Railway vs. Render

Railway is a modern, developer-focused cloud platform that simplifies app deployment and scaling. We are optimised for developer happiness and efficiency!

We are similar in the following ways:

• GitHub repo deployments
• 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
• Monitoring, Observability and In-Dashboard logs
• Autoscaling
• Preview environments
• Native Crons
• Multi-region deployments
• CLI tooling
• Programmatic deployments via API

Differences

Product and Deploy UX

At Railway, we take pride in delivering a superior user experience—from the simplicity of starting with dev.new to managing multiple interconnected services on your Project Canvas. The interface is not only functional but visually appealing, redefining how DevOps can feel. Who says DevOps has to be ugly or boring? On our platform, it’s intuitive, refreshing, and even fun.

One delightful feature we offer is real-time collaboration. You can see exactly which of your teammates are working on the same Project Canvas, fostering seamless teamwork and collaboration.

Builds

Render includes a build pipeline where each task consumes pipeline minutes. These minutes are allocated monthly based on your pricing tier and are billable. If you exceed your allotted pipeline minutes within a month, additional charges may apply, or your builds may be canceled.

At Railway, there’s no need to worry about managing build costs or minutes. Builds are always free—no matter how often you run them. It’s one less thing to plan, letting you focus entirely on building and deploying your apps.

We provide an exceptional deployment experience through Nixpacks—our custom-built, open-source solution that delivers incredibly fast, reproducible builds while automatically detecting and supporting over 22 languages. For advanced and customizable deployments, we also automatically detect and utilize your Dockerfile, giving you complete control.

Databases

Many apps require the use of databases. We want to ensure that it’s very convenient and easy to use and deploy as part of your services so we offer the ability to provision PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis and MongoDB natively in the platform. Render only offers PostgreSQL and Redis natively and allows you install other alternatives via blueprints.

Render charges a base amount for compute (CPU and Memory) for using a managed database plus storage while we charge for only what you use in compute and storage. For example, if you use only 2 GB (RAM) and 1 CPU, we will charge you for only that plus storage.

If you’re aware that there will be periods of inactivity, you can also enable App Sleeping which reduces the cost of usage by ensuring it runs only when absolutely necessary!

There’s a resource-based calculator on our pricing page that you can use to estimate how much you’ll be charged based on CPU, Memory, Volume and Network Egress.

We also provide built-in UI for managing your database easily without the need for external tools. You can see your tables, add and edit data. Render does not.

Database Backups

We provide native database backups for users on our platform. Customers can create, delete and restore backups for services with volumes (or persistent disks) directly from the dashboard.

Render provides a Point-in-Time Recovery to restore your database from 3 or 7 days max and on-demand logical backups.

Templates

We have an increasingly growing templates marketplace (850+) where any user can build and publish a pre-configured starter app setup or template to help developers quickly deploy apps or services on Railway.

They simplify the deployment process by providing one-click deploy buttons for popular frameworks, tools, saving developers the time and effort of setting up projects from scratch. From your dashboard, you can turn your project into a reusable template in less than 2 minutes. For example, you can deploy Django, Laravel, Metabase, Strapi, MinIO, ClickHouse, Redash, Prometheus instantly just by clicking on these links.

We offer a rewarding kickback program for our creators. When you publish a template and it’s deployed into other users’ projects, you become instantly eligible for a 25% kickback of the usage costs incurred—credited to you either as cash in USD or as Railway credits added to your account.

Render has example templates on GitHub that you can deploy and no incentives for community templates.

Private Networking

Render’s private network is regional. Services in different regions can’t communicate directly over a private network.

At Railway, private networking operates globally. This means services in different regions can communicate with each other privately without any barriers or extra configuration. Additionally, you have the flexibility to move services between regions effortlessly.

Pricing

We believe in the principle of pay only for what you use. With Railway, you pay an affordable flat fee for the plan you choose, and additional costs are based solely on the resources (compute) you consume each month. In summary, a flexible pay-as-you-go model!

• Trial: Free, plus one-time $5 credit for resource usage
• Hobby: $5/month, plus $5 credit for resource usage monthly
• Pro: $20 per teammate/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Render Pricing:

• Hobby: Free
• Pro: $19/month
• Org: $29 per teammate/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Curious about the savings? Check out a detailed breakdown of our pricing and see how much you can save by running your workloads on Railway. It’s more cost-effective than Render.

Customer Support and Community

At Railway, we take pride in providing best-in-class support through our vibrant Discord community and our custom-built Help Station—a platform powered by Railway itself. We firmly believe that no project is too small or unimportant when it comes to addressing support needs. If an issue arises, we’re here to help.

With over 800,000 users who think we’re the best thing since sliced bread, we’re committed to continuously improving. Week after week, we ship new features and updates to better support our customers.

To meet the unique needs of our customers, we offer tailored support tiers, ensuring users receive the assistance they need at every step.