Railway vs Netlify
Kofi Agyem, Founder and CEO, CloudzyroPublished
Railway and Netlify side by side on price, limits and how they charge, from each company's own pricing pages, with Cloudzyro as a third option.
| Feature | Railway | Netlify | Cloudzyro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan | $1 of usage a month, after a 30-day $5 trial | 300 credits a month; every project paused when they run out | Launch: free, business use included, never sleeps |
| Paid plan | Hobby $5 or Pro $20 a month per workspace, including that much usage | Pro: $20 a month for the team, 3,000 credits | Boost: $20 a month per site, team included |
| How usage is billed | CPU, memory and traffic by the second | Credits: 15 per deploy, 20 per GB, 10 per GB-hour of compute | Flat: compute and traffic included |
| Best at | Servers, workers and databases side by side | Static sites and frontends | Sites and web apps at a flat price per site |
Other companies' figures from Railway pricing, Netlify pricing, Netlify: how credits work, checked October 31, 2026. Prices change, so check their pages before you decide.
The short answer
Railway and Netlify solve different problems. Railway runs long-lived services, such as servers, background workers and databases, and bills what they use by the second. Netlify is built for static sites and frontends, and bills everything from a monthly pool of credits. Choose Railway for backends and full-stack projects; choose Netlify for frontends. If you want one flat price per site with compute and traffic included, Cloudzyro is a third option.
Free plans
Railway gives a 30-day trial with $5 of credit, then $1 of usage a month on its free plan, enough for very small projects. Netlify's free plan has 300 credits a month as a hard limit: a production deploy costs 15 and each GB of bandwidth 20, and when the credits run out, every project on the account is paused until the next month. Cloudzyro's Launch plan is free with business use allowed, and sites never sleep or pause.
What a small team pays
Both have a $20 Pro plan that doesn't charge per member. Railway Pro includes $20 of usage, then about $20 a month per vCPU, $10 per GB of memory and $0.05 per GB of outbound traffic. Netlify Pro includes 3,000 credits, with packs of 1,500 more for $10. Cloudzyro Boost is $20 a month per site with 2 CPUs, 2 GB of memory and 1 TB of traffic included.
Traffic and busy months
Railway charges $0.05 per GB of outbound traffic. Netlify spends 20 credits per GB, about $0.13 at the Pro credit pack price. Cloudzyro never charges for traffic: a site past its allowance is slowed for the rest of the month and stays online.
Which should you choose?
Choose Railway if your project is several services and a database working together. Choose Netlify if you're shipping static sites or frontends. Choose Cloudzyro if you want your website or web app always on, at one flat price per site, deployed from your AI tool, Git or a zip.