Vercel vs Railway

Compare a Next.js-first frontend cloud against a general-purpose app platform that hosts any long-running service.

Railway

Deploy anything instantly with zero configuration

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Vercel

The platform for frontend developers to deploy and scale

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Our take

Pick Vercel when the workload is a Next.js app — preview deploys, edge functions, and zero-config framework support are the point. Pick Railway when you need a real always-on backend — Postgres, Redis, workers, cron — alongside your web service, and you'd rather not stitch together a separate frontend cloud and a backend host.

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At a Glance

Attribute	Railway	Vercel
Category	Hosting	Hosting
Pricing Model	freemium	freemium
Starting Price	Free / $5/mo	Free / $20/mo
Free Tier	Yes	Yes
Open Source	No	No
Platforms	—	web, serverless, edge

Community Popularity

Railway

Vercel

Key Features

Railway

No features listed.

Vercel

git-based deploys
automatic CI/CD
CDN
WAF
DDoS mitigation
traffic insights
cold start prevention

Pros & Cons

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

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Vercel

Pros

Zero-config deployment for Next.js — push to GitHub and your app is live with edge caching, preview URLs, and analytics in minutes+196
Preview deployments per pull request are a game changer for design review and stakeholder feedback without needing a staging environment+178
The edge network is extremely fast and the global CDN means static assets load in under 100ms for users anywhere in the world+161
Automatic SSL, custom domains, and environment variables are managed through the dashboard without touching any config files+147
The analytics and Web Vitals integration shows real user performance data per route without adding any tracking code+129

Cons

Pricing jumps sharply between the hobby free plan and the $20/mo Pro plan, with no middle tier for small commercial projects+184
Serverless function execution time and memory limits can surprise you in production — a long-running background job will silently time out+162
Bandwidth overages on the free plan are hard to predict and a viral post can result in an unexpected bill overnight+148
Vendor lock-in is significant if you use Vercel-specific features like ISR, Edge Middleware, or the Analytics product+121

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