People leave Railway for two reasons, and they are different problems. The first is the bill: Railway meters CPU, memory, volumes and egress per second on top of a $5 or $20 monthly plan fee, so the total moves with traffic. The second is jurisdiction. Railway does offer an EU West region in Amsterdam, but the company is US-based, and for many European buyers the question is who can be compelled to hand over data, not where the disk sits.
Below are seven platforms that answer one or both of those. They are ordered by how closely they match a Railway workflow, not by how much we like them. Hostim is on the list at number three — it is the cheapest managed option here and the only one that deploys a docker-compose.yml unchanged.
Clever Cloud
France · Paris & RoubaixThe oldest European PaaS still run as an independent company. French-owned, French data centres, and a long list of supported runtimes with managed add-ons behind them. It is the safest pick if your buyer cares about who owns the company, not only where the servers stand.
| Entry price | €0.00833/hour for a nano application unit (1 vCPU, 512 MB), about €6.08/month; XS (1 vCPU, 1 GB) is €0.02222/hour, about €16.22/month, in the Paris zone |
|---|---|
| Billing | Per second, on the size you pick |
| Regions | Paris and Roubaix in France, plus Montreal, Warsaw, London, Singapore and Sydney, and HDS zones for health data |
| EU data residency | Yes — French company, French infrastructure |
| Deploy method | Git push, Docker image, or Dockerfile |
Where it is strong
- French ownership and French hosting, which passes most public-sector procurement checks.
- Managed add-ons for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB and object storage in one console.
- Long track record — the company has been running this platform since 2010.
Where it falls short
- Costs more per container than most platforms on this list at the smallest sizes — €16.22/month for 1 GB of RAM.
- The console and documentation are less polished than Railway’s.
- No free tier for databases — only trial credits when you sign up.
- Clever Cloud pricing — Clever Cloud (checked 2026-08-06)
- Clever Cloud price system API (Paris zone, EUR) — Clever Cloud API (checked 2026-08-06)
Scalingo
France · StrasbourgThe closest thing to Heroku in Europe. Git push, buildpacks, add-ons, review apps. Scalingo also sells a SecNumCloud-qualified region, which matters if you sell to French public bodies or health data controllers.
| Entry price | From €7.20/month for a 256 MB container; €14.40 for 512 MB; €28.80 for 1 GB (standard region) |
|---|---|
| Billing | Per container size, per month, prorated |
| Regions | France (standard and SecNumCloud-qualified) |
| EU data residency | Yes — French company, French infrastructure |
| Deploy method | Git push with buildpacks, or Docker image |
Where it is strong
- Heroku-style workflow that a Railway user recognises within minutes.
- SecNumCloud region for regulated French customers — almost nobody else on this list has that.
- Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB and Elasticsearch as first-party add-ons.
Where it falls short
- Price per GB of RAM is among the highest here — €28.80/month for a 1 GB container.
- Smaller ecosystem and fewer integrations than Railway.
- The interface is in French first for parts of the billing flow.
- Scalingo pricing — Scalingo (checked 2026-08-06)
Hostim
Germany · bare metalA flat-price PaaS running on dedicated bare-metal servers in Germany. It is the cheapest managed option in this list for a single always-on app, and it is the only one that takes a docker-compose.yml as it is.
| Entry price | €2.50/month for 1 vCPU and 1 GB RAM (plan sa-1-1), flat |
|---|---|
| Billing | Per plan, billed hourly, no usage meter and no egress fee |
| Regions | One: Falkenstein, Germany |
| EU data residency | Yes — German company, German bare metal, no hyperscaler underneath |
| Deploy method | Docker image, Git repo with a Dockerfile, or a pasted docker-compose.yml |
Where it is strong
- Cheapest managed entry price here, with a permanently free database tier (PostgreSQL 256 MB, MySQL 256 MB, Redis 128 MB, 1 GB volume).
- Managed PostgreSQL and MySQL are replicated with automatic failover on every plan, including the cheap shared ones.
- Docker Compose import — most platforms on this list make you translate the file first.
