Hosted
Anyport vs Railway
Railway is what most people mean by a modern PaaS: connect a repository and it builds and runs it on hardware Railway owns, in four regions, billed by the vCPU and the gigabyte it uses. If you have no servers and no wish to have any, that is the right shape, and Anyport is not a substitute for it.
The two products differ on one thing, and it is not a feature. Railway sells compute. Anyport sells a control plane for compute you already have. Most of the table follows from that, so the choice is a decision about where you want your bill to go.
01Common ground
What both of them do
This much both products do, so the table below is only about where they differ.
- Connect a repository and every push builds and deploys.
- Preview environments for pull requests.
- Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB and Redis beside your applications.
- Cron jobs, logs and metrics.
- Automatic HTTPS on your own domains.
- A CLI, an API and a config file the repository carries.
02The differences
Where they differ
The short answer first, and the detail underneath it where the short answer alone would mislead.
| Railway | Anyport | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Railway A hosted PaaS Your code runs on Railway's hardware. | Anyport A hosted control plane Your code runs on your Kubernetes cluster. |
| Whose hardware | Railway Railway's Railway Metal, their own data centres, in four regions. | Anyport Yours Any Kubernetes cluster: in a cloud account, in a rack, or a bare Linux machine where Anyport installs k3s. |
| What compute costs | Railway $20 per vCPU, $10 per GB a month On top of the plan: Hobby $5, Pro $20, each with that much usage included. | Anyport Whatever you already pay for it Compute is never metered, because it is not ours to sell. |
| Where your data lives | Railway On Railway Databases are services on the same hardware, with volumes at $0.15 per GB. | Anyport On your cluster Managed databases run in your project's namespace, and backups go to a bucket you own. |
| Idle services | Railway App Sleep Turns down resource usage on inactive services. | Anyport Pause a project Manual, and the whole project at once. Nothing wakes on the next request. |
| Config in the repository | Railway railway.json or railway.toml The build and deploy settings of one service. | Anyport anyport.yaml The whole project: apps, services, secrets by name, tasks and domains. Applied on push, and a pull request's preview gets its own. |
| Price | Railway From $5 a month plus usage Free at $0 with $1 of usage. Hobby $5 and Pro $20 include the same amount of usage, then per-resource rates apply. Checked 14 September 2026. | Anyport $5/mo or $50/yr 1 cluster free, 3 on Pro, then $4 a month or $40 a year each. Compute is never metered. |
| Compliance | Railway SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, HIPAA Listed on their trust centre. HIPAA BAAs on Enterprise. | Anyport Not certified yet Controls are published in full on the security page instead. |
03In their words
What Railway is
Taken from their own documentation, read on 14 September 2026.
Railway builds from a repository or an image and runs the result on hardware it owns. Its Railway Metal page describes the platform migrating completely onto Railway-managed hardware in its own data centres, with regions in US West, US East, Europe West and Southeast Asia.
Pricing is a subscription plus usage. Free is $0 with $1 of usage included and a ceiling of 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB per service. Hobby is $5 a month with $5 of usage included, Pro is $20 a month with $20 included, and Enterprise is custom. Usage is $20 per vCPU a month, $10 per GB of memory, $0.15 per GB of volume and $0.05 per GB of egress.
Its config-as-code file, railway.json or railway.toml, covers the build and deploy settings of the service it sits beside. A TCP proxy exposes non-HTTP services to the internet. App Sleep turns down idle services. Its trust centre lists SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3 and HIPAA reports.
Nothing in its documentation offers a way to run Railway on a cluster or a server you own. That is an absence rather than a statement by Railway, and it is the reason this page exists.
04The decision
Which one to choose
Each list is written to be true. If the left one describes you, the right product is theirs.
Choose Railway if
- You have no servers and do not want any. Railway's whole point is that the hardware is their problem.
- Your workloads are small enough that usage billing beats a server you pay for whether it is busy or not.
- You want services that sleep when idle and cost nothing while they do.
- A SOC 2 or HIPAA report is a gate in your review.
Choose Anyport if
- You already pay for compute, in a cloud account or a rack, and want the Railway workflow on it rather than a second bill.
- Your data has to stay on infrastructure you control, for a customer contract, a regulator or your own preference.
- The usage bill outgrew the hardware it would take to run the same thing yourself, which is how most people arrive here.
- Your clusters are somewhere no hosted platform can be: an edge site, a customer's network, behind NAT.
05Questions
Questions people ask
- Is Anyport a self-hosted Railway?
- Close, with one correction. Anyport's control plane is hosted by us; only your workloads are self-hosted. What you run yourself is the Kubernetes cluster and the agent inside it. The console, the build triggers and the deploy history are ours to operate. If you want the control plane on your own machine as well, Coolify, Dokploy and Canine do that and Anyport does not.
- Can I move an application from Railway to Anyport?
- The workloads move as containers. Anything Railway builds from a Dockerfile or with Railpack builds the same way on your cluster, because Anyport builds with Railpack too. What does not move is the hardware: you need a Kubernetes cluster, or a Linux machine for Anyport to install k3s on, before the first deploy.
- What does Anyport require of a cluster?
- A Kubernetes cluster you can run one command against, or a bare Linux machine where Anyport installs k3s first. No inbound port, no public IP, no load balancer that can obtain one, and no kubeconfig handed to us. The agent opens a connection outward and holds it open.
- What does Anyport cost?
- One cluster is free with every feature and unlimited members, apps and projects. Pro is $5 a month for 3 clusters, then $4 each. Compute is never metered because it is not ours. The one counted resource is traffic our gateway carries for clusters with no public address of their own: 10 GB a month free, 100 GB on Pro, then $0.05 per GB.
- Is Anyport audited or certified?
- Not yet. In place of a report, the security page documents what the agent runs with inside your cluster, what crosses the boundary and how secrets are stored, so a reviewer can evaluate the controls directly. Two of them hold regardless of certification: we never receive credentials for your Kubernetes API, and your workloads keep serving whether or not our control plane is reachable.
06Sources
Where this came from
Read on 14 September 2026. If one of these pages now says something different, the source is right and this page is stale.
If Anyport is the one you want
Connecting a cluster is one command and takes a few minutes. One cluster is free with every feature, and the pricing page lists what each plan includes and the one thing that is metered.