Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Packer VS Railway

Compare Packer VS Railway and see what are their differences

Packer logo Packer

Packer is an open-source software for creating identical machine images from a single source configuration.

Railway logo Railway

Made for any language, for projects big and small.
  • Packer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-15
  • Railway Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-02

Packer videos

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Railway videos

The Railway Review to the IET

More videos:

  • Review - The Railway Review To The Electrostars
  • Review - The Railway Review To The Class 455

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Packer and Railway)
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
22 22%
78% 78
Continuous Integration And Delivery
Cloud Computing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Packer and Railway

Packer Reviews

Introduction to Top Open Source Virtualization Tools
Packer is notably light, high performing, and operates on every major operating system. It assembles and configures all the necessary components for a virtual machine then creates images that run on multiple platforms. Packer doesn’t replace configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef; as a matter of fact, when creating images, Packer can utilize tools like Puppet or...

Railway Reviews

5 Free Heroku Alternatives with Free Plan for Developers
There is a pay as you go model available if you want to scale your apps. Just sign up for the trial account (free tier) and then deploy your small apps. It is perfect for that and the best part is that it is now offering a Heroku importer. Migrating from Heroku to Railway will not be a problem. It can effectively pull the variables that you are using in your app so the whole...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Railway seems to be a lot more popular than Packer. While we know about 225 links to Railway, we've tracked only 9 mentions of Packer. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Packer mentions (9)

  • Failed to connect to the host via SSH on Ubuntu 22.04
    If you have just upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, and you suddenly experience either errors when trying to ssh into hosts, or when running ansible or again when running the ansible provisioner building a packer image, this is probably going to be useful for you. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Create a minimalist OS using Docker Containers and Hashicorp Packer
    I am already using Hashicorp Packer at work and for personal projects and I wanted to test This idea out by wrapping it a single Packer Template file. This reduces the level of maintaining a lot of small scripts, Dockerfiles and configurations and the user can simply trigger a couple of Commands to get a minimalist OS at the end of the process. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
    And while it is a slight increase in complexity, it can be an overall net gain in functionality, configurability and reliability. Much like Packer is far more reliable and practical than manually making VM images sitting in front of a terminal, even though making the initial configuration takes some time. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Customized Ubuntu Images using Packer + QEMU + Cloud-Init & UEFI bootloading
    Hashicorp Packer provides a nice wrapper / abstraction over the QEMU in order to boot the image and use it to set it up on first-boot. Instead of writing really long commands in order to boot up the image using QEMU, Packer provided a nice Configuration Template in a more Readable fashion. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • The journey of sharing a wired USB printer over the network
    Packer seemed like the perfect tool for the job. I have never used it before and wanted to get familiar with the tool. It doesn't come with ARM support out of the box, but there are two community projects to fill that niche. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
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Railway mentions (225)

  • Good alternatives to Heroku
    Railway - Language agnostic and for projects big and small. Never used but it seems very easy to use like Heroku. - Source: dev.to / 14 days ago
  • How to make a Lichess bot in Python
    Next let’s get hosting! Go to https://railway.app/ and create an account. Now create a new project and select your repo:. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Hosting a Flask web server on Railway [FREE]
    Welcome 👋 to this blog. Do you want to host or deploy your flask web server on the production completely free and want to access different production features like configuring environment variables, choose a different version of frameworks or language, etc.? Then you are in the correct place. In this blog, I'll show how to deploy/host a Flask web server in Railway. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • How to Deploy your fullstack website - My approach
    Railway is a platform that provides hosting solutions for full-stack web applications. It offers developers an easy way to deploy and manage their applications without worrying about infrastructure management. It also supports various programming languages, frameworks, and databases, making it suitable for a wide range of projects. It also simple to use and it also has a free tier which is has a little benefit... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • The 2024 Web Hosting Report
    Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a term that captures tools built for developers to use where they don’t need devops engineers to deploy to the cloud. Heroku was the “category-defining” product here, and modern successors include Vercel, Render, Railway, Replit, platform.sh, Aptible, Northflank, and more. We have to say that there are some amazing products in this category. Developer Experience is at a premium! - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Packer and Railway, you can also consider the following products

Terraform - Tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

Render - Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

Fly.io - Edge computing is the new frontier.

Puppet Enterprise - Get started with Puppet Enterprise, or upgrade or expand.

Vercel - Vercel is the platform for frontend developers, providing the speed and reliability innovators need to create at the moment of inspiration.