Railway and Render sell almost the same thing to the same people: a place to deploy your app without managing servers. So I expected their websites to look alike.
They don't. I read every live page on both sites on 6 November 2026, and the gap is big:
- Railway: about 7,650 live pages. 7,201 on railway.com, plus about 290 docs pages on docs.railway.com and 164 posts on blog.railway.com.
- Render: about 845 live pages, docs and blog included (Render keeps both on render.com).
Both sites' community forums are left out.
Most of that difference is one kind of page. Here's what each site is made of, and what I think a smaller dev tool can take from it.
All data in this post is from Outpublished. It reads competitor websites page by page, and every number below is a page count from public pages.
6,573 one-click deploy pages
Railway's sitemap lists about 7,700 template pages. Once you take out duplicates, listing pages and dead links, 6,573 are live templates: one page per thing you can deploy in one click, such as n8n, Metabase, Plausible and thousands more.
The rest of railway.com is smaller than you'd think: 204 guides and 314 changelog entries. Its docs and blog live on their own subdomains.
Render has the same idea at a much smaller size: 100 templates, 44 Docker deploy pages and 74 deploy guides in its docs. About 220 deploy pages in all, out of about 845.
Where the pages are, by topic
I sorted every page on railway.com and render.com into one shared list of topics. Railway's docs and blog subdomains aren't in these numbers, so its real counts are a little higher. Even without them, Railway has more pages on 25 of the 27 topics:
| Topic | Railway | Render |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted software | 1,287 | 34 |
| Templates | 531 | 60 |
| AI agents | 451 | 25 |
| Managed databases | 387 | 15 |
| AI infrastructure | 380 | 16 |
| Observability | 257 | 18 |
| Storage | 231 | 3 |
| MCP servers | 146 | 10 |
On railway.com alone, Render leads on two topics: platform comparisons (44 vs 29) and hosting costs (13 vs 9). Count Railway's docs and the picture changes: they add 10 comparison pages, which brings Railway close to Render on comparisons, and 11 pricing pages, which puts Railway ahead on costs. Where those pages sit is the interesting part, and I'll come back to it.
Pick any open-source app
The easiest way to see the difference is to pick a popular open-source app and count the pages that name it in the title:
| App | Railway | Render |
|---|---|---|
| n8n | 126 | 6 |
| Metabase | 77 | 3 |
| OpenClaw | 62 | 3 |
| Supabase | 33 | 4 |
| WordPress | 33 | 3 |
| Ollama | 28 | 0 |
| Grafana | 24 | 0 |
| Plausible | 23 | 0 |
If you search for how to self-host Grafana or deploy Ollama, Railway has a page ready for that search, often several. Render has none.
How Railway gets that many pages
Railway doesn't write them all. Anyone can publish a template, and Railway pays for it. In its own post from 5 December 2025, Railway says creators earn up to 25% of what Railway makes from their template's deploys: 15% from usage and 10% for answering questions about it. It says it has paid creators almost $1M, about $730k of it in cash.
So every new template a creator publishes is also a new page on railway.com, aimed at one search. Railway's pages don't say how many templates it publishes itself, so I can't split those out.
What Render does instead
Render's pages lean the other way: fewer apps, more pages for someone who is already choosing a platform. 39 of its 44 comparison pages are articles on its main site. They put Render against Railway, Railway against Fly.io, and list alternatives to Heroku and Vercel. Several of them are about Railway.
Railway has comparison pages too, but they sit in its docs, comparing Railway with Render and with Heroku, next to the setup guides. Same subject, written for a different moment: Render's are for someone still choosing, Railway's for someone who has more or less decided.
That's a reasonable bet for a smaller site. It's also the only part of the map where Render is ahead.
What a smaller dev tool can take from this
- Every list your product has can be pages. Railway's list is templates. Yours might be integrations, supported frameworks, file formats or regions. One page per item, each built for the person searching for that item.
- Let your users make pages. Railway turned page creation into something its users get paid for. You don't need a payout programme to start. A gallery where users publish their own setups gets you part of the way.
- Don't skip the pages for people still choosing. Render's comparison and pricing pages are where it leads. If you only have a few pages, these are the ones closest to a decision.
How I counted
- Every page railway.com and render.com list or link to, read once, on 6 November 2026. Render's docs.render.com redirects to render.com/docs, so its docs are in. Railway's docs.railway.com and blog.railway.com are counted from their sitemaps.
- Only live pages are counted: no redirects, duplicates, dead links or listing pages. Render's sitemap lists about 80 addresses that answer with a 404; they're left out.
- Topics were assigned by an AI model to every page on both sites, using one shared list of topics.
- App counts are plain title matches.
- The payout figures are Railway's own, from its 5 December 2025 post.
If you build a dev tool: what's the one list in your product that could be a page per item? I'm curious what people pick, and I'm happy to count a site pair in the comments if you're wondering how yours compares.
Top comments (0)