Heroku vs Railway
A side-by-side, data-driven comparison of Heroku and Railway — pricing, free tiers and capabilities.
Both replace Heroku's git-push flow, but Railway bills by actual per-second usage (often cheaper for bursty apps) with a slicker UI, whereas Heroku's flat dynos are more predictable for steady 24/7 workloads.
At a glance
- At a medium always-on instance, Heroku is ~$50/mo vs Railway ~$40.52/mo — Railway is the cheaper estimate.
Specs side by side
Estimated cost
Estimated monthly cost of a single always-on service — estimates, not quotes. Try the calculator for your own traffic. “—” means no verified price for that tier.
| Heroku | Railway | |
|---|---|---|
| Small (~0.5 vCPU / 512MB–1GB) | $25 | $20.26 (lower) |
| Medium (~1 vCPU / 2GB) | $50 | $40.52 (lower) |
| Large (~2 vCPU / 4GB) | $250 | $81.03 (lower) |
| Egress ($/GB) | — | $0.05 |
Pros & cons
Our editorial assessment — not vendor-stated facts. Last reviewed 2026-07-16.
Heroku
Pros
- Low operational overhead: deploy with a single git push, no servers to manage
- Mature, well-documented workflow with pipelines, review apps, and one-click add-ons
- Broad first-class language support through buildpacks
- Integrated managed Postgres and key-value store reduce the need to wire up external services
- Backed by Salesforce, with a large ecosystem and deep community knowledge base
Cons
- No free tier since November 2022; the cheapest Eco dynos also sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity
- Costs scale up quickly at higher tiers compared to raw IaaS or cheaper PaaS alternatives
- Common Runtime region availability is limited (primarily US and Europe); broader regions require Private Spaces
- In February 2026 Salesforce moved Heroku to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability and maintenance rather than new features, and stopped offering Enterprise contracts to new customers, signaling slower innovation (existing credit-card pricing and billing are unaffected)
Railway
Pros
- Fast, low-configuration deploys that avoid Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code for common workloads
- App, databases, networking, and environment config managed in a single UI
- Usage-based billing charges for resources actually consumed rather than fixed instance sizes
- Built-in preview environments and collaboration features suit small teams
Cons
- Consumption-based pricing can be hard to predict and may spike under bursty or unexpected traffic
- No built-in CDN or edge network, so globally distributed or latency-sensitive static delivery needs a separate CDN layer
- Access controls are relatively coarse, which can limit larger orgs needing granular per-service or per-environment permissions
- Publicized outages and degraded-performance incidents through 2025-2026 (Railway publishes post-incident reports) — check its current status before committing
Bottom line
Pick Heroku for legacy apps and teams that want zero-ops dynos. Pick Railway for indie devs who want fast, pay-for-what-you-use deploys.
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Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between Heroku and Railway?
- Heroku: Widely credited with popularizing "git push to deploy". As of 2026 it is in a sustaining-engineering mode with no new features, pushing many teams to evaluate alternatives. Railway: Deploy apps, databases and services from a canvas UI or CLI with usage-based pricing; popular with indie devs for its developer experience.
- Is Heroku or Railway cheaper?
- For a medium always-on instance, Heroku is about $50/mo and Railway about $40.52/mo, so Railway is the cheaper estimate. Actual cost depends on your usage — try the calculator.
- Does Heroku have a free tier?
- No.
- Does Railway have a free tier?
- No.
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