Railway vs Dokku
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Railway and Dokku.
Railway Deploy in seconds, scale in minutes | Dokku Self-hosted mini Heroku on your own VPS | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.9 (506 reviews)✓ | 4.7 (251 reviews) |
| Pricing model | freemium | free |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free |
| Best for | Developers who want a project running in production within 60 seconds with no config files | Developers who want Heroku-style deployments at VPS pricing on infrastructure they own and control |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | 0 vCPU | — |
| RAM | 0.5 GB | — |
| Storage | 0 GB | — |
| Bandwidth | 0 TB/mo | — |
| SLA uptime | 99.9% | — |
| Data-center count | 2 | — |
| €/GB RAM/mo | €0.00 | — |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ✓ | |
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | United States | — |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiermanaged optionus datacenterapi access | free tieropen sourceself hostable |
| Visit Railway → | Visit Dokku → | |
Railway
Pros
- + Fastest time-to-deploy of any platform
- + Usage-based pricing — pay only for what runs
- + PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB all one-click
Cons
- - Less suitable for large-scale production workloads
- - Pricing can surprise at higher usage levels
Dokku
Pros
- + Free and open source — just need a VPS
- + Heroku buildpack compatible
- + Full control over your data and costs
Cons
- - Self-managed — you handle updates and maintenance
- - Requires Linux server knowledge
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