're a seasoned developer or a beginner, Northflank provides an intuitive experience, allowing us to effortlessly manage our infrastructure. The straightforward design and well-documented resources make it easy to understand the platform's capabilities, enabling users to get up and running quickly, but also allowing for a fairly deep level of customization.

One of Northflank's standout features is its comprehensive API and Javascript Client, anything you can do in the UI, you can script using javascript. It was very simple to deprecate all our terraform and helm charts in favor of very simple javascript and json files. It also has support for CI/CD pipelines, which we used to completly replace our dependency on gitlab CI/CD and allowed us to cut our deploy times by more than half.

Another aspect that made us love the platform is how easy it is to run experiments. just drop a random docker image from dockerhub in our infra and connect it to our running containers. also, all containers are easily reachable via API/CLI and all addons are reachable via port forwading. We can run some fast paced "trial and error" driven development this way, which is very valuable during development / QA. The platform also allows us to easily experiment with different configurations, environments, scaling options, and deployment strategies.

Also important to note that Northflank boasts the best customer service I have encountered in the PaaS industry. Their support team is responsive, knowledgeable, and genuinely committed to resolving any issues or answering questions promptly. Having such excellent customer support makes a significant difference when it comes to a hosting provider, and Northflank truly excels in this regard. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While Northflank offers an extensive range of customization options, it does have some limitations when it comes to networking: VPCs, Load balancing and VPN connections. Users looking for highly specific networking configurations may find the options limited.

Another common problem we had (that was easily solved by their customer service) was the lack of options to fine tune addon configuration files, for exampole, deploying a mysql addon with a specific mysql.ini file. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The UI is clear and allows a new project to be set up quickly and simply. At the same time there is a lot of flexibility and the option to create more complex set ups if needed. The support from Northflank is also top quality! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For a DevOps newcomer the sheer amount of options can be a little overwhelming at first, but they do provide a large number of how-to guides covering many common scenarios. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Everything in one place, and logical to navigate. We can bring our own AWS account and manage all the things in one interface. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lots of options, but everything is arranged sensibly and is super flexible. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Northflank truly does ‘sort out’ the developer experience. It makes it extremely easy to set up new projects and run them through from github into staging and production in a few clicks, and the templating language they have to support both the CLI and the GUI is fantastic for keeping configurations in-sync with code repos.

Going into our first steps with Northflank I was of the mindset of ‘how can it be easier than apprunner or beanstalk’ but in reality it's much more powerful as well as significantly more friendly - it allows for granular configuration and monitoring while also providing fantastic tooling and integration potential through their API.

You can go as high level as you want and just click buttons in a UI to get started, or build your own workflows and script everything through the API. At all times you have shell access to containers if you need to do some low-level investigations as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is not currently possible to manage cloud-native and specific applications through Northflank - as an example, you can’t use Northflank to manage your AWS Lambdas. This makes sense because it's a cloud agnostic platform built on kubernetes, but it is a consideration and not every project will be ideally suited. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.