Northflank vs Railway
Northflank
northflank.com
Railway
railway.comSide by side
| Figure | Northflank | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $2.70/mo | $5/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 6 | 7 |
| Spec score · Preview Environment Software | 9.1 (#2) | 8.9 (#4) |
| Spec score · Deployment Automation Software | 8.8 (#2) | 8.7 (#4) |
| Spec score · Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) Software | 8.9 (#2) | 8.8 (#3) |
| Spec score · PaaS tools | 8.8 (#2) | 8.8 (#3) |
| Spec score · Platform As A Service Paas Software | 8.9 (#2) | 8.8 (#3) |
| API limits | The default API rate limit is 1,000 requests per hour, with higher limits available by contacting support. | API quotas are 100 requests/hour for Free, 1,000 for Hobby and 10,000 for Pro, with higher per-second limits on paid plans. |
| Company profile | Crunchbase describes Northflank as a developer platform automating deployments across cloud infrastructures and lists a 11–50 employee range with London headquarters. | LinkedIn lists Railway as a privately held software-development company founded in 2020, headquartered in San Francisco, with 11–50 employees. |
| Compliance | Northflank states that it has SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliance, while ISO 27001/27018 is listed as unavailable. | Railway's Trust Center lists SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3, HIPAA, GDPR EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework compliance information. |
| Funding | Northflank announced a $22 million funding raise on 11 November 2024. | Crunchbase lists Railway as a private Series B company with three funding rounds and nine investors, including Unusual Ventures and TQ Ventures. |
| Integrations | Supported integrations include GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, self-hosted Git services, Docker Hub, GHCR, ECR, GAR and ACR. | Official Railway integrations include ChatGPT, Codex, Claude, Claude Code, Grok, Cursor, and other AI assistant connectors. |
| Observability | The platform provides centralized logs, CPU/memory/network/disk metrics, dashboards, alerts and exports to tools such as Datadog and Splunk. | Railway includes searchable logs, configurable dashboards, metrics, distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry support. |
| Public API | The REST API is available at https://api.northflank.com/v1/ and exposes OpenAPI JSON and HTML specifications. | The public API is GraphQL at backboard.railway.com/graphql/v2 and supports account, workspace, project tokens and OAuth. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.9 out of 5 from 11 reviews. | 4.7 out of 5 from 42 reviews |
| Rating on Trustpilot | 3.4 out of 5 from 6 reviews. | 2.6 out of 5 from 93 reviews |
| What it does | Northflank is a developer platform for building, deploying and operating services, databases, jobs and GPU workloads on managed or customer-owned infrastructure. | Railway is a cloud platform for deploying, managing and scaling applications, databases and infrastructure without users managing traditional servers. |
Plans
Northflank
- Pay-as-you-goFree
- SandboxFree
- nf-compute-10$2.70 a month
- nf-compute-50$12 a month
- nf-compute-100-2$24 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
Railway
- FreeFree
- TrialFree
- Hobby$5 a month
- Hobby$5 a month
- Pro$20 a month
- Pro$20 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Northflank
Northflank is a developer platform for building and running applications made up of microservices, databases, background jobs, and scheduled tasks. It handles container builds, networking, and orchestration, and offers managed Kubernetes across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Deployments can use Northflank infrastructure, cloud accounts from AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, or CoreWeave, or imported Kubernetes clusters, including bare-metal and on-premises environments. Git integrations include hosted and self-hosted services; the platform also supports container registries and observability tools. Teams can use its UI, CLI, REST API, GitOps, reusable templates, pipelines, and preview environments. Northflank says secrets and files are encrypted at rest with AES-256, secrets are injected at runtime, and managed-cloud workloads use isolation controls. It states that it is SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliant; ISO 27001/27018 is listed as unavailable. The free Sandbox includes two services, one database, and two cron jobs with always-on compute. A payment method is required before creating resources, including on the free plan. Basic email support is included in all plans.
Railway
Railway is a deployment platform for teams that want to provision infrastructure, develop locally against it, and deploy services to the cloud. Projects can start from Docker images, GitHub repositories, local repositories, container registries, or templates. Railway offers PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis database templates with built-in backups, plus persistent volumes with up to 5 TB of storage. Networking includes public and private options, TCP proxying, custom domains, and managed TLS certificates. Services can scale vertically, horizontally, and across four regions. Operational tools include logs retained for up to 90 days, configurable dashboards, distributed tracing, health checks, usage limits, and alerts. Teams can use unlimited environments, pull-request and preview deployments, GitHub branch deploys, approval gates, audit logs, and rollbacks. Railway also provides a GraphQL API, a CLI, and iOS and Android apps for deploying, monitoring, and managing services. The Trial plan includes a one-time $5 free credit; Hobby costs $5 a month and Pro costs $20 a month. Enterprise pricing is custom.