Heroku
vs
Railway
Heroku uses fixed-size dynos with per-dyno monthly pricing. Railway bills by the second on actual CPU and memory utilization and scales vertically without instance size selection.
What's good about each
- Fully-managed infra, minimal ops overhead
- Heroku Postgres is a one-click, battle-tested database
- Extensive add-on marketplace
- 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 | Heroku | Railway | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small VM | $50.00 /mo Dyno 1 GB RAM (Standard 2X) | $30.00 /mo 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM | 40% cheaper on Railway |
| Medium VM | $250.00 /mo Dyno 2.5 GB RAM (Performance M) | $160.00 /mo 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM | 36% cheaper on Railway |
| Large VM | $500.00 /mo Dyno 14 GB RAM (Performance L) | $320.00 /mo 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM | 36% cheaper on Railway |
| Block storage | -- Not listed | $15.00 /mo 100 GB | |
| Object storage | -- Not listed | $15.00 /mo 1 TB | |
| PostgreSQL | $50.00 /mo 4 GB RAM, 64 GB storage | $87.50 /mo 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB storage | 43% cheaper on Heroku |
| Redis | $200.00 /mo 1 GB RAM | $30.00 /mo 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM | 6.7x more expensive on Heroku |
| Load balancer | Included in plan | Included in plan | |
| Egress allowance | 2 TB / mo per app | -- Not listed | |
| Egress | Not publicly listed Bandwidth is soft limited per app (2 TB / mo) | $50.00 /TB $0.05 / GB |
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 | Heroku | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2007 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | USA | USA |
| Locations | 10 | 4 |
| Example customers | Airbase, Dovetail, Hotel Engine, ClickMechanic, Ambassify | -- |
| Website | heroku.com | railway.com |
Alternatives to consider
Compare Heroku and Railway against other cloud providers.
Our data for Heroku was last updated on Feb. 12, 2026, and for Railway on Aug. 24, 2026.