Railway vs Vercel
Both are developer tools. Here is what separates them.
What Railway is
Railway is a cloud platform for deploying applications, databases, persistent volumes, functions and background jobs from one place. Its unit of deployment is a service, whose source is either a code repository or a Docker image. Connecting a GitHub repository makes Railway build and deploy on every push, and a project can also be sent straight from a local directory with the railway up command. Builds default to Nixpacks, which detects the language and dependencies, though a Dockerfile can be used instead. Service configuration can be committed with the code as a railway.toml or railway.json file. Deploy history is kept and an earlier deployment can be restored with one click. Railway serves HTTP, TCP, gRPC and WebSocket traffic, and custom domains get TLS certificates provisioned automatically. Services inside the same project reach each other over a private IPv6 network using internal DNS. Scaling runs in both directions: horizontally through replicas behind a load balancer, and vertically through CPU and memory limits. Managed Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB and ClickHouse are on offer, volumes give a service persistent storage at a configurable mount path and can be expanded later, and Railway Functions run TypeScript on the Bun runtime. Workloads are placed in one of four regions: California, Virginia, Amsterdam or Singapore. A monthly bill is the plan subscription fee plus metered resource usage. Memory is billed at $10 per GB per month, CPU at $20 per vCPU per month, volume storage at $0.15 per GB per month and network egress at $0.05 per GB. The Free plan costs nothing and grants $1 of resource credit a month, with 1 replica, 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB of RAM and three days of log history. Hobby is $5 a month with $5 of usage included and ceilings of 6 replicas, 48 vCPU, 48 GB of RAM and seven days of logs. Pro is $20 a month per workspace with $20 of usage included, 42 replicas, 1,000 vCPU, 1 TB of RAM and 30 days of logs. Because the fee is charged per workspace rather than per seat, seats are unlimited and included. A one-time trial grants $5 of credit valid for 30 days, with up to 2 replicas, 2 vCPU and 1 GB of RAM per service. Pull request preview environments are billed as active workloads for as long as they run.
What Vercel is
Vercel is a hosting and deployment platform for web applications. Connect a Git repository and every push builds and deploys automatically, with a preview environment created for each one so a change can be checked at a real URL before it reaches production. Deployments are unlimited, and the controls around them matter as much as the build itself. Rolling releases push a new deployment out incrementally rather than all at once. Rollbacks return to a previous deployment when something goes wrong in production. Deployment Protection keeps builds that are not meant to be public from being reached. Environments are managed separately for local, preview, production and custom cases, and environment variables are typed as either Config or Secret. Elastic build machines make use of Turborepo cache data. Serving runs over a globally distributed delivery network with automatic routing, automatic compression, image optimisation and SSL/TLS. Pages support incremental static regeneration, refreshed on a schedule or on request. Functions scale dynamically and can be configured by region; on the Bun runtime they go up to 5GB in size and 30 minutes in duration. Private inter-region networking is available, as is Vercel Sandbox, which runs globally. A customisable web application firewall handles attacks and unwanted traffic through rules you set. An AI Gateway reaches hundreds of models through a single endpoint, and an AI SDK wires language models into an application with streaming and tool calling. The Chat SDK connects to Notion, Slack Enterprise Grid and XChat. Vercel Connect links applications to more than 100 services. The Hobby plan is free and includes automatic CI/CD and one million function executions a month. Pro is $20 a month, with ten million executions, $20 of included usage credit and team collaboration features. Enterprise is custom priced and adds a 99.99% SLA, guest and team access controls, up to 100 team members, custom invoicing and advanced support. Plans include 10GB of Blob storage a month and one million observability observations. Traffic analytics and spend management tools come with the platform. Named customers give a sense of the range: Notion runs untrusted code on it at scale, Ramp holds 100% uptime through traffic surges, and the Weather Company serves real-time forecasts from it. Investors include Accel and Google Ventures.
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