# Keel vs Railway

Railway provides a hosted application platform. Keel provides a similar deployment workflow for AWS resources in your own account. The main differences are infrastructure ownership, service integration, and billing.

## Side by side

| | Keel | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Where your app runs | Your AWS account | Their infrastructure |
| Where your data lives | Your RDS instance, in your VPC | Their platform |
| What you pay | AWS prices, direct | A monthly plan, plus their own usage rates |
| AWS credits and discounts | Apply in full | Can't be used |
| Reaching your existing AWS | It's already there | Over the public internet |
| Access control | Your own IAM roles, MFA required | Their accounts and permissions |
| If you leave | Ordinary AWS, still running | Rebuild somewhere else |

## Your app and data stay in your account

Railway runs your app, your database, and your logs on their infrastructure. Keel puts all three in your own AWS account.

Your data remains under your existing AWS account and agreement. Keel has no hosted service in the request path.

Applications can access existing AWS resources such as S3 buckets, Cognito pools, warehouses, and peered networks.

## Pay AWS, not a platform

Railway charges a monthly plan plus usage. Keel does not add a subscription or usage margin to the AWS bill.

AWS credits, committed-spend agreements, and Savings Plans apply to eligible resources created by Keel.

```bash
keel cost     # what your app will cost, before you build it
```

## Backups and failover, handled

Your database is an RDS instance: automated backups, point-in-time restore, an optional standby that takes over if the primary fails, and a master password AWS generates and rotates without Keel ever holding a copy.

If you stop using Keel, the RDS instance remains a standard resource in your AWS account.

## Room to grow into

Keel includes private networking, per-service IAM, WAF support, environment isolation, and deployment history. These features are configured in your AWS account rather than unlocked through a higher platform tier.

[Get started →](../guide/getting-started) · [Back to comparisons](./)