Comparison
Tensel vs Railway
Choose Railway if you want databases, volumes, cron jobs and workers on the same platform as your app. Railway runs stateful workloads; Tensel deliberately does not.
Choose Tensel if the app itself is stateless HTTP and the deciding constraints are jurisdiction, a bill in euros a French accountant will accept, and a spend limit that cannot be exceeded.
What both do
- Push to deploy from GitHub, with build logs streamed live.
- Builds without a Dockerfile: Railway created Nixpacks, and Tensel builds non-Node languages with it.
- Usage-based pricing on top of a subscription.
- Automatic HTTPS, custom domains, rollback.
- Applications can sleep when idle.
The differences
| Dimension | Tensel | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Operating jurisdiction | French company under EU law; hosted on Scaleway in Paris | US company, subject to US law including the CLOUD Act |
| Where your app runs | One region: Paris. Backups, logs and platform data included | Regions in the US, Europe (Amsterdam) and Asia |
| Billing | Euros, EU VAT handled, Factur-X e-invoices | USD, subscription plus usage |
| Team pricing | Team plan: €49/month, unlimited members, never per seat | Pro: $20 per seat per month, plus usage |
| Spend control | Customer-set hard limit (2× plan by default); at 100% a 24-hour grace applies and its usage is absorbed, not billed | Usage limits with configurable hard cap |
| Managed databases | No managed databases; bring your own via environment variables | Postgres, MySQL, Redis, Mongo as first-class services |
| Workers, cron, volumes | No background workers, cron jobs or volumes; stateless HTTP only | All three: background services, cron schedules, persistent volumes |
| Preview environments | No preview environments | PR environments, on by default on some plans |
| Static sites | Detected automatically, served from a European CDN, never billed | Served from the app container; no separate unmetered static tier |
| Deploy without git | From a folder, in the browser or the CLI | railway up deploys a local directory |
| Invoices | Factur-X e-invoices (EU standard), usage by day and by project | Standard invoices in USD |
| Agents | Eleven agent skills ship in the CLI package; skills hold no credentials; /llms.txt published | MCP server available |
Where Railway is ahead
- Stateful workloads: managed Postgres, Redis, MySQL and Mongo, persistent volumes, cron jobs and background workers in one project.
- PR environments.
- Multi-region deploys, including outside Europe when you want them.
- A template marketplace with hundreds of one-click stacks.
Where Tensel is ahead
- Jurisdiction: a French company, Paris, EU law. Railway's European region is still operated by a US corporation.
- Flat team pricing: €49 with unlimited members against $20 per seat.
- Euros, EU VAT and Factur-X e-invoices.
- A spend limit whose overrun grace is absorbed by the platform, not billed.
- Static sites are detected and served free; the meters never touch them.
- Agent skills that ship in the CLI package and never hold a credential.
The price for a team of five
- Tensel Team
- €49/monthunlimited members, €49 of usage included
- Railway Pro, five members
- $100/month$20 × 5 seats, plus usage
Public prices as checked on 24 August 2026, excluding tax. Dollar amounts depend on the exchange rate and do not include usage.
Frequently asked questions
Railway runs my Postgres. What do I do on Tensel?
Bring a managed database from a European provider and hand its URL to your environment as a secret. Tensel deliberately does not run databases; a stateless platform is simpler to keep reliable. The honest consequence is a second bill, from a second provider.
I use Nixpacks. Does my build carry over?
Very likely. Tensel builds Go, Python, Rust, PHP, Java and Ruby projects with Nixpacks from the same marker files. Node frameworks are detected directly, and a Dockerfile wins when present, the same rule Railway uses.
What about cron jobs and workers?
Tensel does not run them. If your app is a web process plus a worker plus a schedule, Tensel only hosts the web process today. The gap is listed on /product with the other missing pieces.
Comparison built on 24 August 2026 from Railway's public documentation. Spotted something out of date? Write to contact@tensel.eu and we will correct it. Trademarks belong to their owners; Railway is not a partner of or affiliated with Tensel.