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frp vs Railway
Railway automates deployment of services, whereas frp focuses on exposing existing local services.
Which to pick
Pick frp if you want…
- Fast reverse proxy for NAT traversal
- A free, open-source tool
Pick Railway if you want…
- All-in-one cloud deployment and scaling
- Zero-config app deployment
Side by side
- What it is
- frp:frp is a fast reverse proxy that exposes local servers behind NAT or firewalls to the Internet.
- Railway:Railway is a full-stack cloud platform that lets developers deploy apps, databases and services with automatic scaling, monitoring and networking.
- Best for
- frp:Fast reverse proxy for NAT traversal
- Railway:All-in-one cloud deployment and scaling
- Who it’s for
- frp:Developers needing to expose local services (HTTP, TCP, UDP) publicly.
- Railway:Developers and teams who want to ship web apps and services without managing infrastructure.
- Pricing
- frp:Open source
- Railway:Freemium
- Plans
- frp:—
- Railway:Free Free · Hobby Free
- Open source
- frp:Yes, 109,771 GitHub stars
- Railway:—
- Works with
- frp:—
- Railway:GitHub, Docker, Railway CLI
frp features
- Multi-protocol support. Handles TCP, UDP, HTTP and HTTPS traffic for inbound forwarding.
- P2P connect mode. Enables direct peer-to-peer connections without a central server.
- Server dashboard & client UI. Web interfaces for monitoring and managing proxies.
- Prometheus metrics. Exports proxy health and performance data for monitoring.
- Authentication options. Supports token, OIDC and basic HTTP authentication for clients.
- Encryption & compression. Secures traffic with TLS and reduces bandwidth usage.
Railway features
- One-click Deploy. Connect a repo and Railway auto-configures, builds and deploys the app instantly.
- Visual Project Canvas. See and edit the entire stack, networking and resources on a visual canvas.
- Instant Networking. Private connections, public endpoints, SSL and load balancing are provisioned automatically.
- Auto Scaling & Replicas. Scale CPU, RAM or add replicas with load balancing, globally.
- Built-in Observability. Logs, metrics, traces and alerts are available in a single dashboard.
- Preview Environments. Every pull request gets an isolated preview environment with one-click rollbacks.
frp vs Railway FAQ
Is frp or Railway free?+
frp is free and open source. Railway has a free plan and paid plans.
Is frp or Railway open source?+
frp is open source (fatedier/frp on GitHub, Apache-2.0 license). DevHunt has no public source repository on record for Railway.
On DevHunt
Based on each tool's website and DevHunt data. Details may change; check the official sites.