Pyo vs Railway
Services, databases and cron jobs from one dashboard, on servers you own. Pyo is open source, and free to run for as many services as your servers can hold.
| Feature | Pyo | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | ||
| Runs on your own servers | Yes: A VPS, dedicated server or homelab | No: Railway's cloud only |
| Open source | Yes: Apache 2.0 | No: Proprietary |
| Free to use | Yes: You only pay for your servers | Partly: Paid by usage, with a small free plan |
| Runs on any provider | Yes: Or several at once | No: Railway only |
| Your data on your hardware | Yes: Yes | No: On Railway's infrastructure |
| No plan limits | Yes: Every feature, on every install | No: Replicas, seats and roles depend on your plan |
| Deploying | ||
| Deploy from Git | Yes: On every push | Yes: Yes |
| Deploy any container image | Yes: Yes | Yes: Yes |
| Zero-downtime deploys | Yes: With 2 or more replicas | Yes: With a health check |
| One-click rollback | Yes: To any earlier version | Yes: Yes |
| Automatic rollback | Yes: A failed deploy undoes itself | Yes: Failed checks keep the old deploy |
| Cron jobs | Yes: With run history and failure alerts | Yes: Yes |
| Health checks | Yes: HTTP, TCP or command | Yes: HTTP, while deploying |
| One-click templates | Yes: Databases, tools and apps | Yes: Yes |
| Scaling | ||
| Services move if a server fails | Yes: Stateless services, automatically | Yes: Yes |
| Autoscaling | Yes: On CPU and memory, from min to max | Partly: Up to your plan's CPU and memory. Replicas set by hand |
| Choose where services run | Yes: By location, tag or server | Partly: By Railway region |
| Add your own servers | Yes: Over Tailscale, from anywhere | No: Railway's infrastructure only |
| Networking | ||
| Custom domains and HTTPS | Yes: Automatic certificates | Yes: Yes |
| Private networking | Yes: Between services, and over Tailscale | Yes: Between services |
| Traffic | ||
| Web application firewall | Yes: OWASP and custom rules, off by default | Partly: Under Attack Mode at the edge |
| Observability | ||
| Analytics | Yes: Built in, no script to add | No: Infrastructure metrics only |
| CPU and memory metrics | Yes: Servers and services, no Prometheus | Yes: For services |
| Live logs | Yes: Yes | Yes: Yes |
| Terminal into a service | Yes: From the dashboard | Yes: Over SSH, from the CLI |
| Security | ||
| Encrypted secrets | Yes: A separate key for each team | Yes: Yes |
| External secret stores | Yes: Vault, OpenBao, Infisical, AWS, GCP, Azure and Doppler | Partly: Synced in by Doppler, Infisical or a script |
| Team roles | Yes: On every install | Partly: Depends on your plan |
| Automation | ||
| CLI | Yes: Yes | Yes: Yes |
| API | Yes: Yes | Yes: Yes |
| MCP for AI assistants | Yes: 131 tools, covering the whole API | Yes: Yes |
Based on Railway's public docs, checked November 9, 2026. Features and plans change, so check their site for the latest. Railway is a trademark of its owner. Pyo isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Railway.
Get Pyo running on your server
Run Pyo on any machine, from your laptop or VPS to a dedicated server or homelab.
curl -fsSL https://pyo.dev/install.sh | bash