These two appear together in the same search because they both take a project from idea to running, and they solve different halves of that job.
TL;DR
Supabase sells a Postgres database with auth, storage, realtime and edge functions around it: Free at $0 with 50,000 monthly active users, Pro at $25 a month, Team from $599 a month. Railway sells compute you point at anything: a $5 Hobby floor, a $20 Pro floor, then per-second CPU, memory and volumes plus $0.05 per GB of egress. Buy Supabase when the product is data and you want the backend assembled; buy Railway when you want to run a service or a database of your own choosing.
Supabase is a managed Postgres development platform. The Free plan gives unlimited API requests, 50,000 monthly active users, a 500 MB database on shared CPU with 500 MB of RAM, 5 GB of egress, 1 GB of file storage and community support, with free projects paused after a week of inactivity. Pro is $25 per month and includes the first project, with extra projects from $10 a month: 100,000 monthly active users then $0.00325 each, 8 GB of disk then $0.125 per GB, 250 GB of egress then $0.09 per GB, cached egress then $0.03 per GB, 100 GB of file storage then $0.0213 per GB, $10 a month in compute credits, daily backups held for seven days and email support. Team starts at $599 per month and adds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, backup controls and SSO, with log drains at $60 per drain per project.
Railway sells no database of its own. Its pricing page runs Free at $0 with a 30-day trial carrying $5 of credits, Hobby at a $5 minimum that includes $5 of monthly credits, and Pro at a $20 minimum that includes $20 of credits. Beyond the floor, memory is $0.00000386 per GB-second, CPU is $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, volumes are $0.00000006 per GB-second and egress is $0.05 per GB for services, with object storage at $0.015 per GB-month and free egress. Any container runs here: a frontend, a queue, a worker, or a database image you manage yourself.
| Feature | Railway | Supabase |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Free: $0, with a 30-day trial carrying $5 of usage credits | Free: $0, 50,000 monthly active users, 500 MB database, 5 GB egress, paused after a week of inactivity |
| Entry paid plan | Hobby: $5 minimum usage, including $5 of monthly credits | Pro: $25 per month, first project included, extra projects from $10 a month |
| Mid tier | Pro: $20 minimum usage, including $20 of monthly credits | Team: from $599 per month, with SOC 2, ISO 27001, SSO and backup controls |
| Enterprise | Contact sales above 50 replicas per service | Enterprise terms handled through Supabase's sales motion |
| Usage pricing | Memory $0.00000386 per GB-second, CPU $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, volumes $0.00000006 per GB-second | 100,000 monthly active users then $0.00325 each, 8 GB disk then $0.125 per GB, 250 GB egress then $0.09 per GB |
| Egress | $0.05 per GB for services; object storage $0.015 per GB-month with free egress | 250 GB included on Pro then $0.09 per GB, cached egress then $0.03 per GB |
| Storage | Volumes per GB-second plus object storage per GB-month | 100 GB file storage included on Pro then $0.0213 per GB |
| What it runs | Any container: services, workers, agents, database images you manage | Managed Postgres with auth, storage, realtime, edge functions and vector search |
| Platform | Web canvas, CLI, API and GitHub-driven deploys | Web dashboard, CLI, APIs and generated Postgres endpoints |
| Offline mode | Not a concept for a hosted compute service | Not a concept for a hosted database service |
| Billing note | Usage floor with credits, then metered by the second | Plan fee with metered overages on users, disk and egress |
Pick Railway if
Teams that have opinions about their database, their runtime or their queue get a canvas where every container is welcome, billed by the second against a $20 floor that comes with matching credits. It is the right side of this comparison when you want infrastructure without a product catalog attached to it.
Pick Supabase if
Builders who want a database, user accounts, file storage and realtime updates on one bill start at $0 and move to $25 a month when the project has users, with the Postgres underneath staying portable. It is the right side when assembling those pieces yourself would cost more engineering time than the plan costs money.
No independent reviews were gathered for this pairing: all figures come from railway.app and supabase.com pricing pages, and the cards repeat vendor-published claims only.
No. Railway runs containers and metered compute; Supabase runs a managed Postgres with auth, storage, realtime and an API layer on top. A Railway service can call a Supabase project over its API, but the database itself lives in the Supabase project.
Supabase covers the data layer and the code that sits directly on it through edge functions. Anything else, such as a separate worker, a cron service or a third-party database, still needs somewhere to run, and Railway is priced for exactly that.
Supabase starts at $0 with 50,000 monthly active users and 500 MB of database storage. Railway starts at $0 with a 30-day trial carrying $5 of credits, then a $5 Hobby floor. For a project with users and data, the free tier is longer-lived on Supabase; for a container that just needs to run, Railway's floor is the number to watch.
Supabase meters monthly active users, disk and egress above the Pro allowances, so a viral month raises the bill in predictable units. Railway meters seconds of CPU and memory plus $0.05 per GB of egress, so a compute-heavy service and an idle one can differ by an order of magnitude at the same traffic.
Supabase includes daily backups retained for seven days on Pro, with longer retention and additional controls on Team. On Railway, any database image you deploy is yours to back up, monitor and upgrade, which is the trade you make for choosing the engine yourself.
Spot an outdated price or feature? Let us know and we'll verify it.