Comparison

vs

Taxiway vs Railway

Railway is superb, and this whole project exists because I wanted it on my own servers. Here is the honest trade.

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The short version

Written by the person who makes Taxiway, so read it with that in mind. I have tried to make the case against us as well as for us.

I want to be clear about this one: Railway is excellent, I have paid them money happily, and Taxiway's entire interaction model is a compliment to theirs. If you have no interest in owning a server, Railway is a better product than Taxiway and you should use it.

There are two reasons people leave anyway. The first is the meter. Usage-based billing is fair, but it is not predictable, and a traffic spike or a memory leak arrives as an invoice. The second is location and custody: some work has to sit on hardware you control, in a country you chose, on disks you can physically account for.

Taxiway is that shape of platform pointed at a VPS you already rent. A £4 Hetzner box will happily run a dozen small apps, and the price of that box is the price, whatever the traffic does. What you take on in exchange is real: when the host dies at 2am, that is now your pager.

At a glance

Your apps run on

Taxiway

Servers you own or rent

Railway

Railway's infrastructure

Cost model

Taxiway

Free, you pay only your server bill

Railway

Usage-based, per vCPU/GB-hour and egress

Who is on call for the hardware

Taxiway

You

Railway

Railway

Where your data physically sits

Taxiway

Your disks

Railway

Their regions

The difference is the arrow.

Both diagrams are drawn on the same grid. The thing worth staring at is which way the connection points, and how much of it you are responsible for keeping alive.

Taxiway
Our control plane Your VPS inbound: nothing Your browser or the iOS app Control plane API auth · state · views Gateway desired state · ingest Postgres your config, not your data outbound wss :443 Taxiway agent one Go binary · opens no port Traefik edge :80 and :443, the only ports you open docker web node api go postgres volume
Railway
Their cloud · metered Your hardware Your browser their dashboard Their control plane build · schedule · route Their edge TLS · routing · egress metered web api postgres The meter vCPU-hours · GB-hours · egress a busy month is an invoice not involved nothing to own, nothing to page you

Feature by feature

Including the rows we lose. A comparison table with no crosses in our own column would not be worth your time.

Predictable monthly cost

Taxiway

Taxiway, Predictable monthly cost: yes Your VPS bill, unchanged

Railway

Railway, Predictable monthly cost: no Scales with usage

No platform fee at all

Taxiway

Taxiway, No platform fee at all: yes

Railway

Railway, No platform fee at all: no

Data stays on hardware you control

Taxiway

Taxiway, Data stays on hardware you control: yes

Railway

Railway, Data stays on hardware you control: no

Push to deploy from GitHub

Taxiway

Taxiway, Push to deploy from GitHub: yes

Railway

Railway, Push to deploy from GitHub: yes

One-click databases

Taxiway

Taxiway, One-click databases: yes

Railway

Railway, One-click databases: yes

Logs and metrics built in

Taxiway

Taxiway, Logs and metrics built in: yes

Railway

Railway, Logs and metrics built in: yes

Deploy a repo with no Dockerfile

Taxiway

Taxiway, Deploy a repo with no Dockerfile: partly Dockerfile required for most repos

Railway

Railway, Deploy a repo with no Dockerfile: yes Nixpacks

Autoscaling and multiple regions

Taxiway

Taxiway, Autoscaling and multiple regions: no You size the server

Railway

Railway, Autoscaling and multiple regions: yes

Someone else handles hardware failure

Taxiway

Taxiway, Someone else handles hardware failure: no Your server, your pager

Railway

Railway, Someone else handles hardware failure: yes

Works with no cloud account at all

Taxiway

Taxiway, Works with no cloud account at all: yes A machine in your office counts

Railway

Railway, Works with no cloud account at all: no

Native iOS and iPad app

Taxiway

Taxiway, Native iOS and iPad app: partly In development

Railway

Railway, Native iOS and iPad app: no

Checked September 2026. Products move, and Railway moves quickly. If something here is out of date or simply wrong, tell me and I will fix it .

Pick Railway if…

  • You do not want to own a server, and that is a completely reasonable thing to want. Railway removes an entire category of problem from your life.
  • You need to scale sideways under load without thinking about it, or serve from several regions.
  • Someone else being responsible at 2am is worth more to you than the difference in the bill.
  • You want the polish of a large team's product. Taxiway is one developer, and it shows in places.

Pick Taxiway if…

  • Your bill has become the reason you think about architecture. On your own box, the number stops moving.
  • You have a compliance, contractual or personal reason for the data to sit on hardware you can point at.
  • You already rent a VPS that is mostly idle and you would like it to earn its keep.
  • You want to keep the ergonomics (push, build, release, logs, metrics) without the meter.

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