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Amazon AWS vs DigitalOcean comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon AWS
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
254
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (2nd)
DigitalOcean
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
13th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 18.8%, down from 25.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DigitalOcean is 2.2%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Arun Srivastav - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows for automatic scaling of resources and provides built-in firewalls and security features, eliminating the need for external security solutions
One thing that's a bit different is that we're still accustomed to speaking to someone directly. AWS doesn't offer that kind of support. It's only through bots. You're speaking to chatbots, and that can sometimes be frustrating because there's no person on the other side. AI is not a substitute for a person. AWS marketplace is very strong, but somehow AWS doesn't promote it much. They have a huge customer base across the globe, and if products were launched in their marketplace, they could sell like hotcakes. They should improve their marketplace and promote the same product across the globe. They can take a cut, but they should promote it. That's something they don't do very much. So, AWS should promote its marketplace software. The company should promote it aggressively. Currently, they keep it very subtle. If you ask for it, they'll help you out. But they don't seem to advertise, "You're building a product on our platform? Why don't you sell it in our marketplace?" Improvement in AI: AWS is a little behind Microsoft Azure in terms of AI. AWS is still getting there, but the kind of examples and help files available in Azure for AI are much better. So AWS still needs to work on its AI functionality.
Michael Olayemi - PeerSpot reviewer
Enjoy cost-effective hosting with flexible deployment and room for payment model improvement
I use only one feature, which is the droplet, and it has been satisfactory. The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well. I also have total freedom over what I use, and I have a better user interface and documentation compared to Oracle.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It streamlines tasks like table creation and data loading into Redshift, making the process more efficient and manageable."
"Cloud Trail API log storage."
"Amazon AWS is good in terms of deployment and user experience. Their certificate management and load balancer are also good features."
"The availability is good, you can get any service you need immediately."
"The monitoring is the most valuable aspect of the product."
"Its scalability is powerful. We are providing services for people to schedule an appointment for the vaccine and for COVID testing to see whether they are positive or negative. In one night, we can have 240,000 people in one minute to schedule an appointment. I am very happy with the scalability."
"It is easy to spin up resources."
"The most valuable features of Amazon AWS are the EC2 instance for web applications with CDN Networks."
"The solution is easy to set up."
"The solution is very stable."
"The customer support team are very responsive."
"The solution's app platform simplifies many tasks a developer must handle manually. For instance, when serving a website, the app platform uses NGINX to manage the app's serving, caching, and automatic rerunning in case of failure."
"It's been a good choice for us for some services. We generally have several deployments. For instance, for some static Angular applications, it was a clear choice to run them on Cloudflare, which performs very well in this context. All the assets go on DigitalOcean."
"The most valuable feature is the ease with which you can create a phishing server and use it."
"The user interface is nice, and it is very easy to use. Anyone can use it."
"DigitalOcean is much cheaper compared to Oracle, Amazon, and Google, making it a better option for a startup."
 

Cons

"I think Amazon could improve some of the security or fine-grained access for metadata and many other things."
"I'd like to see integration with MySQL."
"Some services which were easy to use through shortcuts are now more complicated to use."
"Amazon needs to develop better tools for troubleshooting network traffic, application insights, performance, and even some aspects of integration mapping. I'm hoping AWS implements something like Azure's Network Watcher and a log analytics solution where a can pull logs from various services and present them in a single dashboard. I want to summarize the performance and usage of every service and application."
"Some of their well-listed services are not super configurable."
"There's not much room for improvement but that being said, they can improve the overall process of the overall product features and backend."
"Their support can be improved. In some cases, their support is not as proficient as it can be. They should be quicker at getting back."
"Some features may be better in Azure or some other portal. AWS could add some of those features."
"We found the solution to be a bit expensive."
"DigitalOcean could offer a pay-as-you-go model similar to AWS, where I would pay for what I use rather than having fixed payments."
"I think something needs to be done in terms of technical support."
"I would like to see improvements to the logging and user interface. The verification process could be more streamlined."
"The deployment time can be improved in DigitalOcean. While deployment is automated, the process can take a minute and a half to five minutes, and for more complex applications, this time increases even further. This is not optimal for applications that receive frequent updates."
"The issue with DigitalOcean is primarily the latency. So, when you have a mixed system with some components staying here, and then we encounter network latency, it's not optimal. Our"
"Other solutions are proving the monitoring feature, like AWS having GuardDuty and SAP having services for logs and monitoring. DigitalOcean doesn’t have any other benefits."
"DigitalOcean could offer a pay-as-you-go model similar to AWS, where I would pay for what I use rather than having fixed payments."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are happy with the pricing."
"It's paid on a monthly basis and you have to pay for the resources that you use."
"From a cost perspective, Amazon AWS is excellent. You need to pay for a license to use AWS, and the license could be cheaper, but in each of the cases and instances I've used AWS, there has been a good chance to save money."
"Its pricing model is too complex."
"The price for AWS is good."
"Much faster than other solutions at a super low cost."
"The pricing of AWS was attractive for us, so that's something that's okay at least for this transaction-based system. However, we still have some concerns about more data-driven applications or those that involve a lot of heavy uploading and downloading. So our whole data warehouse is still something that would not go into the cloud because of the pricing model."
"We pay a monthly licensing fee. It's below $100 a month."
"This is a pay as you go solution. There is no license and it is usage based."
"I would rate DigitalOcean's pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive."
"The solution provides the cheapest cloud in comparison to the other cloud solutions."
"The pricing is cheap."
"The pricing is moderate and reasonable for a mid-tier cloud platform."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"There is no licensing fee but there is a subscription cost based on how much RAM and storage you require."
"The price of DigitalOcean could be lower. It is expensive. it's higher than other solutions available in the market. We pay approximately $20 to $25 a month to use the solution. The price we pay is for the shared CPU option."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
29%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
8%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...
Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure
We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...
What do you like most about DigitalOcean?
It's been a good choice for us for some services. We generally have several deployments. For instance, for some static Angular applications, it was a clear choice to run them on Cloudflare, which p...
What needs improvement with DigitalOcean?
DigitalOcean could offer a pay-as-you-go model similar to AWS, where I would pay for what I use rather than having fixed payments. It would be beneficial to have more flexibility without fixed paym...
What is your primary use case for DigitalOcean?
I primarily use DigitalOcean to deploy applications. I rent the system from them, where I deploy my web servers and application servers. I use it to host my applications since moving from Oracle. I...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
Digital Ocean
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
jQuery Foundation, Pertino, TaskRabbit, Compose, InfluxDB, The Able Few
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS vs. DigitalOcean and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.