bex is a Render-compatible platform you run on your own servers. The compatibility is deliberate — it is what makes moving over a copy of your manifest rather than a rewrite — so this page is about where the two genuinely differ, including the places where Render is still the better answer.
Partialbex.yml takes render.yaml's top-level services: and databases: shape, so a Blueprint mostly copies across — but it is not a byte-for-byte superset, and the manifest compiler is where the remaining differences live.
bex mirrors Render on purpose. bex.yml takes render.yaml's shape, the REST and GraphQL surfaces are built against Render's published API spec, and the MCP tools follow Render's own — so moving over is repointing a base URL and copying a manifest, not a rewrite.
Every line above is tracked in a public parity ledger: one row per Render capability across REST, GraphQL, MCP and the dashboard, each cell backed by a pointer to code or to Render's own spec. Where this page and the ledger disagree, the ledger is right.
Some Render features are deliberate non-goals rather than gaps — external log and metric drains, dedicated outbound IPs, platform-scheduled maintenance runs, Workflows, and static-site CDN cache purge. Each one has its reasoning recorded in the ledger.