On 8 October 2026 Railway published "Introducing Railway Authentication via identity-aware proxy". The feature is a login gate: an admin flips a toggle at the environment or service level and, in Railway's words, users "can gate services not intended for public view like staging previews, internal tools, and other self-hosted services behind a Railway login instead of configuring authentication manually". Flip it on for a staging environment and "any environment forked from the staging environment would now also default this setting to On".
It is a genuinely useful thing. The post is also precise about who gets it: "Today we're making Railway Authentication via identity-aware proxy available to enterprise users", and, at the end, "you'll need to be on the $5,000/mo committed spent tier". The same paragraph lists what that tier already carries: "Enterprise users on committed spend tiers already get access to features like SSO, RBAC, audit logs, and higher resource limits."
So the thing to notice is not the feature. It is where on the price ladder a platform decided that keeping a staging URL private belongs.
What "keeping a staging URL private" actually is
Every staging environment has a URL, and the URL is the whole problem. It has to be reachable, or nobody can review the work; it must not be reachable by everyone, or search engines index it, customers find it, and a half-finished checkout page becomes a support ticket. The ways to close that gap have been the same for twenty years: HTTP basic auth in front of the site, an allow-list, a login your app already has, or a proxy that checks identity before the request reaches the app at all.
Railway's framing of the alternative is fair: "the alternative would be wiring up Okta or another OIDC provider inside every single app, or putting something like Cloudflare Access in front of everything". An identity-aware proxy at the platform level is the cleanest version of that idea, because the app does not have to know it is being protected. It is the kind of thing that, once you have had it, you do not want to configure by hand again.
Which is exactly why the tier placement matters. Environment hygiene — a staging copy, a private URL for it, a way to promote from it — is not an enterprise concern. A two-person agency with a client who must not see the redesign until Friday has the same problem as a bank. Pricing the fix at a committed-spend tier says the platform regards it as a compliance feature for large teams, and the post says as much: "The most common use case is for team compliance."
Where staging itself sits, by tier
Here is the only comparison this post makes, and it is about tier placement, not capability.
On DeployBase, a staging environment — a clone of the live site with its own preview URL, which you can sync back to production — is included from the Business plan upwards; Starter and Pro do not have it. That is the whole of the gate: no committed spend, no enterprise agreement, a plan tier. SSH access and Git deployment start one tier lower, at Pro.
What DeployBase does not have, and this post is not going to imply otherwise, is a platform-level login gate on that preview URL. A DeployBase staging URL is a plain URL. Keeping it private is your job: your application's own login, an .htaccess rule on a PHP site, a noindex header, or simply not sharing it. We checked the platform code before writing that sentence, because the easy thing to do here would be to let a comparison imply a feature by omission, and that is how comparison pages go wrong.
On Railway, by their post, the identity-aware proxy that does this job automatically is available to enterprise users on the committed-spend tier. What Railway charges for staging environments themselves on lower tiers, and what else those tiers include, is not something this post has read at primary, so it is not something this post will characterise.
The pattern, and why it is worth naming
The platform-as-a-service middle has a habit of moving basic operational hygiene up the ladder: audit logs, SSO, role-based access, and now the ability to put a password in front of a staging site. Each of those is reasonable on its own; collectively they draw a line between "developer convenience" and "enterprise control" at a place that does not match how small teams actually work. A small team does not need SSO. It does need the client not to see the staging site.
If you are evaluating platforms for a team that is not on a committed-spend contract, the question to ask is not "does the platform have a login gate" but "at what tier does keeping my staging URL private stop being my problem". On Railway, per the 8 October post, that tier is enterprise. On DeployBase, it never stops being your problem, and the staging environment itself starts at Business. Those are different answers to different questions, and a buyer is better off with both stated plainly than with either one dressed up as the other.