Railway vs Heroku
Heroku is the platform Railway was built to replace, and the most mature one here: dynos, a large add-on marketplace and Heroku Postgres. Since February 2026 it runs in a sustaining engineering model, focused on stability rather than new features.
Pick Heroku if you want a fixed price per dyno, a managed Postgres with rollback from $50 a month, and add-ons for logging, search or email in one click. Stay on Railway if you need persistent volumes, more memory for the money, or cron more precise than every 10 minutes.
Side by side
Railway vs Heroku at a glance
| Railway | Heroku | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing | Plan + per-second usage | Fixed price per dyno, prorated to the second (wall-clock time) |
| Cheapest always-on service | Hobby $5/mo, includes $5 of usage | Basic $7/mo (512 MB) |
| Free option | 30-day trial ($5 credit), then $1/mo of usage | None; Eco $5/mo gives 1,000 dyno hours and sleeps after 30 min |
| 1 GB RAM, always on | About $10/mo of RAM plus CPU used | Standard-2X $50/mo |
| Postgres | One-click template on a volume; backups, PITR (about 4 weeks) and HA available | Essential from $5/mo (no rollback); Standard from $50/mo (4-day rollback); HA from Premium, $200/mo |
| Persistent storage | Yes: $0.15/GB-month | None: dyno filesystem is wiped on restart |
| Regions | 4: California, Virginia, Amsterdam, Singapore | 2 on the Common Runtime (US, EU); 10 more with Private Spaces |
| Cron | Any crontab schedule (UTC) | Scheduler add-on: every 10 min, hourly or daily, no guarantee a run happens |
| Preview environments | Yes: an environment per pull request | Review apps on pipelines (dynos and add-ons billed as usual) |
| CI | Not included | Heroku CI, billed at dyno rates per test run |
Sources: Heroku pricing · Heroku Postgres plans · Heroku Scheduler · Heroku regions · Heroku dynos · Heroku update, Feb 2026 · Railway pricing · Railway plans · Railway backups · Railway regions. Checked October 22, 2026.
Where Heroku wins
Add-ons for everything
Logging, search, email, monitoring and queues install from the Elements marketplace and bill on the same invoice. On Railway you deploy a template or wire up an external service yourself.
Postgres with rollback and followers
From Standard-0 ($50 a month) Heroku Postgres adds rollback up to 4 days, forks and read followers; Premium adds high availability and a 1-week rollback. It is fully run by Heroku, with no volume to size.
A fixed bill and built-in CI
Each dyno has one monthly price, and Heroku CI runs tests on the same platform, billed at dyno rates (Heroku's example: about $0.03 for a 5-minute run).
Where Railway still wins
More memory for the money
Heroku's $25 Standard-1X dyno has 512 MB of RAM and 1 GB costs $50 a month. On Railway a gigabyte of RAM is about $10 a month, plus the CPU you actually use.
Volumes and a moving roadmap
Railway attaches persistent volumes; Heroku dynos have an ephemeral filesystem. And Heroku now ships few new features: its February 2026 update moved it to a sustaining model, and Enterprise contracts are no longer offered to new customers.
Moving from Railway to Heroku
- Rotate first: copy no secret from Railway as-is. Issue new database passwords and API keys and put only the new values on the new host.
- Create the app with
heroku create, add aProcfile, and set the new values withheroku config:set. - Provision Heroku Postgres on Standard or higher if you need rollback, then restore a
pg_dumpfrom Railway withpg_restore. - Move anything kept on a Railway volume to object storage, connect GitHub for deploys on push, then switch DNS.
Common questions
Railway vs Heroku: common questions
Is Heroku more expensive than Railway?
Usually, for the same memory. A 1 GB Heroku dyno (Standard-2X) is $50 a month, while 1 GB of RAM on Railway is about $10 a month plus the CPU used. Heroku is easier to forecast, because each dyno has a fixed monthly price.
Is Heroku being shut down?
No. In February 2026 Heroku moved to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability and support, with no change to pricing or service for existing customers. It still ships some updates, but Enterprise contracts are no longer offered to new customers.
Does Heroku support persistent storage like Railway volumes?
No. Each dyno has an ephemeral filesystem and anything written to it is discarded when the dyno restarts. Files go to object storage such as S3, and data goes to Heroku Postgres or another add-on.