Compare
How SmolClouds compares.
Other platforms can host small apps, and several do it well. These pages describe what each one is built for so you can pick on the merits.
SmolClouds vs Railway
Railway is a general-purpose app platform with a strong developer experience. SmolClouds is narrower on purpose: many small apps that are idle most of the time.
Read →SmolClouds vs Fly.io
Fly.io runs Firecracker microVMs too, with fine-grained control over regions and machine lifecycle. SmolClouds wraps a narrower slice of that in an app-shaped product.
Read →SmolClouds vs Vercel
Vercel is built around frontend frameworks and a serverless function model. SmolClouds runs whole long-lived applications that happen to sleep.
Read →Comparison
Where SmolClouds is different.
Other platforms can host these apps — several of them well. The difference is what the platform is optimised for: hundreds of mostly-idle apps deployed by agents.
| Capability | SmolClouds | Traditional cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Agent-first deploy | ✓ | Varies |
| Scale-to-zero | ✓ | Varies |
| App-based UX | ✓ | Usually infra-based |
| microVM isolation | ✓ | Varies |
| Optimized for hundreds of tiny apps | ✓ | General purpose |
| GitHub deploy | ✓ | ✓ |