Gagarin vs Render
Render has five regions, a free tier, preview environments and cheaper compute at the same size. Gagarin has free traffic, cheaper disk, and deletes that wait for a person.
Render and Gagarin both run your containers, give them addresses and look after their databases. This post lists the differences we could check on Render's own pages, on 22 October 2026, and says where Render is the better pick. Every figure links to the page it came from, in the list at the end.
The short version
Pick Render if you need regions outside Europe, horizontal scaling, preview environments, a free tier, or builds straight from a git push. At the same size, Render's compute also costs less than Gagarin's.
Pick Gagarin if you serve a lot of traffic, keep data on disk, want the network policy and the secrets to come from one graph, or let a coding agent deploy and want deletes to wait for you.
Where Render is the better pick today
Regions. Render runs in five: Oregon, Ohio and Virginia in the US, Frankfurt, and Singapore. Gagarin runs in one, Paris.
Scaling out. Render's Pro workspace adds horizontal autoscaling. Gagarin runs one replica per service.
Compute at the same size. A Render instance with 1 CPU and 2 GB costs $25 a month. Gagarin's size m, 1 vCPU and 2 GB, costs $30.66. A 512 MB Render instance costs $7 a month.
A free tier. Render has free web services, with limits: they spin down after 15 minutes without traffic, a workspace gets 750 free instance hours a month, and free Postgres databases expire after 30 days. Render says not to use free instances in production. Gagarin has no free tier, on purpose. A new account gets $5 and no card is asked for until it runs low.
Builds and previews. Render builds and redeploys a service when you push to
its branch, and its workspaces include preview environments. Gagarin doesn't
build images: your docker or your CI does, and then gg ship or gg deploy
runs it. We explain why in what we will never build.
A contractual SLA. Render's Enterprise plan includes uptime SLAs. Gagarin offers none today.
Where Gagarin is different
Traffic is free. Render's Hobby workspace includes 5 GB of bandwidth a month and Pro includes 25 GB, then $0.15 per GB. Gagarin charges nothing for traffic.
Disk is cheaper, and doesn't block a deploy. Render charges $0.25 per GB a month for a persistent disk, and its docs say a service with a disk can't scale to multiple instances and loses zero-downtime deploys. Gagarin charges $0.15 per GB. It runs one replica per service either way, so the scaling point doesn't apply here.
The graph is the policy. On Gagarin a service reaches only what it declares
with gg deps add, and declaring a database hands the service its credentials.
The graph in the console is the firewall and the secrets map at once.
Deletes wait for a person. Destroying a service, taking an address off the internet, removing a route and transferring a project all stop and email the owner a button. Gagarin's API enforces this, whatever client asked.
The rest of the box. Alerts on one switch in the console, nightly backups
kept fourteen days, project memory for your agent, and gg eject to leave with
your Kubernetes objects. The full list is on
what's in the box. We have not compared each of these
against Render's equivalents here.
Both have an MCP server
Render's MCP server can create web services, static sites, cron jobs, Postgres and Key Value instances, trigger deploys, read logs and metrics, and run read-only SQL. Its docs say it does not delete: for that you use the dashboard or the API.
Gagarin's MCP server, at mcp.gagarin.cloud/mcp, can also destroy things, and
each destroy waits for the owner to approve it by email. So an agent can drive
either platform. On Render, deleting is outside the agent's reach. On Gagarin,
deleting is in reach and gated by you.
The same workload, priced
Render's plans charge a workspace fee plus compute: Hobby is $0 a month, Pro $25, Scale $499. Gagarin has no workspace fee.
| Workload | Render (Hobby) | Gagarin |
|---|---|---|
| 1 CPU and 2 GB, all month | $25 | size m at $0.042 an hour = $30.66 |
| 20 GB disk | 20 × $0.25 = $5.00 | 20 × $0.15 = $3.00 |
| 100 GB of egress | (100 − 5) × $0.15 = $14.25 | $0 |
| 100 GB of egress, on Pro | (100 − 25) × $0.15 = $11.25, plus the $25 workspace | $0 |
For one 1 CPU, 2 GB service with little traffic, Render costs $5.66 a month less. Each GB of egress past the 5 included costs $0.15 on Hobby, so past about 43 GB a month Gagarin costs less. A disk moves that point lower. Put your own numbers in before you decide.
Who should pick which
If you need US or Asian regions, autoscaling, preview environments or a free tier, Render fits better today.
If you run a few services in Europe with data on disk and real traffic, and let an agent do the deploying, Gagarin is built for that. The quickest way to see is to paste one sentence into your coding agent and let it deploy: start at gagarin.cloud.