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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
255
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (2nd)
DigitalOcean
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
14th
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 April 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.6%, down from 22.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DigitalOcean is 2.2%, down from 2.3% 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

"The solution has good speed. It's very fast."
"AWS is constantly growing in features with every new version. It's a good cloud provider with excellent availability. The integration is good, and their security products are interesting. Amazon is always innovating and delivering new products to customers."
"The most valuable features are load balancers, databases, and S3 buckets."
"It's quite stable and scalable. The price is good as well."
"Amazon for DevOps is fantastic. Amazon has fast clouds, and the process and the Dev is very good."
"The ecosystem offered by the product has almost everything."
"Machine learning is a valuable feature."
"It is flexible. It is quite comfortable to use for organizations."
"I like Kubernetes integration."
"The solution is easy to set up."
"The most valuable feature is the ease with which you can create a phishing server and use it."
"The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well."
"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."
"The customer support team are very responsive."
"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 user interface is nice, and it is very easy to use. Anyone can use it."
 

Cons

"It has the technical support features, but they need to be improved. It has lots of users, but they need to be managed accordingly."
"In a future release, I would like to see more support for AI because it is the future."
"I think Amazon could improve some of the security or fine-grained access for metadata and many other things."
"The availability could be better."
"The price could be better. Support for data analytics could be better. I don't see much support for data analytics. They have a lot of support in Azure, but I don't see a lot of innovation on the data analytics side in AWS."
"The cost of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The pricing could be adjusted to provide more advantages versus current on-premise solutions for business applications."
"I think the price can be improved."
"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."
"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 would like to see an automation feature added to send emails out using the open-source solution."
"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."
"I think something needs to be done in terms of technical support."
"The technical support for this solution could be improved."
"I would like to see improvements to the logging and user interface. The verification process could be more streamlined."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS is not an expensive product."
"This solution offers good pricing."
"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."
"The pricing is reasonable. It's not expensive, nor will it be cheap, but the free credits initially given provide leverage for new companies to start their businesses."
"AWS IaaS is a very generic service, which is extremely overpriced.​"
"It's expensive. It costs you an arm and a leg."
"The price can be better."
"I find Amazon AWS very expensive compare to Microsoft Azure."
"This is a pay as you go solution. There is no license and it is usage based."
"There is no licensing fee but there is a subscription cost based on how much RAM and storage you require."
"The pricing is moderate and reasonable for a mid-tier cloud platform."
"I am using the cheapest option available, which costs $50 per month."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"The solution provides the cheapest cloud in comparison to the other cloud solutions."
"The program is cheaper than others."
"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."
report
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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
22%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

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: April 2025.
847,625 professionals have used our research since 2012.