Railway vs. Fly

Railway is a modern, developer-centric cloud platform designed to simplify app deployment, scaling, and management—all while optimizing for developer happiness and efficiency.

We provide a robust, feature-rich platform comparable to other cloud providers, with a focus on ease of use and developer productivity.

Railway offers:

• Broad Language and Framework Support: Deploy apps in any language or framework.
• Flexible Deployment Options: Use GitHub, Dockerfiles, Docker images from any registry, or local deployments via the Railway CLI.
• Integrated Tools: Simplify environment variable management, CI/CD, observability, and service scaling.
• Networking Features: Public and private networking.
• Best in Class Support: Very active community and support on Slack, Discord and Help Station.

We differ in the following:

• A vibrant, highly engaged community with fast, reliable support.
• A superior developer experience designed for simplicity and efficiency.
• Transparent, flexible pricing that scales with your needs.
• And much more...

Differences

Product and Deploy UX

At Railway, we believe DevOps should be effortless, intuitive, and even enjoyable. From the instant simplicity of dev.new to managing interconnected services with ease on your Project Canvas, our platform is designed to be both powerful and visually refined. Who says DevOps has to be ugly or boring? On our platform, it’s fluid, engaging, and a pleasure to use.

One of our standout features is real-time collaboration. See exactly which teammates are working alongside you on the Project Canvas, fostering seamless teamwork and collaboration.

Deploy UI and GitHub Repo Deployments

Fly.io currently supports GitHub repository deployments for Node.js, Phoenix, Laravel, Django, Python, and Golang via their Launch UI, but these are still considered experimental. They strongly recommend using the CLI for more reliable and flexible deployments.

At Railway, you can deploy any language repository seamlessly through our fast and intuitive deploy UI. Additionally, you have the flexibility to use our CLI whenever it suits your workflow.

We make it incredibly simple to deploy exactly what you need—whether it's a template, database, Docker image, or even an empty service—all from the dashboard. With just a right-click on the Project Canvas or a tap on the Create button, you can instantly spin up new resources. Fly.io does not offer this level of convenience in its dashboard.

Native Crons

Railway provides native cron jobs directly in the dashboard—no setup, no extra packages, just seamless scheduling. Simply define a cron schedule in your service settings, and Railway will automatically execute the start command at the specified times.

With Railway’s built-in cron management, you can:

• Easily create and manage cron jobs from the dashboard
• View all past and running jobs in one place
• Avoid unnecessary installations and configurations—just set and go!

Fly.io does not offer native crons. To schedule tasks, you’ll need to manually configure crontab using supercronic, adding extra setup and maintenance overhead.

With Railway, scheduled tasks are simple, streamlined, and built-in. No extra steps—just reliable automation.

PR Environments

Railway offers a powerful environments feature that makes managing complex development workflows seamless—all from the dashboard. With just a few clicks, you can enable multiple environments such as staging, development, QA, and more, ensuring your project scales efficiently with your workflow.

Additionally, Railway provides PR environments—ephemeral environments automatically created when a pull request is opened and cleaned up when it’s closed. No need to manually configure or integrate with GitHub Actions—Railway handles everything for you, so you can focus on building and shipping faster.

Fly.io recommends setting up Git branch preview environments manually via GitHub Actions and workflows, requiring additional setup and maintenance.

Webhooks

Railway provides native support for webhooks, allowing you to receive real-time notifications about key project events such as deployments, build status changes, and more. Stay in sync with your workflow effortlessly and build anything on top of it!

Fly.io does not offer built-in webhook support, meaning users must rely on external integrations or manual setups to track application events.

With Railway, webhooks are built-in and ready to go—no extra setup required.

Variables and Secrets

Railway offers an intuitive and delightful variable management feature where you can easily reference variables(a.k.a shared variables) in the same service or from another service within your project. We also provide the ability to seal variable values for extra security.

Additionally, Railway offers variable functions that automatically generate secure secrets for your environment variables—eliminating the need for manual secret creation.

