Side-by-side comparison · Databases & Backend
Cloudflare vs PlanetScale vs Railway
Everything that matters when choosing between them, in one place: our rating, what each can do, what they cost, and the trade-offs.
Comparing 3 tools, the maximum.
At a glance
Pick it if: Any business with a website that wants it faster and safer for free, and builders who want cheap hosting for apps and AI features.
Pick it if: Teams running a real product who need their database to stay fast and never go missing.
Pick it if: Builders and small teams who need to host an app, API, bot or database without managing servers.
Overview
| Attribute | Cloudflare | PlanetScale | Railway |
|---|---|---|---|
| In one line | Makes your website faster and safer, and hosts sites, apps and AI features cheaply. | Fast, serious databases for apps that have outgrown the free tiers. | Hosts your app and its database in a few clicks, and charges only for what it uses. |
| Pricing model | Freemium | Paid | Freemium |
| Starting price | $20/mo | From $5/mo | $0 |
| Free plan | Yes | No | Yes |
| Works with Claude Code | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Rating breakdown
Our scores out of 5. The higher bar in each row is highlighted.
| Attribute | Cloudflare | PlanetScale | Railway |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall rating | 4.5Winner | 4.1 | 4.0 |
| Ease of useHow quickly someone non-technical gets value from it. | 3.0 | 3.0 | 4.0 |
| FeaturesHow completely it covers its own job, and how well the pieces fit together. | 5.0 | 4.5 | 4.0 |
| Output qualityHow good the results are before you fix them. | 4.5 | 5.0 | 4.0 |
| Value for moneyWhat you get for the price, including the free plan. | 5.0 | 3.0 | 4.0 |
| Speed & reliabilityHow fast it is and how often it falls over. | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.0 |
Feature comparison
A tick means it does this today. A dash means we haven't checked.
| Attribute | Cloudflare | PlanetScale | Railway |
|---|---|---|---|
| Access & platform | |||
| Free plan | Yes | No | Yes |
| Mobile app | No | No | No |
| Desktop app | No | No | No |
| Browser extension | No | No | No |
| API access | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Teams & business | |||
| Team workspace | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Enterprise plan or SSO | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Connects to other apps | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Open source or self-hosted | No | No | No |
| AI abilities | |||
| Works with your files | Yes | No | Yes |
| Understands images | – | No | – |
| Makes images | – | No | No |
| Makes video | No | No | No |
| Writes code | Yes | No | No |
| Runs agents or automations | Yes | No | Yes |
| Learns your brand or style | – | No | – |
| Works in many languages | Yes | – | – |
| Capabilities score | 9/ 17 | 4/ 17 | 7/ 17 |
Pricing
Plans as listed on each vendor's site when we last checked. Confirm before you buy.
| Attribute | Cloudflare | PlanetScale | Railway |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plans | FreeOur pick Free Almost every small business website. | Postgres, single node From $5/mo Staging and small apps that can tolerate a restart. | Free $0, after a 30-day trial with $5 credit Trying it out. |
Pro $20/mo billed yearly, or $25 monthly Professional sites that want faster images and support tickets. | Postgres, high availabilityOur pick From $15/mo Production apps with paying users. | HobbyOur pick $5/mo, includes $5 of usage Side projects and small business tools. | |
Workers Paid From $5/mo plus usage Builders hosting apps on Cloudflare. | Metal From $50/mo Apps where database speed is the bottleneck. | Pro $20/mo, includes $20 of usage Production apps and teams. | |
Business $200/mo billed yearly, or $250 monthly Online businesses that need an uptime guarantee. | Vitess (MySQL) From $39/mo MySQL apps that need to shard as they grow. | Enterprise Custom Companies with compliance needs. | |
Enterprise Custom Mission-critical sites and large companies. | Enterprise Custom Single-tenant or fully managed setups. | ||
| Which plan to pick | Put your site on the free plan. It covers speed, SSL and security for most small businesses. If you host an app on Workers, the $5 a month Workers Paid plan lifts the limits. Pro and Business only make sense when you need their image tools, support or uptime guarantee. | Don't start here for a weekend project; Neon or Supabase are free. When a product has paying customers, the $15 high-availability Postgres is the sensible entry point. Only go to Metal once Insights shows the disk is the slow part. | Use the trial to get your app running, then move to Hobby. Many small apps stay within its included $5. Switch to Pro when a team works on it or it needs more power, and set a usage limit either way. |
Key features
| Attribute | Cloudflare | PlanetScale | Railway |
|---|---|---|---|
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Pros and cons
| Attribute | Cloudflare | PlanetScale | Railway |
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Who each one is for
| Attribute | Cloudflare | PlanetScale | Railway |
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Questions people ask
Which is better, Cloudflare, PlanetScale or Railway?
Cloudflare scores highest overall in our ratings (Cloudflare 4.5/5, PlanetScale 4.1/5 and Railway 4.0/5). Cloudflare is best for making any website faster and safer for free and blocking or managing AI crawlers. PlanetScale is best for production apps with paying users and predictable database performance. Railway is best for hosting an app with a database in one place and self-hosting tools like n8n from a template.
Which is cheaper, Cloudflare, PlanetScale or Railway?
Cloudflare: There's a free plan, and paid plans start at $20/mo. PlanetScale: There's no free plan. Paid plans start at From $5/mo. Railway: There's a free plan, and paid plans start at $0.
Which is easier to use, Cloudflare, PlanetScale or Railway?
Railway rates highest for ease of use in our scores. Builders and small teams who need to host an app, API, bot or database without managing servers.
How we compare
Ratings are our own, from using each tool, across ease of use, features, output quality, value for money, speed & reliability.
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