Dokku vs Railway
Both are alternatives to Heroku. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Railway vs Dokku — same comparison, one verdict.
Dokku
The original self-hosted PaaS — small, stable, unglamorous.
Dokku has been doing this since 2013 and describes itself accurately as the smallest PaaS implementation you have seen: Git-push deployment via Docker, Heroku buildpack support so existing apps often deploy unchanged, and a plugin system for databases and TLS. MIT, around 32k stars. It has no web interface — everything is the command line — and that is deliberate. For someone comfortable in a terminal it is the most dependable option here, and it has outlived several better-funded competitors.
Railway
The Heroku experience, without owning a server.
Railway is the closest thing to what Heroku felt like in its best years: connect a repository, it detects the framework, provisions the database and deploys — with usage-based pricing that is typically well below Heroku for equivalent work. Proprietary and hosted, which is the honest trade. Included because for a great many teams the real choice is not self-hosted versus managed but which managed provider, and pretending everyone should run a server would not serve the reader.
Side by side
| Dokku | Railway | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 95 | 34 |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes | No |
| Local-first | Yes | No |
| License | MIT | Proprietary (hosted service) |
| Pricing | Free and open source. You supply the server. | Usage-based with a small monthly minimum; typically well below Heroku for comparable workloads. |
Dokku edges it on the Sovereignty Score, but the right pick depends on the trade-offs below.
Dokku
Strengths
- +Over a decade of stability; genuinely mature
- +Heroku buildpack support means many apps deploy unchanged
- +MIT and very light — runs on a small VPS
- +Extremely well documented for command-line use
Trade-offs
- −No web interface at all
- −Single-server by design
- −Assumes comfort with the command line
- −Fewer batteries included than Coolify
Railway
Strengths
- +Best developer experience of anything in this comparison
- +Usage-based pricing rather than fixed dyno tiers
- +Nothing to operate, patch or back up
- +Databases, cron and private networking built in
Trade-offs
- −Proprietary and hosted — a vendor dependency, same as Heroku
- −Usage pricing is harder to forecast than fixed dynos
- −Smaller company than Salesforce, with the risk that implies
- −No self-host option
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-05. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.