Railway
8.3#1 in databases and backendFrom $5 a monthFree planAndroidiOSWebAPI
VisitRailway vs TiDB Cloud
TiDB Cloud
8.1#1 in distributed systemsFree planFree planWebAPILinuxSelf-hosted
VisitWhat both publish
| Fact | Railway | TiDB Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Company profile | LinkedIn lists Railway as a privately held software-development company founded in 2020, headquartered in San Francisco, with 11–50 employees. | LinkedIn lists TiDB powered by PingCAP as privately held, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with 501–1,000 employees. |
| Funding | Crunchbase lists Railway as a private Series B company with three funding rounds and nine investors, including Unusual Ventures and TQ Ventures. | LinkedIn states PingCAP raised a $300 million Series D+ in July 2021 and approximately $600 million total since founding. |
| Integrations | Official Railway integrations include ChatGPT, Codex, Claude, Claude Code, Grok, Cursor, and other AI assistant connectors. | Official integrations include Kubernetes via TiDB Operator, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Kafka, Flink, Confluent, Airbyte, Amazon AppFlow and dbt. |
| Public API | The public API is GraphQL at backboard.railway.com/graphql/v2 and supports account, workspace, project tokens and OAuth. | The TiDB Cloud REST API is public preview, HTTPS-only, JSON-based and uses API-key HTTP Digest Authentication. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.7 out of 5 from 42 reviews | 4.6 out of 5 from 66 reviews |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 5.0 out of 5 from 4 reviews | 4.9 out of 5 from 165 ratings |
| Rating on GetApp | 0.0 out of 10 from 0 reviews | 0 out of 5 from 0 reviews |
| Scaling | Services can scale vertically, horizontally with replicas and across four global regions. | Starter offers on-demand compute that scales to zero when idle. |
Railway plans
- FreeFree
- TrialFree
- Hobby$5 a month
- Pro$20 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
TiDB Cloud plans
- TiDB Cloud Essential—
- TiDB Cloud Premium$1,800 a month
- TiDB Cloud Dedicated$0.22 a month
- TiDB Cloud StarterFree
- StarterFree
- Essential$400 a month
Pick Railway if…
Railway suits developers and teams deploying services from repositories or Docker images who want infrastructure, databases, deployment environments and operational tools in one platform. Mobile apps may also suit users who want to manage services from iOS or Android.
Pick TiDB Cloud if…
TiDB Cloud may suit teams needing a managed MySQL-compatible database for transactional and analytical workloads. Starter's free quota and scale-to-zero compute may interest organizations evaluating the service or running workloads with idle periods.