Fly.io
vs
Railway
Fly.io and Railway are similar in that they both simplify app deployment and management. Fly.io focuses on managed containers at the edge for low-latency applications, while Railway emphasizes ease of use and a seamless developer experience.
What's good about each
- Excellent tooling and developer experience
- Fast deployments, scale to zero, little config needed
- Per-second billing, with a 40% discount for reserved compute blocks
- Anycast networking and global load balancing included at no extra cost
- Billed by the second on actual CPU and memory utilization
- App Sleeping reduces costs on low-traffic workloads
- Self-owned hardware across US, EU, and Asia
- Template directory with a 15% kickback for template authors, 25% with active support
Price comparison
Closest matching configuration on each side, monthly list price in USD.
| Service | Fly.io | Railway | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small VM | $5.70 /mo 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM (shared-cpu-1x) | $30.00 /mo 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM | 5.3x more expensive on Railway |
| Medium VM | $42.79 /mo 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM (shared-cpu-4x) | $160.00 /mo 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM | 3.7x more expensive on Railway |
| Large VM | $248.00 /mo 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM (performance-8x) | $320.00 /mo 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM | 23% cheaper on Fly.io |
| Block storage | $15.00 /mo 100 GB | $15.00 /mo 100 GB | Identical |
| Object storage | $20.50 /mo 1 TB (Tigris) | $15.00 /mo 1 TB | 27% cheaper on Railway |
| PostgreSQL | $86.00 /mo 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB storage (Starter) | $87.50 /mo 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB storage | Within 5% |
| Redis | $20.00 /mo 1 GB data (Upstash Fixed 1GB) | $30.00 /mo 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM | 33% cheaper on Fly.io |
| Load balancer | Included with apps | Included in plan | |
| Egress | $20.00 /TB $0.02 / GB (North America and Europe) | $50.00 /TB $0.05 / GB | 2.5x more expensive on Railway |
Heads up: Figures take each provider's closest plan to a common setup, and vary by region and usage. Hover a service for the reference configuration. Verify before provisioning. More on how we price.
Services
Managed services each provider offers.
Company details
| Fact | Fly.io | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2017 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | USA | USA |
| Locations | 18 | 4 |
| Example customers | Cars.com, Fanatics, Tailscale, Supabase | -- |
| Website | fly.io | railway.com |
Alternatives to consider
Compare Fly.io and Railway against other cloud providers.
Our data for Fly.io was last updated on Aug. 24, 2026, and for Railway on Aug. 24, 2026.