Nodion vs Railway
Railway has built a strong following among developers with its clean interface and usage-based pricing. Both platforms share a philosophy of making deployment simple, but they take different approaches to platform breadth, data residency and enterprise readiness.
| Feature | Nodion | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Stuttgart, Germany (EU) | San Francisco, USA |
| Data Residency | EU, US and APAC regions | US (Oregon), EU (available) |
| GDPR by Default | Yes | DPA available |
| Managed Applications | Yes | Yes |
| Managed PostgreSQL | Yes | Yes |
| Managed MySQL | Yes | Yes |
| Managed Valkey / Redis | Yes | Yes (Redis) |
| Object Storage | Yes (S3-compatible) | No |
| Global CDN | Yes (25 locations) | No |
| Transactional Emails | Yes (SMTP) | No |
| Managed DNS | Yes (free, GeoDNS) | No |
| Billing Model | Per-second | Usage-based |
| Spending Limits | Predictable per-second pricing | Hard spending limits |
| Free Tier | First 5 EUR/month free | Trial plan (limited) |
| Docker + Buildpacks | Yes | Yes (Nixpacks) |
| 1-Click Deploy Marketplace | 25+ apps | Templates (community) |
| Enterprise SLA | Up to 15-minute P1 response | Enterprise plan available |
EU Hosting and Data Sovereignty
Nodion is a German company operating under EU jurisdiction. For organizations that require their cloud provider to be an EU legal entity, and not just hosting in an EU data center, this is a fundamental difference. Railway is a US company and subject to US data access laws regardless of where the servers are located. For regulated industries, public sector projects or any team with strict data residency requirements, the legal entity behind the platform matters.
Platform Breadth
Railway excels at application and database hosting but stops there. Need object storage? You connect AWS S3 or another provider. Need a CDN? You set up Cloudflare separately. Need transactional emails? You sign up for a service like Resend or Postmark. Need DNS? You manage it with a separate provider. Nodion provides all of these as built-in services: S3-compatible object storage, a global CDN with 25 locations, SMTP-compatible transactional emails and managed DNS with GeoDNS capabilities. One platform, one bill, one set of credentials.
Pricing and Billing
Both platforms use consumption-based billing, but Railway's compute pricing starts at $0.000463 per vCPU per minute. Nodion's smallest instance costs approximately 1 EUR per month and a database starts at 1.50 EUR per month. Railway offers a $5 free trial credit for new users that does not renew. Nodion provides the first 5 EUR of monthly usage free every month, permanently, with no payment method required. For a small application with a database, this means zero cost on Nodion versus an ongoing bill on Railway once the trial credit runs out.
Enterprise Support
Nodion offers structured SLA plans from Basic (included free) through Standard, Premium and Enterprise tiers. The Enterprise SLA guarantees a P1 initial response time of under 15 minutes with 24/7 availability and phone support. For teams that need formal support guarantees with clear response times, Nodion provides a transparent tiered system with published pricing.
When Railway Might Be the Better Choice
Railway has a vibrant developer community, an active Discord and a polished onboarding experience. If you primarily need application and database hosting, are US-based and value community engagement, Railway is a strong choice. For teams that need EU hosting, a broader integrated platform or formal SLA guarantees, Nodion provides a more complete enterprise-ready solution.
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