Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Railway VS Fly.io

Compare Railway VS Fly.io and see what are their differences

Railway logo Railway

Made for any language, for projects big and small.

Fly.io logo Fly.io

Edge computing is the new frontier.
  • Railway Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-02
  • Fly.io Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-11-16

Railway features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Railway features an intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it accessible for developers of all levels to deploy and manage applications.
  • Integration Flexibility
    Supports a range of integrations with popular tools and platforms, allowing seamless addition to existing workflows.
  • Scalability
    Railway allows for effortless scaling of applications, enabling users to handle increased traffic and workload without significant overhead.
  • Rapid Deployment
    Offers quick and straightforward deployment processes, significantly reducing the time required to go live with applications.
  • Resource Management
    Provides robust resource management capabilities, making it easy to monitor and optimize the usage of resources such as CPU, memory, and networking.

Possible disadvantages of Railway

  • Less Customization
    The platform might offer limited customization options compared to more traditional deployment solutions, restricting the level of control for advanced users.
  • Pricing Structure
    Railway's pricing model may not be the most cost-effective for very large applications or organizations with complex requirements, potentially leading to higher costs.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    While the basic features are user-friendly, mastering the advanced functionalities of Railway can require a steep learning curve.
  • Limited Community Support
    Compared to more established platforms, Railway has a smaller user community, which can result in less available support and fewer shared resources.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Relying heavily on Railway's platform could lead to vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate to other services or platforms in the future.

Fly.io features and specs

  • Global Deployment
    Fly.io enables developers to deploy applications geographically close to users, reducing latency and improving performance.
  • CLI and Git-based Deployment
    Fly.io offers a command-line interface and Git integration for quick and efficient application deployment.
  • Automatic SSL
    Fly.io provides automatic SSL/TLS certificates, simplifying secure traffic management.
  • Scalability
    Applications deployed on Fly.io can scale both vertically and horizontally to handle varying loads.
  • Built-in Storage
    Fly.io offers persistent storage solutions such as Fly Volumes, which seamlessly integrate with applications.
  • Integrated Monitoring
    Fly.io provides built-in monitoring tools to track application performance and health.

Possible disadvantages of Fly.io

  • Learning Curve
    New users may find the platform's concepts and deployment methods unfamiliar, requiring time to learn.
  • Documentation
    Users have reported that the documentation can sometimes be lacking in detail or difficult to navigate.
  • Cost
    While Fly.io offers a free tier, the cost can become significant as you scale your applications.
  • Limited Language Support
    Fly.io supports fewer runtime environments and languages compared to more established platforms like AWS or Azure.
  • Platform Maturity
    As a relatively new platform, Fly.io may lack some advanced features and ecosystem integrations offered by more mature competitors.
  • Debugging
    The debugging tools and processes can be less comprehensive compared to traditional cloud providers.

Railway videos

The Railway Review to the IET

More videos:

  • Review - The Railway Review To The Electrostars
  • Review - The Railway Review To The Class 455

Fly.io videos

We FLY a SPACESHIP! Video Game FLY.io Computer App with HobbyKidsTV

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Railway and Fly.io)
Developer Tools
48 48%
52% 52
Cloud Computing
34 34%
66% 66
Software Engineering
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud Infrastructure
35 35%
65% 65

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Railway and Fly.io

Railway Reviews

5 Free Heroku Alternatives with Free Plan for Developers
There is a pay as you go model available if you want to scale your apps. Just sign up for the trial account (free tier) and then deploy your small apps. It is perfect for that and the best part is that it is now offering a Heroku importer. Migrating from Heroku to Railway will not be a problem. It can effectively pull the variables that you are using in your app so the whole...

