Head to head
Neon vs Railway
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
54/100Higher score | 50/100 | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #5 | #3 |
| Confidence | High confidence | Medium confidence |
| External Reputation | 78 | 73 |
| AI Authority | 42 | 42 |
| Web Authority | 25 | 16 |
| Expert Assessment | 64 | 65 |
| TOP10 User Score | — | — |
| Pricing | Launch: no monthly minimum — compute $0.106/CU-hour, storage $0.35/GB-month · free tier: Free plan is permanent, no credit card: 100 projects, 10 branches/project, 100 CU-hours/project, autoscaling to 2 CU (8 GB RAM), scale to zero after 5 min, 0.5 GB storage/project, 6-hour history window, 1 manual snapshot, 5 GB egress, up to 60k Auth MAU, community support; hitting any monthly limit suspends compute until next billing month | Hobby $5/month minimum (includes $5 of monthly usage credits; charged even at zero usage) · free tier: Free $0/mo — starts as a 30-day trial with $5 one-time credit, then $1 free credit per month; 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM per service, 0.5 GB volume, 1 project, 3 services, 1 replica, 0 custom domains after trial, 3-day logs, no global regions, community support, no credit card required |
| Pricing model | Usage-based (pay-as-you-go, metered hourly) with a permanent free tier | Usage-based (per-second metering) with a minimum monthly subscription that includes usage credits |
| Best for | Teams running many short-lived, mostly-idle Postgres databases — preview environments, per-PR branches, per-customer sandboxes — and startups or AI/agent builders with spiky load who want Postgres plus pgvector with no seat costs and no monthly minimum. | Small-to-mid engineering teams migrating off Heroku or a request-metered host who run always-on containers, workers and their own database, and want per-second compute billing plus unlimited seats for a flat $20/month workspace fee — and solo developers at $5/month. |
| Avoid if | You run latency-critical low-traffic production apps (cold starts), steady-state high-utilisation workloads where there is no idle to reclaim at $0.222/CU-hour, need compliance or an SLA below the Scale tier, need more than 56 CU / 224 GB RAM, or must commit to a hard fixed monthly budget. | You need SSO, RBAC, extended audit logs or a HIPAA BAA without committing $1,000–$2,000/month, require a contractual uptime SLA with credits, want a genuinely usable permanent free tier, need to prepay rather than keep a post-paid card on file, or cannot tolerate workloads being stopped when a credit balance hits zero. |
| Markets | Startups, SMB, Developers, Agencies, Enterprise (Scale plan), AI/agent platforms | Solo developers / indie hackers, SMB, Mid-market engineering teams, Enterprise |
| Founded | 2021 | — |
| Headquarters | Menlo Park, California, United States | — |
A higher TOP SCORE means more of the evidence favours that platform on this methodology — it is not a recommendation, and it does not account for your specific requirements. Advertisers are never declared the winner of a comparison.