Render vs Railway
Two developer-friendly PaaS options. Render has a genuinely free tier (with cold starts); Railway switched to trial-credit + usage-based billing. Both support Git-push deploys, databases, and cron.
Key differences
- Free tier: Render has free web services (15-min sleep) and free static sites; Railway has a one-time $5 trial credit.
- Pricing model: Render has fixed instance tiers; Railway bills by actual CPU/RAM/egress usage.
- Cold starts: Render free web services cold-start; Railway services do not once running.
- Database options: Both ship Postgres, Redis, etc. as managed services.
- Commercial use: Permitted on both.
Rights
| Key | Render | Railway |
|---|---|---|
commercial_use_allowed |
yes | yes |
Constraints
| Key | Render | Railway |
|---|---|---|
api_available |
yes | yes |
cron_available |
yes | yes |
custom_domain_available |
yes | yes |
webhook_available |
yes | yes |