Cloudflare Pages
JAMstack hosting platform with Git integration and unlimited bandwidth, deployed on Cloudflare's edge network.
Pricing FreemiumPaid from $20-$25 a month (Pro plan)Open source noStars 4.6knpm a week 30M
Railway alternatives
9 tools you can use instead of Railway, ranked by live GitHub stars and npm downloads. Cloudflare Pages, Vercel and Coolify are the most used. Stats updated 16 hours ago.
When Railway is not a good fit
Railway is a cloud deployment platform from Railway Corp. that runs apps, databases, volumes and cron jobs from a GitHub repository or a Docker image, on infrastructure the company runs itself. Billing is by the second for CPU, memory, storage and egress: Hobby costs $5 a month and Pro $20 a month, each including that amount of usage, and a free plan gives $1 of credit a month after a 30-day trial.
It is a weaker choice for:
- A permanent free tier for real workloads: after the trial the free plan gives only $1 of credit a month
- Fixed monthly bills: costs rise with CPU, memory and egress beyond the included usage
- Apps that need a region outside the four Railway offers (US West, US East, EU West and Southeast Asia)
- Self-hosting: the platform is proprietary
The alternatives
Most used first.
View Cloudflare Pages
Vercel
Cloud platform for deploying web apps and frameworks like Next.js, with preview URLs and serverless functions.
Pricing FreemiumPaid from $20 a month for Pro, including one deploying seat and $20 of usage creditOpen source noStars 16.3knpm a week 5.4M
Coolify
Open source, self-hostable alternative to Vercel, Heroku, Netlify and Railway for deploying apps.
Pricing FreemiumPaid from $5 a month for Coolify Cloud, connecting up to 2 serversOpen source yesStars 62.6k
AWS Amplify
AWS's platform for building and hosting full-stack web and mobile apps, priced pay-as-you-go.
Pricing Pay as you goPaid from $0.01 per build minute (Standard instance) beyond the free tierOpen source noStars 9.6knpm a week 2.2M
Netlify
Web platform for deploying sites and apps from Git, the CLI or AI agents, with functions, storage and Postgres.
Pricing FreemiumPaid from $9 a month for Personal (1,000 credits)Open source noStars 1.9knpm a week 484k
Fly.io
Platform for running apps and databases close to users globally, billed by the second for compute used.
Pricing Pay as you goPaid from About $1.94 a month (shared-cpu-1x, 256MB, running continuously)Open source noStars 1.7k
Heroku
Platform-as-a-service for deploying apps as dynos, spanning classic Cedar dynos and newer Fir dynos.
Pricing PaidPaid from $5 a month (Eco dyno, Cedar)Open source noStars 889npm a week 16k
DigitalOcean App Platform
Platform-as-a-service for deploying apps from Git or a container registry, from a free static-site tier.
Pricing FreemiumPaid from $5 a month (Shared Fixed instance, 512 MiB)Open source no
Render
Cloud platform for deploying web apps, APIs, databases and background jobs from a Git repo.
Pricing FreemiumPaid from $25 a month for the Pro workspace plan, plus usage-based compute, bandwidth and storageOpen source no
Railway and its alternatives, side by side
| Tool | Pricing | Free plan | Paid from | Open source | GitHub stars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Railway | Pay as you go | Yes: a 30-day trial with a one-time $5 credit, then a free plan with $1 of credit a month (0.5 GB RAM and 1 vCPU per service) | $5 a month for Hobby, including $5 of usage | No | 622 |
| Cloudflare Pages | Freemium | Yes: 500 builds a month, 1 concurrent build, 100 custom domains per project, unlimited sites and bandwidth | $20-$25 a month (Pro plan) | No | 4.6k |
| Vercel | Freemium | Yes: Hobby, for personal and non-commercial use, with 100 GB of fast data transfer and 1 million function invocations a month | $20 a month for Pro, including one deploying seat and $20 of usage credit | No | 16.3k |
| Coolify | Freemium | Yes: self-hosting Coolify on your own infrastructure is free forever with full access to all features | $5 a month for Coolify Cloud, connecting up to 2 servers | Yes, Apache-2.0 | 62.6k |
| AWS Amplify | Pay as you go | Yes: AWS Free Tier includes 1,000 build minutes, 5 GB storage and 15 GB data transfer a month for 12 months | $0.01 per build minute (Standard instance) beyond the free tier | No | 9.6k |
| Netlify | Freemium | Yes: 300 credits a month, with a hard limit and no option to buy more | $9 a month for Personal (1,000 credits) | No | 1.9k |
| Fly.io | Pay as you go | Limited free usage may be available for small workloads; primarily pay-as-you-go | About $1.94 a month (shared-cpu-1x, 256MB, running continuously) | No | 1.7k |
| Heroku | Paid | No free dyno tier; the lowest-cost Eco dyno starts at $5 a month | $5 a month (Eco dyno, Cedar) | No | 889 |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Freemium | Yes: up to 3 apps with static sites and 1 GiB data transfer per app | $5 a month (Shared Fixed instance, 512 MiB) | No | None |
| Render | Freemium | Yes: the Hobby workspace plan, free services with 512 MB RAM and 5 GB bandwidth a month included | $25 a month for the Pro workspace plan, plus usage-based compute, bandwidth and storage | No | None |
Pricing facts come from each tool's official pricing page, with the checked date on the tool's own page.
Questions
What is the most popular alternative to Railway?
By GitHub stars, Cloudflare Pages is the most used alternative to Railway listed on ScratchDB, with 4.6k stars.
Which Railway alternatives are open source?
Coolify is open source.
Which Railway alternatives have a free plan?
Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Coolify, AWS Amplify, Netlify, DigitalOcean App Platform and Render have a free plan. The table on this page shows what each one includes.