Head-to-head
Vercel vs Railway
Two hosts, side by side. Pricing, features, and the trade-offs that actually matter.
Vercel from Free
The default home for Next.js, with a polished DX and a love-it-or-hate-it bill.
HQ US · founded 2015
Railway from $5/mo
Heroku-style git-push with the best modern UX in the category.
HQ US · founded 2020
Quick verdict
Cheapest: Vercel wins on entry price (Free vs $5/mo).
More features: Railway ships more first-party platform features out of the box.
Region: Vercel is HQ'd in US; Railway in US.
Cheapest plans, side by side
| Vercel | Railway | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | Hobby | Hobby |
| Price | Free | $5/mo |
| CPU | — | shared (8 vCPU bursts) |
| RAM | 0 GB | 8 GB |
| Disk | — GB | 5 GB |
| Bandwidth | 100 GB | 100 GB |
Feature parity
| Vercel | Railway | |
|---|---|---|
| Managed Postgres | ✓ | ✓ |
| Managed Redis | ✓ | ✓ |
| Object storage | ✓ | × |
| One-click apps | ✓ | ✓ |
| Private network | × | ✓ |
| IPv6 | × | × |
| DDoS protection | ✓ | ✓ |
| Snapshots | × | × |
| Public API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Terraform | × | × |
Vercel pros
- +Push to GitHub, get a preview URL — no other host has tightened this loop further
- +Image optimisation, ISR, edge functions all wired in by default
- +Generous free tier covers solo side projects
Vercel cons
- −Bandwidth and function execution beyond the free tier scale aggressively
- −Pro plan starts at $20/seat/month — expensive for a solo dev
- −Long-running functions are not the platform's strength (15-min cap, costly)
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