Coolify vs Railway

At a Glance

Coolify

Railway

Coolify

Pros

Completely self-hosted on your own VPS — you pay $5/mo for a Hetzner server instead of Vercel's $20/mo for the same capability+178
Supports deploying Docker containers, static sites, databases, and any Nixpacks-compatible framework with a single UI+154
Automatic SSL certificate management with Let's Encrypt means you don't need to configure Nginx or Certbot manually+131
One-click deployment for popular open source tools like Plausible, Gitea, and n8n saves hours of server configuration+118

Cons

Being self-hosted means you're responsible for server maintenance, uptime, and security patching — it's not hands-off like managed platforms

Developer Platform

Render vs Railway

Hosting

Vercel vs Railway

Hosting

Railway vs Fly.io

Get the next comparison in your inbox

Weekly digest — no spam, unsubscribe anytime.

Railway

Pros

The deployment experience is the closest to Heroku's one-click simplicity but with modern infrastructure and reasonable pricing+167
PostgreSQL, Redis, and MySQL are available as one-click services that connect to your app with auto-injected environment variables+152
Cron jobs, background workers, and web services all live in one project with shared environment variables — no separate tooling needed+128
The $5 hobby plan is the most reasonable entry-level paid tier I've found for always-on services that need a persistent process+113

Cons

No persistent disk for Docker containers on the default plan — stateful apps need an external volume or external storage service+124
Larger workloads can get expensive quickly since you pay for actual compute usage rather than a fixed plan+107
Deployment logs and debugging tooling are more basic than what you'd get on a larger platform — no tracing or distributed logging+83