Railway vs Heroku is the PaaS question of 2026: Heroku invented the git-push deploy and still has the smoothest workflow in the business, but it costs $25-50/mo per production dyno and has no free tier. Railway gives you the same push-to-deploy feeling with managed Postgres, Redis, and volumes, metered per second from a $5/mo Hobby plan.
Bottom line up front: pick Heroku if you want the most polished, battle-tested platform and your team can absorb $100+/mo for a real production stack. Pick Railway if you want modern DX at a fraction of the price and are comfortable with usage-based billing — most side projects and startups land there.
| Railway | Heroku | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $5/mo Hobby (includes $5 usage); free tier $0 with $1/mo credit | Eco $5/mo (1,000 shared hours, sleeps); always-on from $7/mo Basic |
| Production app cost | Pay per second for actual CPU/RAM used; a small app with Postgres often lands $5-20/mo | Standard-1X $25/mo per dyno + Postgres Essential from $5/mo; realistic stack $100-200/mo |
| Billing model | Usage-based, per-second metering with hard spend limits | Fixed per-dyno tiers: $7 / $25 / $50 / $250 / $500 per dyno |
| Managed databases | Postgres, MySQL, Redis, and volumes inside the same project | Heroku Postgres from $5/mo; Key-Value Store (Redis) from $3/mo; huge add-on marketplace |
| Free tier | Yes — $0 plan with $1/mo usage credit | None since November 2022 |
| Scale-to-zero | No — idle services keep billing, same as Heroku | No — dynos bill around the clock |
| Preview environments | PR environments via templates and service replicas | Review apps and pipelines — the original, still excellent |
| Best for | Startups and solo devs who want Heroku-style DX at usage-based prices | Teams that want the most polished, battle-tested PaaS and can pay for it |
Push to deploy: the simplest PaaS for full-stack apps.
Free $0 ($1/mo usage credit); Hobby $5/mo (includes $5 usage); Pro $20
Try Railway →The original git-push PaaS: the smoothest deploy experience ever built, at a premium price.
Eco $5/mo (1,000 shared dyno hours, sleeps after 30 min idle); Basic $
Try Heroku →Heroku wins on polish and maturity; Railway wins on price by a wide margin. For a typical small production app, Railway costs roughly a third of Heroku's bill for the same architecture. Choose Heroku when the team values zero-surprise operations over cost; choose Railway when the bill matters — which, for most indie hackers and early startups, it does.
Usually, yes — by a lot. Railway meters actual usage per second, so a small app with a database often costs $5-20/mo. The equivalent Heroku stack (Standard dyno + Postgres) starts around $30/mo and a realistic production setup lands at $100-200/mo.
Yes — both deploy from Git and run standard buildpacks or Dockerfiles. Move the code, recreate the database (Railway offers managed Postgres), and re-point environment variables. The main adjustment is Railway's usage-based billing versus Heroku's fixed dyno tiers.
No. Heroku removed free dynos in November 2022. The cheapest entry is Eco at $5/mo for 1,000 shared dyno hours, but Eco dynos sleep after 30 minutes idle — always-on starts at $7/mo Basic.