Comparison · Railway

Croft vs Railway

Railway is a powerful developer PaaS - git push or Docker deploy, services scale, databases and previews are built in, and it's designed for apps that face the public internet. It's a strong choice when you're shipping a product or API service. Croft takes a different approach: apps are private by default, behind your team's single sign-on, and built for small internal tools where the people using them all know each other. Different posture, different buyer - Railway for internet-facing services; Croft for the private apps your team needs to run the business.

	Railway	Croft
Built for	Developers shipping services, APIs, and products to the internet	Teams building private internal apps - developers and non-developers alike
Default posture	Public URL by default - services face the internet	Private by default - apps sit behind your team's single sign-on
Who uses your apps	The public internet, customers, or APIs you expose	People you invite by name, inside your business
Login & access	You build and wire authentication per service	Company login in front of every app - nothing to build or wire up
Getting an app live	Connect a repo or Dockerfile, configure services, expose a port	Describe it to your AI assistant - it writes the code and deploys in one conversation
The AI	Railway's agent helps you deploy and operate on their PaaS	Your AI builds apps that live privately on Croft - no tokens resold
Pricing	Usage-based plans (Hobby/Pro) — workspace fee plus compute, memory, egress	Flat plan price with no usage meter - Solo $24/month, Team $99/month
Where it runs	Railway's managed cloud infrastructure	A private server that's yours - export and run anywhere Docker does
Preview environments	PR-based preview deploys for every branch	Versioning, backups, and rollback - keep iterating on the live app
Platform depth	TCP proxying, cron jobs, volumes, observability integrations	Scheduled tasks, connectors, monitoring, error tracking - opinionated and included
Best when	You're a developer deploying services, APIs, or products that scale	You're a team that wants small, private apps without standing up a full PaaS

More comparisons: Croft vs Vercel + Supabase · Croft vs Replit · Croft vs Lovable · Croft vs Base44 · Croft vs Cloudflare OS · Croft vs Retool · Croft vs Superblocks · Croft vs Island · Croft vs ChatGPT Sites · Croft vs Taskade Genesis · the app builders

New to Croft?

What Croft actually is.

Croft is a home for the small apps you build with Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Your assistant writes the app; Croft runs it on your own private server - with a database, one login for the people you invite, HTTPS, and backups all handled. One flat price, bring your own AI, no lock-in.

How it works Connect an assistant, describe an app, invite your people. Under the hood The stack, the security model, and how your data is handled. Pricing One flat price. 7-day free trial, no card to start. Prompt library Copy-paste prompts to build your first app in minutes. Connect an assistant Point Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok at your croft over MCP. Templates One private server instead of a license for every job. Real apps, with the prompt that built them.

Stake out your croft.

Your team's first app could be live before lunch.

Get your croft

7 days free, no card to start. From $24/month - cancel anytime and take everything with you.