Fly.io Reviews

5 Free Heroku Alternatives with Free Plan for Developers
Fly.io is one the best free alternatives to Heroku that you can use. It’s designed for developers and students to run small applications for free and scale costs affordably as you grow. Just like Heroku it comes with CLI applications and there are other tools in it that you can use to easily deploy your apps. For advanced users, it has premium plans but for now, due to its...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Fly.io should be more popular than Railway. It has been mentiond 457 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Railway mentions (236)

  • Launch HN: Infra.new (YC W23) – DevOps Copilot with Guardrails Built In
    Congrats on the launch. Here are my two cents, as I am very familiar with this space[1][2] The problem of trying to position your product as "an easy way to deploy on over GCP" or "an easier way to do K8s" is that your product is always limited by the potential of what the underlying platform directly offers. You are not required to, but will be seduced to build 1:1 mapping to the concepts of the underlying... - Source: Hacker News / 10 days ago
  • 5 Must-Watch Tutorials to Build Your SaaS App in 2025
    You’ll start by configuring a Python project with Django to manage views, routes, and static files. The video also shows how to style the front end using Flowbite and TailwindCSS. The tutorial then walks you through preparing Django for a production environment and deploying it to Railway’s cloud platform via Docker containers. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Django on a Budget: The Best Affordable Hosting Options for Your App
    If your wallet’s on life support, these platforms give you solid performance without the hefty price tag: Render – Free static hosting + affordable backend plans. A smooth Heroku alternative. Fly.io – Deploy globally with a generous free tier. Great for performance. Railway – Think of it as DIY Heroku with smooth GitHub integration. Great for side projects and testing, but if you need serious power, check out... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • My 2025 Tech Stack: Tools & Tech I'm Using This Year
    Railway. My go-to platform for backend/database hosting. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Ask HN: Why does nearly every Ruby on rails tutorial/book ask to use Heroku?
    Heroku is the OG of affordable rails hosting. If the tutorial is older than 3-4 years ago then it was published when Heroku was free, which it no longer is. There are lots of other affordable, but probably not free, options now; https://railway.app/. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
View more

Fly.io mentions (457)

  • The ultimate open source stack for building AI agents
    Fly.io Deploy Docker containers close to users, great for edge agents. - Source: dev.to / 2 days ago
  • Quick blog set-up with Quarto and Fly.io
    Fly.io, a developer-centric and friendly cloud platform. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Django on a Budget: The Best Affordable Hosting Options for Your App
    If your wallet’s on life support, these platforms give you solid performance without the hefty price tag: Render – Free static hosting + affordable backend plans. A smooth Heroku alternative. Fly.io – Deploy globally with a generous free tier. Great for performance. Railway – Think of it as DIY Heroku with smooth GitHub integration. Great for side projects and testing, but if you need serious power, check out... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Local Development, Remote Data: Accessing Fly.io PostgreSQL from Your Java API
    Inter-communication between databases when developing applications is not an entirely new challenge to developers or the software engineering space. I recently found myself in a situation where I had to access data from an external PostgreSQL database while developing a Java API locally. The external database was hosted on Fly.io and my local development setup had to interact with it seamlessly. After some... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Building Static HTML Pages with JSX Server-Side Rendering
    Deploying your app globally is so simple with Query's integration with Fly.io. Using LiteFS for distributed SQLite database replication, you can ensure low-latency access for users across different regions. Say goodbye to complex deployment pipelines. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Railway and Fly.io, you can also consider the following products

Render - Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

Heroku - Agile deployment platform for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, and Scala. Setup takes only minutes and deploys are instant through git. Leave tedious server maintenance to Heroku and focus on your code.

Vercel - Vercel is the platform for frontend developers, providing the speed and reliability innovators need to create at the moment of inspiration.

ClawCloud Run - ClawCloud Run delivers a high-performance, lightweight cloud-native deployment platform with integrated GitOps workflows, native Docker/Kubernetes support, and seamless GitHub integration.

Netlify - Build, deploy and host your static site or app with a drag and drop interface and automatic delpoys from GitHub or Bitbucket

Supabase - An open source Firebase alternative