Where it falls short
- One region today, in Germany. More are planned, but there is no US or Asia region yet, and no global edge or scale-to-zero.
- No object storage, CDN, managed DNS or transactional email — you bring an external provider.
- Hostim.dev price list — Hostim.dev (checked 2026-08-06)
- Managed PostgreSQL — high availability — Hostim.dev docs (checked 2026-08-06)
Koyeb
France · Frankfurt regionFrench company, seven regions including Frankfurt, per-second billing and scale-to-zero. Since announcing that it is joining Mistral AI, Koyeb has pointed its roadmap at GPU and AI inference workloads, so weigh how much of the platform is still aimed at a plain web app.
| Entry price | Pro plan $29/month, which includes $10 of compute; compute is billed on top |
|---|---|
| Billing | Per second, plus a monthly plan fee |
| Regions | 7 across US, EU and Asia, including Frankfurt |
| EU data residency | Possible — pick the Frankfurt region; the company is French |
| Deploy method | Git push, or any container image from a registry |
Where it is strong
- Scale-to-zero and autoscaling, so idle services cost close to nothing.
- 1 TB of bandwidth included, then $0.02/GB in the EU and US — cheap egress compared with most of this list.
- Serverless Postgres with a free 5 hours per month tier for development.
Where it falls short
- The $29/month plan fee lands before you run anything, which is a lot for one small service.
- Serverless Postgres jumps to $29.76/month for the smallest always-on instance.
- The company is moving toward AI infrastructure, so general web hosting is no longer the centre of the roadmap.
- Koyeb pricing — Koyeb (checked 2026-08-06)
Northflank
UK · EU West regionThe most capable platform in this list: pipelines, preview environments, GPUs, and the option to run the whole thing inside your own cloud account. It is a British company, so for a strict "must stay in the EU" requirement it needs a second look.
| Entry price | $2.70/month for 0.1 shared vCPU and 256 MB; $24/month for a dedicated 1 vCPU / 2 GB plan |
|---|---|
| Billing | Per plan, prorated to the second; egress $0.06/GB, SSD $0.15/GB-month |
| Regions | US West, Central, East, EU West, Asia East, plus 600+ bring-your-own-cloud regions |
| EU data residency | Region yes, company no — Northflank is UK-based, outside the EU since Brexit |
| Deploy method | Git, Dockerfile, container image, or Helm-style templates |
Where it is strong
- Free sandbox with 2 services, 1 database and 2 cron jobs — enough to actually try it.
- Bring-your-own-cloud means you can keep data in an account you already own.
- Build pipelines and preview environments are stronger than anything else in this list.
Where it falls short
- Priced in USD, and egress at $0.06/GB is the most expensive per-GB rate here.
- UK jurisdiction. The UK has an EU adequacy decision, but it is not EU law, and some procurement rules still say no.
- The feature surface is large. For one container it is more platform than you need.
- Northflank pricing — Northflank (checked 2026-08-06)
Scaleway Serverless Containers
France · Paris, Amsterdam, WarsawNot a PaaS in the Railway sense — it is a French cloud provider with a serverless container product on top. Pick it when you want the rest of the cloud too: object storage, managed databases, Kubernetes, a private network.
| Entry price | Usage-based. Serverless Functions in Paris are €0.000005 per GB-second and €0.15 per million requests, after a monthly free tier of 400,000 GB-seconds and 1 million requests |
|---|---|
| Billing | Per resource-second and per request |
| Regions | Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw |
| EU data residency | Yes — French company (Iliad group), EU regions only |
| Deploy method | Container image from a registry, CLI, Terraform |
Where it is strong
- A real free allowance every month, which suits bursty or low-traffic services.
- The whole cloud is next to it: object storage, managed PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, block storage.
- European ownership with three EU regions to spread across.
Where it falls short
- Usage billing means the bill moves with traffic — the exact thing people leave Railway to escape.
- More assembly required. You wire the pieces together yourself.
- The console is a cloud console, not a two-click deploy experience.