• Need a random secret? Simply use: ${{ secret() }}
• Need a hex-encoded secret of a specific length? Just specify the length and character set: ${{ secret(128, "abcdef0123456789") }}

Fly.io provides a basic secrets management feature, allowing users to store secrets with a digest. However, it lacks the advanced functionality of Railway’s shared variables and dynamic secret generation.

Databases

Many applications rely on databases, and we believe managing them should be seamless and hassle-free. That’s why Railway allows you to natively provision and deploy PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB directly within the platform—no external setup required.

Fly.io, on the other hand, provisions Postgres, Upstash Redis, Upstash Kafka, and Upstash Vector. If you need MySQL or MongoDB, you’ll have to manually set up and manage them via Docker. Alternatively, Fly recommends several external providers for these databases.

Railway goes further by offering a built-in database UI, making management effortless. You can view tables, add and edit data directly from the platform—no need for third-party tools. Fly does not provide an equivalent UI, requiring external tools for database management.

Templates

Railway's Templates Marketplace is rapidly expanding, with 940+ templates and counting. Any user can create and publish pre-configured starter setups or templates, making it effortless for developers to deploy apps and services with just one click—eliminating the hassle of manual setup.

Our templates cover a wide range of frameworks and tools, including Django, Laravel, Metabase, Strapi, MinIO, ClickHouse, Redash, and Prometheus—all deployable in seconds. From your dashboard, you can turn your project into a reusable template in under two minutes.

We also reward our creators through the Kickback Program. When you publish a template and it’s deployed by other users, you receive 25% of the usage costs as a kickback, credited either as cash (USD) or Railway credits—allowing you to earn while supporting the developer community.

Fly.io offers a selection of official and community-contributed application templates, mainly available through their GitHub fly-apps repositories. However, Fly does not have a centralized marketplace like Railway, nor does it provide any incentives for community templates.

Pricing

At Railway, we believe in transparent, flexible pricing—you only pay for what you use. With our pay-as-you-go model, you get an affordable flat fee for your selected plan, plus usage-based billing that scales with your needs. No overpaying, no hidden fees—just straightforward pricing.

• Trial: Free + a one-time $5 credit for resource usage
• Hobby: $5/month, includes $5 in usage credits every month
• Pro: $20 per teammate/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Fly.io follows a pure usage-based pricing model—there are no subscription tiers, meaning you pay based on the exact resources you consume. Check out Fly’s pricing here.

Want to see the savings?

Explore our detailed pricing breakdown to see how Railway keeps costs predictable while still giving you the flexibility to scale as needed.

Customer Support and Community

At Railway, we take pride in offering best-in-class support through our vibrant Discord community and our custom-built Help Station—a support platform powered by Railway itself. We believe that every project matters, no matter how big or small. If you run into an issue, we’re here to help, and our engineers are always available to ensure you get the support you need.

With over 880,000 users who love what we do, we’re committed to continuous improvement. Every week, we ship new features and updates to make Railway even better—because great support isn’t just about answering questions, it’s about building a platform that just works.

Fly.io offers paid support plans starting at $29/month for standard support, $199/month for premium, and $2,500+ for enterprise-level assistance. If you can’t afford these plans, your only option is their community forum for help.

We are similar to Fly.io in the following ways:

• Database Backups
• Bare Metal
• Docker Image deployments
• Dockerfile deployments
• Health checks
• Zero downtime deploys.
• Custom domains
• Stateful Services a.k.a Persistent Disks and Volumes
• Private Networking
• Instant Rollbacks
• Infrastructure as code
• CI/CD
• Monitoring, Observability and In-Dashboard logs
• Autoscaling and Scale to Zero
• Monorepo and multi-environment deployments.
• Multi-region deployments
• CLI tooling
• Programmatic deployments via API
• Serving static sites

Migrate to Railway

Thinking about migrating from Fly.io to Railway? We’ve put together a quick and simple guide to make the transition effortless and fast.

Sign up on Railway today and get a $5 in free credits to explore the platform.

For companies and large organizations, we’d love to chat! Book a call with us to see how Railway fit your needs.