Heroku vs Railway

Who Should Use Which

Use Railway if you're starting a new project and want modern PaaS with per-second billing, zero-config deploys, and active development. This is the default choice for new work in 2026.

Use Heroku if you have a legacy application running on Heroku that works fine and the migration cost outweighs the benefit. That's the only honest recommendation.

The State of Heroku in 2026

Heroku pioneered cloud PaaS. The git-push deploy workflow that every platform copies today? Heroku invented it. But Salesforce's acquisition killed the momentum. The free tier was removed in November 2022. Feature development slowed to a crawl. The add-ons marketplace, once Heroku's crown jewel, is increasingly stale.

I checked Heroku's changelog. The last significant platform feature shipped over a year ago. Compare that to Railway, which ships multiple updates per week. The trajectory tells the whole story.

Pricing: Railway Wins Clearly

Heroku's Basic plan starts at $7/month for a single dyno (512MB RAM). Want always-on? That's $7. Want a database? Heroku Postgres Mini is $5/month for 10K rows. Standard-0 is $50/month. Scaling horizontally means paying per dyno.

Railway charges per-second for actual compute usage. The Hobby plan is $5/month with $5 of included usage. A small app running 24/7 on Railway costs roughly $3-5/month. The same app on Heroku costs $7-12/month before you add a database.

Worked example for a typical starter project (web server + Postgres + Redis):

• -Heroku: $7 (Basic dyno) + $5 (Mini Postgres) + $0 (Heroku Data for Redis removed) = $12/month minimum, and Mini Postgres caps at 10K rows
• -Railway: $5/month covers all three services with per-second billing

The gap widens at scale. Heroku's Standard dynos start at $25/month each. Railway's per-second billing means you only pay for what you use.

Developer Experience

Railway auto-detects your language and framework. Push to Git, Railway deploys. No Procfile, no buildpack configuration, no manual setup. The dashboard shows logs, metrics, and deployment history in a clean interface.

Heroku's DX was great in 2015. It still works - Procfiles, buildpacks, the CLI. But it feels dated. The dashboard hasn't been meaningfully redesigned in years. Deployment takes longer than Railway (buildpack-based builds vs Railway's Nixpacks). Cold starts on Basic dynos are noticeable.

Railway's per-second billing also changes how you think about infrastructure. Spin up a staging environment, test for an hour, shut it down. You paid pennies. On Heroku, every additional dyno is a monthly commitment.

Database and Services

Heroku Postgres was once the best managed Postgres offering. It's still reliable but the pricing is no longer competitive. The Mini plan (10K rows, $5/month) is barely usable. Standard-0 ($50/month) is the first plan that's genuinely production-ready.

Railway includes Postgres and Redis as first-class services. Spin them up from the dashboard, they connect automatically to your app via environment variables. No add-on marketplace friction. Pricing is usage-based - you pay for compute and storage, not for a tier.

Heroku's add-ons marketplace was its ecosystem advantage. Need monitoring? Add New Relic. Need search? Add Elasticsearch. Many of these add-ons still work, but some have been deprecated and alternatives are cheaper when self-provisioned.

Migration Path

If you're on Heroku and considering Railway, the migration is straightforward. Railway supports Heroku buildpacks, so your existing Procfile and buildpack configuration works. Database migration requires a pg_dump/pg_restore. Most teams complete the migration in a day.

The only reason to stay on Heroku is if you have a complex add-on dependency chain that would be expensive to replicate. Even then, most add-ons have direct alternatives that are cheaper.

The Verdict

Railway wins decisively. Better pricing, better DX, active development, and a team that ships features weekly. Heroku is coasting on legacy trust with no compelling reason to choose it for new projects.

The only scenario where Heroku makes sense: you have a running application with complex add-on dependencies where the migration cost exceeds the savings. For everything new, Railway.