- Scaleway serverless pricing — Scaleway (checked 2026-08-06)
Hetzner plus Coolify (self-hosted)
Germany or Finland · do it yourselfNot a service — a server plus an open-source control panel. It is the cheapest way to run many apps at once, and the most expensive way to run one, once you count your own time.
| Entry price | €5.99/month: a Hetzner CX23 (2 vCPU, 4 GB) at €5.49 plus €0.50 for the IPv4 address. Coolify itself is free |
|---|---|
| Billing | Fixed server price. Unlimited containers on the box |
| Regions | Germany (Falkenstein, Nuremberg) and Finland (Helsinki) |
| EU data residency | Yes — German company, EU data centres |
| Deploy method | Git, Dockerfile or Docker Compose, through the Coolify UI you install |
Where it is strong
- One fixed price for as many apps as the machine fits.
- Full root access and no platform between you and Docker.
- Coolify supports Docker Compose stacks and automatic TLS out of the box.
Where it falls short
- You own the OS updates, the security patches, the backups and the 3 a.m. restarts.
- One machine means one point of failure. High availability is a project, not a checkbox.
- Hetzner raised prices on 15 June 2026 — the CPX22 went from €7.99 to €19.49, a 144% jump. Your fixed cost is only fixed until the supplier says otherwise.
- Hetzner price adjustment notice (15 June 2026) — Hetzner (checked 2026-08-06)
- What does 'hello world' actually cost on AWS vs bare metal? — Hostim.dev blog (checked 2026-08-06)
How this list was made
Every price above is taken from the vendor’s public price list on the date shown next to the source link, and converted to nothing — the currency is whatever the vendor bills in. Where a platform bills per second, the monthly figure is the published rate for a service left running all month.
Platforms were included if they run containers, publish their prices, and either operate from an EU or EEA country or are owned by a European company. That rule is why Render, Fly.io and Sevalla are missing here: all three have European regions but are US-owned, and they are covered in Best EU Docker hosting platforms instead. Northflank is included with a warning, because the UK left the EU and its adequacy decision is a political document, not a permanent one.
Prices change often. If you are reading this months after the date at the bottom of the page, check the linked price list before you budget from it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best European alternative to Railway?
It depends on what you need from "European". For French ownership and a long track record, Clever Cloud and Scalingo are the strongest picks. For the lowest flat monthly price with EU-only hosting, Hostim starts at €2.50/month for 1 vCPU and 1 GB of RAM. For scale-to-zero and multiple regions, Koyeb. For the deepest feature set, Northflank, though it is a UK company.
Does Railway have an EU region?
Yes. Railway has four deploy regions: US West (California), US East (Virginia), EU West (Amsterdam) and Southeast Asia (Singapore), so you can place workloads in Europe. The open question for most European buyers is ownership rather than location: Railway is a US company, so US legal reach such as the CLOUD Act is the part a data protection officer will ask about. Platforms owned and operated inside the EU avoid that discussion.
Why do Railway bills grow over time?
Railway meters resources per minute on top of the plan fee, at published rates of $20 per vCPU-month, $10 per GB of RAM per month, $0.15 per GB-month of volume storage and $0.05 per GB of egress. The plan fee is $5/month on Hobby and $20/month per workspace on Pro. Nothing is hidden, but the total moves with traffic, so a service that grows quietly raises the bill quietly.
Which European Railway alternative is cheapest for one small app?
Hostim, at €2.50/month for a 1 vCPU / 1 GB container with a free 256 MB PostgreSQL attached. Self-hosting Coolify on a Hetzner CX23 costs €5.99/month but runs unlimited apps on that machine, so it becomes cheaper per app once you host several. Scalingo starts at €7.20/month for 256 MB and Clever Cloud at about €6/month for a nano instance.
Can I move a Railway project to a European platform without rewriting it?
Usually yes, if the app already runs in a container. Every platform in this list accepts a Dockerfile or a prebuilt image. The parts that need work are the managed services: you recreate the PostgreSQL, MySQL or Redis instance on the new platform, restore a dump, and copy the environment variables across. Hostim additionally imports a docker-compose.yml and creates the apps, databases and volumes from it.
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