Head-to-head
Railway vs Fly.io
Two hosts, side by side. Pricing, features, and the trade-offs that actually matter.
Railway from $5/mo
Heroku-style git-push with the best modern UX in the category.
HQ US · founded 2020
Fly.io from Free
Run small full-stack apps in dozens of regions for genuinely low cost — when it works.
HQ US · founded 2017
Quick verdict
Cheapest: Fly.io wins on entry price (Free vs $5/mo).
More features: Fly.io ships more first-party platform features out of the box.
Region: Railway is HQ'd in US; Fly.io in US.
Cheapest plans, side by side
| Railway | Fly.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | Hobby | Free (3× shared-cpu-1x) |
| Price | $5/mo | Free |
| CPU | shared (8 vCPU bursts) | 1 vCPU |
| RAM | 8 GB | 0.25 GB |
| Disk | 5 GB | 3 GB |
| Bandwidth | 100 GB | 160 GB |
Feature parity
| Railway | Fly.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Managed Postgres | ✓ | ✓ |
| Managed Redis | ✓ | ✓ |
| Object storage | × | ✓ |
| One-click apps | ✓ | × |
| Private network | ✓ | ✓ |
| IPv6 | × | ✓ |
| DDoS protection | ✓ | ✓ |
| Snapshots | × | ✓ |
| Public API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Terraform | × | ✓ |
Railway pros
- +Best-in-class developer experience for git-push deploys
- +Add a Postgres / Redis / Mongo from the canvas with one click
- +Usage-based billing so idle services cost cents, not dollars
Railway cons
- −No always-free plan (since August 2023) — minimum $5/month
- −Single region per project; multi-region requires manual fan-out
- −Pricing scales fast for high-traffic apps — quickly more expensive than a tuned VPS
Fly.io pros
- +35+ regions, deploy multi-region with one command
- +Run any Docker image — no platform-specific buildpacks
- +Generous always-free tier (3 small machines)
Fly.io cons
- −Reliability has been bumpy across 2023–2025; status page tells the story
- −Support is community-first — paid support tiers exist but are light
- −Some primitives (volumes, secrets) have rough edges that bite production apps