Compared
Dockup and Railway, with the arithmetic shown.
The compute rates are identical to four decimal places. Everything that actually separates the two is somewhere else.
The short answer
On a normal web service the monthly totals land within a few cents of each other, because both platforms rent the same class of machine and price it the same way. Railway is cheaper on egress. Dockup is cheaper on persistent storage, and runs things Railway does not: Linux and Windows VMs, and deployments to servers you already own.
Line by line
| Compared on | Dockup | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Entry paid plan | $5 · Hobby | $5 · Hobby, $5 usage credit included |
| The plan most teams buy | $20 · Pro, first $20 usage included | $20 · Pro per workspace, $20 credit included |
| Compute | $0.02778 / vCPU-hour | $0.02779 / vCPU-hour |
| Memory | $0.01386 / GB-hour | $0.01390 / GB-hour |
| Persistent storage | $0.10 / GB-month | $0.158 / GB-month |
| Egress | $0.09 / GB | $0.05 / GB |
| Charged per team member | No | No |
| Linux VMs with root | Yes | No |
| Windows VMs over RDP | Yes | No |
| Deploy to servers you own | Yes, over SSH | No |
| Template library | Small | Very large |
Railway figures are their published list prices, checked on 22 August 2026. They change without notice — verify before deciding. Ours are on the pricing page, per unit, so you can redo this arithmetic yourself.
Choose Railway if
- You move a lot of data out. At $0.05 against $0.09 per GB, egress is the one line where Railway is meaningfully cheaper, and it compounds.
- You want to start from a template. Railway has thousands; Dockup does not.
- You want the larger community. More people have hit your problem there already.
Choose Dockup if
- You need a machine, not just a container — Linux with root, or Windows over RDP. Railway runs containers only.
- You have servers of your own that have to stay. Dockup deploys to them over SSH and keeps the output, timings and exit codes.
- You store a lot and move a little. Storage at $0.10 against $0.158 goes the other way from egress.
- You drive deployments from a coding agent and want structured JSON and real exit codes rather than parsed prose.
Questions this page gets asked
Is Dockup cheaper than Railway?
Not on compute or memory — those rates are identical to four decimal places, because both platforms rent the same class of hardware. Dockup is cheaper on persistent storage ($0.10 against $0.158 per GB-month) and more expensive on egress ($0.09 against $0.05 per GB). Which is cheaper for you depends on whether you store more than you send.
Does either charge per developer?
Neither does. Both price the workspace rather than the people in it, which is the main structural difference between these two and Vercel.
Can Railway run a Windows VM?
No. Railway runs Linux containers. Dockup runs containers, Linux VMs with root, and Windows VMs reachable over RDP on a tunnelled port.
Compare something else
- Dockup and Render
- Dockup and Vercel
- Dockup and Heroku
- Dockup and Fly.io
- Dockup and Netlify
- Heroku alternatives
- Vercel alternatives
- Railway alternatives
- Netlify alternatives
- Supabase alternatives
- Firebase alternatives
- DigitalOcean alternatives
- Coolify alternatives
- Render alternatives
- Dokploy alternatives
- What to do when Railway is down
- Railway and Render, compared
- How a migration actually goes
Try it against your own workload.
The free plan grants $10 of infrastructure credit at signup, needs no card, and does not sleep.