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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 February 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 15.3%, down from 22.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DigitalOcean is 2.1%, 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

"I like that it helps us do everything really fast, and its advanced services."
"It's highly scalable. It's guaranteed 99.99% uptime, and it shows you can scale up or scale out whenever you need more space."
"I am very impressed by the solution's stability."
"The best features are flexibility and cost."
"Amazon AWS is good in terms of deployment and user experience. Their certificate management and load balancer are also good features."
"The stability is magnificent, it's spectacular."
"The solution offers a low footprint. We don't have to come up with a data center ourselves. We basically don't have to own any hardware. We just rent a slice of their platform and we have everything we need."
"We can easily upgrade and downgrade the Instance."
"The user interface is nice, and it is very easy to use. Anyone can use it."
"The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well."
"DigitalOcean is much cheaper compared to Oracle, Amazon, and Google, making it a better option for a startup."
"The most valuable feature is the ease with which you can create a phishing server and use it."
"The solution is easy to set up."
"The customer support team are very responsive."
"The most outstanding aspect of DigitalOcean is its user interface and ease of use. Compared to more complex solutions, such as AWS, DigitalOcean's platform is highly intuitive and user-friendly."
"The technical support services are good."
 

Cons

"I'd like the solution to be more plug-and-play."
"At times we find ourselves a little trapped, with the lack of customization, for what we need."
"The technical support should be better than what is on offer right now."
"It's sometimes a challenge to manage billing on this platform. It takes a lot of labor to generate billing for our customers from the service on the cloud."
"Its price should be lower. The price for in-house usage should be different from production usage."
"Amazon AWS is a very poor product for students. Microsoft Azure is a better solution."
"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of hybrid Kubernetes management."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"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 solution could improve by having integration with GitHub."
"We found the solution to be a bit expensive."
"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"
"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."
"The platform could enhance its features, particularly for ETL processes. Additionally, more integration features would be highly beneficial."
"I would like to see improvements to the logging and user interface. The verification process could be more streamlined."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"When compared to GCP, Google, or Azure, the price could be lower."
"AWS IaaS is a very generic service, which is extremely overpriced.​"
"Billing for cloud services can be difficult at times."
"It can get quite pricey at times."
"It is very expensive, you have to be very cautious."
"The license for Amazon AWS is expensive. I am currently using the free version."
"We have a monthly subscription for Amazon AWS."
"I am using the cheapest option available, which costs $50 per month."
"The program is cheaper than others."
"The pricing is cheap."
"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."
"I would rate DigitalOcean's pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"The solution provides the cheapest cloud in comparison to the other cloud solutions."
"This is a pay as you go solution. There is no license and it is usage based."
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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
30%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
8%
Comms Service Provider
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: January 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.