Elastic Beanstalk vs. Railway.app

An online system is essential for every business regardless of its size, and that online system needs a reliable enough backend. Managing on-site hardware and IT infrastructure is not that efficient.

Especially when a small or medium business has to deploy its website, there are a lot of hurdles, and PaaS solves all of those problems.

Today, many platforms provide their PaaS, and the ones we will be comparing here are Elastic Beanstalk from Amazon Web Services and Railway.app.

Both offer competitive services with top-notch features and a quality experience. By the end of this comparison, you will be able to tell which one offers better services for you.

Elastic Beanstalk Overview

It helps you develop your web apps and then deploy them with all the features and services that you may need. Developing and deploying the experience of your web apps with this PaaS is simple and quick, as uploading your source code is the only task. Even the platform resolves hosting and management, so the efforts from your end are restricted.

In addition, Elastic Beanstalk brings automatic scalability, load balancing, performance monitoring, resource provisioning, and all other things your website needs to perform reliably. As AWS provides Elastic Beanstalk, it also comes with different services from AWS, and integrating other AWS services here is pretty easy.

Elastic Beanstalk can be a great pick for the websites that millions will simultaneously use.

Elastic Beanstalk Features

Elastic Beanstalk brings a complete range of features, and here are the best ones you will enjoy using.

Project monitoring

Elastic Beanstalk comes with efficient project monitoring by integrating other services. It allows the integrating of X-Ray and CloudWatch, providing all insights about the project performance at one interface. Here you can monitor the performance of your projects from all aspects.

Graviton Support

As Elastic Beanstalk comes from AWS, it is supported by Graviton processors, which are much better in terms of performance and efficiency. The regular processors work on x86 architecture, while the Graviton is based on the arm-64 architecture. So, you not only get better performance, but it also provides optimization as needed.

Customization as per needs

From using the language and framework to defining the features of your application, Elastic Beanstalk provides you with control over all the features. So, you can customize everything along with the other tool integration for easier management and a better experience.

Elastic Beanstalk Pricing

The good part is that its services come free as you pay for AWS S3 or AWS EC2.

Combining different services and AWS tools and integrating them into one project will offer a great deployment and hosting experience, bringing you a complete package.

Another amazing thing is that the services here can be used anytime you want without any commitments for a minimum time frame.

Similarly, there are no commitments about the minimum charges or service usage. Thus, it offers complete freedom of usage.

Railway.app Overview

Railway.app is the PaaS that provides the complete infrastructure where you can develop and deploy your projects on the cloud backend. It only requires code from your end, and everything else is managed by Railway.app.

It is an infrastructure platform that is not restricted to any specific type of project as it supports small and big projects with its cloud backend.

Railway.app provides a flexible experience for you as it allows you to start with your existing repository while you also have the choice to start with a template here.

As every project has different features for which different plugins are necessary, it provides tooling that can add features to your app using plugins.

The best part is that its variable management makes your project’s environment as if it is present on your local backend. 

Railway.app Features

With Railway.app, you will get many intuitive, and useful features, and below are the best 3.

Infrastructure based on microservices

The infrastructure here is based on your project’s microservice requirements, and everything scales with your requirements.

You can add a database, cron job, or any other microservice as per the app’s requirements. With Railway.app, these will grow along your application.

Connect with any terminal

Railway CLI helps you connect the whole infrastructure and your environment with any terminal. The best part is that Railway.app keeps everything in one place, so managing stuff for your team becomes easier.

Instant deployment with automatic builds

No matter what project you plan to deploy, it provides instant deployment services with great security. Once deployed, the process will accelerate as you iterate your projects. With Automatic Builds feature from Railway.app, you will never need to use CI. again.

Railway.app Pricing

The good quality of the Railway.app is that it uses a pay-as-you-go pricing method, so you are only charged for the resources you use. So, some vital resources that you may use and their prices are:

• vCPU at Railway.app costs $20 per 1 CPU per month
• RAM at Railway.app costs $10 per 1 GB per month

You get community support, disk space, shared projects, and other features with these resources. Railway.app also comes with a Starter trial package for free, while a Developer plan costs $5 per month and a Team package costs $20 for every seat.

The best part about prices at Railway.app is that a resource usage estimation tool is integrated at the pricing page that shows estimated prices for all different resources. You get maximum results as it is worth your investment with good plans.

Railway.app vs Elastic Beanstalk Comparison

Conclusion

Elastic Beanstalk and Railway.app offer great service features and pricing. The service quality is also amazing from both sides, so selecting between one can get a little confusing. So, you can consider your needs when deciding. 

As both offer similar pricing policies(pay-as-you-go), the cost will be somewhat similar for you. So, when narrowing down, your requirements and how they are fulfilled will be the decider for you.

FAQ