Railway vs Coolify
Updated . Stats refresh daily.
Short answer: Railway: Instant deployments, effortless scale. Coolify: An open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative. Compare their pricing models, features and live usage from GitHub and npm below.
At a glance
| Attribute | Railway | Coolify |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Freemium | Open Source |
| Main job | App Hosting | Self-hosted PaaS |
| GitHub stars | 620 | 62,289 |
| npm downloads a week | 422k | Not on npm |
| Latest release | v5.62.1, 2 days ago | v4.3.23, 1 week ago |
| Founded | 2020 | 2021 |
Strengths and weaknesses
Railway
Strengths
- Simple pricing
- Great DX
- Databases included
Weaknesses
- Limited free tier
- US-only regions initially
- Less enterprise features
Coolify
Strengths
- Self-hosted
- Open source
- No vendor lock-in
Weaknesses
- Self-hosting complexity
- Smaller community
- Maintenance burden