Compare to Vercel

Summary

Railway is an intuitive cloud platform that streamlines your deployment workflow, letting developers focus on building great products instead of managing infrastructure.

Railway also offers

• Zero configuration required - We automatically detect your language and deploy your application.

• Framework templates - We have templates for many popular frameworks, including Next.js, Nuxt, Express, and more.

• Zero maintenance - We handle the underlying infrastructure, so you don't have to.

• Global distribution - We deploy your application to multiple regions, so you can serve your users faster.

• Cron jobs - Cron jobs are just another service that run on a schedule, no extra packages, no extra setup.

This is just scratching the surface of the similarities between Railway and Vercel!

Railway excels with

• Straightforward pricing - We charge based on the resources your application uses, rather than function invocations, config reads, observability, etc.

• Universal deployment support - Deploy any application or service, from static sites to complex backends.

• Rich OSS ecosystem - We have templates for many popular OSS projects, including Supabase, N8N, and Typebot.

• Developer-centric experience - We prioritize intuitive workflows, providing a unique dashboard to manage your services, including scaling, logs, and more.

• Persistent Disks - We provide persistent disks for your application, so you don't have to worry about data loss.

• Best in Class Support - Incredibly fast personalized support on Slack, and the Help Station.

• Private networking - Seamlessly and securely connect your services together through the global wireguard network.

• Deploy any container - We support Dockerfiles, and we also support deploying container images from both public and private registries.

Improvements over Vercel

Product and Deploy UX

We offer a unique dashboard to manage your many projects, the services within them, and the collaborators on your projects.

Within each project can be found the Project Canvas which is a real-time collaborative canvas that lets you see all your services and the connections between them. This visual approach makes it easy to understand your entire infrastructure at a glance - from databases and APIs to frontend services and their relationships.

It is your mission control center, where all aspects of your project come together. Monitor your services in real-time, manage environment variables, scale resources up or down, and view logs - all from one unified interface. The Project Canvas makes infrastructure management intuitive by showing you exactly how your services connect and interact, while enabling real-time collaboration with your team.

This unified view eliminates the need to jump between different dashboards and tools, making infrastructure management more intuitive and efficient.

Builds

We provide native support for 22 languages (including Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and more) with our custom-built, open-source solution, Nixpacks, delivering incredibly fast, reproducible builds.

Simply give us a GitHub repository and we'll automatically detect the language and build it for you, completely hands off.

For advanced and customizable deployments, we also automatically detect and utilize your Dockerfile, giving you complete control over your deployment.

Runtime

We run with a serverfull container runtime for maximum compatibility and performance, this allows for greater flexibility in what you can deploy since you aren't limited by available runtimes.

A container runtime also means your application will be ran as-is, meaning you don't have to worry about how a runtime will modify your application or its state, we just run your application as-is.

Since we are serverfull, there are no cold starts, or pre-warming, your application will be up and running to handle requests at all times instantaneously.

There are so many benefits to a serverfull runtime, and we are just scratching the surface of what benefits you get from it.

Multi-Region Deployments

With a few clicks, you can deploy your application to multiple regions globally, and we'll automatically route your users to the closest region.

This is incredibly useful for reducing latency and improving the performance of your application, and it is all managed from the dashboard and transparently handled by us.

Use Cases

While Vercel's focus is on frontend, Railway is a complete platform for both frontend and backend deployments.

This very website is built with Next.js and deployed on Railway, let alone railway.com itself is deployed on Railway, and it is also built with Next.js.

You can deploy anything from a simple static site to a complex backend built out with microservices all connected privately through our global wireguard network.

Databases

Instead of 3rd party integrations, we natively support PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, and more — all manageable directly from our platform without external providers, and best of all, they are billed the same as any other service on Railway.

Our built-in database UI lets you view tables and manage data directly from the dashboard, eliminating the need for third-party tools. Plus, with our native database backups, you can easily create, delete, and restore backups for your databases.

Private Networking

We provide a private wireguard network to connect your services together, this allows for private communication between services without the need for public internet, ex. between a backend and a database.

This is incredibly useful for reducing latency and improving the performance of your application, and it is all managed from the dashboard and transparently handled by us.

You don't pay egress fees for private networking, meaning you don't pay for the data that flows between your services, this is incredibly useful for reducing costs.

Cron Jobs

Cron jobs are just another service that run on a schedule, no extra packages, no extra setup.

Only pay for the time they run, and only for the resources they use while running, this makes them outstandingly cost effective.

Templates

Railway's Templates Marketplace features 940+ templates and counting. Any user can deploy pre-configured starter setups, making it effortless to deploy apps and services with just one click.

The template marketplace contains templates for many popular OSS projects, including Supabase, N8N, and Typebot. Deploying these templates is as easy as clicking a button, and they are all configured to deploy with the best practices for Railway.

Best of all, through our Kickback Program, template creators receive 25% of the usage costs when others deploy their templates—either as cash (USD) or Railway credits.

Pricing

Railway offers straightforward and transparent, resource-based pricing that scales with your needs, pay only for the resources you use.

• Memory: $10 per GB / month

• CPU: $10 per vCPU / month

• Storage: $0.25 per GB / month

• Outbound Data: $0.10 per GB used

Unlike Vercel's function-based pricing, we charge based on actual resource usage (CPU, Memory, Storage), making costs more predictable and often more economical for backend services.

And fortunately, this simple pricing model does not change based on the region you deploy to.

Support

We offer incredibly fast and personalized support on Slack, and the Help Station.

Our help station is built in house from the ground up to allow us to provide the best possible support to you, the user.

Pro and enterprise users get priority support within Slack, and entrpise can also book a call with our team to get direct help from the Railway team.

Ready to Switch?

Thinking about migrating from Vercel to Railway? We've made it simple! Check out our migration guide to get started.

Sign up on Railway today and get $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 will fit your needs.