DigitalOcean vs Google Cloud comparison

DigitalOcean and Google are both solutions in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category. DigitalOcean is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.8, while Google is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.4. DigitalOcean holds a 2.2% mindshare in ISI, compared to Google’s 8.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of DigitalOcean users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Google users who would recommend it.

DigitalOcean

Read 12 DigitalOcean reviews

1,692 Views
1,674 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Google Cloud

Read 74 Google Cloud reviews

6,833 Views
4,961 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

DigitalOcean

Google Cloud

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

DigitalOcean and Google Cloud compete as cloud service providers. DigitalOcean is preferred for its pricing and support, while Google Cloud surpasses it with comprehensive features valued by enterprises.

Features: DigitalOcean offers simplicity, scalability, and a developer-centric approach, enhancing application deployment. Google Cloud provides advanced machine learning capabilities, extensive data analytics tools, and a wide network of global data centers for complex operations.

Room for Improvement: DigitalOcean may enhance its network capabilities, expand advanced feature sets, and improve integration options for larger environments. Google Cloud could simplify its pricing structure, improve support for smaller businesses, and enhance the user-friendliness of its advanced tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: DigitalOcean provides a straightforward deployment process with clear documentation, aiming at startups. Google Cloud offers intricate deployment models with comprehensive professional services for enterprise IT environments.

Pricing and ROI: DigitalOcean presents lower setup costs and predictable billing, appealing to budget-conscious small businesses. In contrast, Google Cloud, with higher initial costs, offers superior ROI through extensive features, suitable for long-term infrastructure growth.

To learn more, read our detailed DigitalOcean vs. Google Cloud Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

DigitalOcean vs. Google Cloud

March 2025

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Helped 842,161 peers since 2012

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

DigitalOcean

Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

13th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Google Cloud

Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

5th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

PaaS Clouds (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of DigitalOcean is 2.2%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud is 8.4%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

Featured Reviews

Michael Olayemi

Senior Software Engineer at Checkit

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.

Read full review

RaidHammouri

Presales Engineer at 2P - Perfect Presentation

Monitoring solution enhances cost efficiency with good internal tools

In terms of Google services, providing more hypervisors would be beneficial. Currently, in my region, they don't offer many services as they have just started. They have some local instances, yet improvements are needed in the tools and offers provided to customers. I currently only use, for example, a native hybrid. VMware is not available, and other hypervisors are still not there. They need to wait on that.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The user interface is nice, and it is very easy to use. Anyone can use it."

"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 solution is very stable."

"The solution is easy to set up."

"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 customer support team are very responsive."

"The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well."

"I like Kubernetes integration."

More DigitalOcean pros

"The solution is stable and reliable."

"There is no downtime. It is very reliable."

"It's easy to deploy Google Cloud."

"The solution has improved our web apps so that we can have a canary deployment. GCP also helps us upload new features and changes to our software without impacting a lot of users with the network. The AI features have improved the software as well."

"Good storage and ease of access."

"What I like most about Google Cloud is its stability. I also like that its GUI works fine for my company."

"We can increase the storage as we need."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

More Google Cloud pros

Cons

"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 an automation feature added to send emails out using the open-source solution."

"We found the solution to be a bit expensive."

"I would like to see improvements to the logging and user interface. The verification process could be more streamlined."

"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."

"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 platform could enhance its features, particularly for ETL processes. Additionally, more integration features would be highly beneficial."

More DigitalOcean cons

"I would like to see some improvement in the accessibility features of this solution."

"The price of the solution could be more transparent."

"My only concern is that a number of the offerings are built on their own proprietary technologies which means means that, with respect to the offerings in Google Cloud, it's difficult to have a path to migrate to other cloud providers."

"Currently, in my region, they don't offer many services as they have just started. They need to wait on that."

"Security features could be improved."

"The UI is beautiful but not easy to use, and also a little slow. Anything that you click is slow to load. It is also not easy to find something. I do not find the left-hand side menu good. We have a lot of options mixed there and we need the best way to deploy cloud resources. I prefer Azure ARM templates since their JSON files are easy to manipulate and integrate with other tools."

"It is complex to set up."

"They could integrate artificial intelligence into the applications."

More Google Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The pricing is moderate and reasonable for a mid-tier cloud platform."

"The tool's pricing is cheap."

"The pricing is cheap."

"There is no licensing fee but there is a subscription cost based on how much RAM and storage you require."

"The solution provides the cheapest cloud in comparison to the other cloud solutions."

"The program is cheaper than others."

"I would rate DigitalOcean's pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive."

More DigitalOcean pricing and cost advice

"We use the NGO version so the cloud reasonably priced at $2 to $3 per month."

"The licensing cost is based on the capacity we use."

"We approached Google Cloud with certain cost assumptions but were surprised to find that our actual expenses were higher than expected. Initially, we had anticipated spending a set amount on the solution, but in reality, we ended up spending more than that. It would be helpful to have greater transparency and educational documentation on the cost-related aspects of Google Cloud."

"I don't pay for the license. For me, it's completely free."

"Licensing fees are paid monthly."

"For commercial purposes, users need to pay for the products they use on a workload basis, not a license basis. There are two pricing models: fixed monthly and pay-as-you-go. In the pay-as-you-go model, users pay for the resources they use, while in the fixed monthly model, they have 24/7 access to resources for a set monthly fee."

"Google Cloud is quite expensive, and I rate it at seven out of ten."

"It is not easy to calculate the price of the solution from the pricing table since they are not standard rates. However, I find the solution’s prices to be fair and reasonable."

More Google Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

51%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

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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...

See all answers

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...

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What do you like most about Google Cloud?

Google Cloud is perceived as a cost-effective and user-friendly option, especially compared to AWS. The current affordability and ease of use make it suitable for medium-sized companies. While the ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Cloud?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Google Cloud?

My platform offers a monitoring solution for the virtual machines hosted in GCP. GCP is one of the firms that I work with. For customers who use GCP as an infrastructure service, software as a serv...

See all answers

Comparisons

Google Firebase vs DigitalOcean

Compared 37% of the time

Amazon AWS vs DigitalOcean

Compared 17% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs DigitalOcean

Compared 13% of the time

Alibaba Cloud vs DigitalOcean

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs DigitalOcean

Compared 7% of the time

More DigitalOcean Competitors

Alibaba Cloud vs Google Cloud

Compared 31% of the time

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Google Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Google Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Google Cloud

Compared 11% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Google Cloud

Compared 9% of the time

More Google Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

DigitalOcean

March 2025

Download DigitalOcean product report

Buyer's Guide

Google Cloud

March 2025

Download Google Cloud product report

Also Known As

Digital Ocean

No data available

Overview

DigitalOcean has the fastest and most convenient cloud technology to help you easily and more efficiently manage your infrastructure so you can get back to coding. We provide all of our users with high-performance SSD Hard Drives, a flexible API, and the ability to select the nearest data center location.

DigitalOcean

Google Cloud is an Infrastructure as a Service Cloud (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that provides infrastructure tools and services for building applications on top of a public cloud computing platform. As one of the leading global infrastructures, this product allows users to securely manage enterprise data, receive valuable insights, and store documents. Google Cloud provides its various services through tools and services for data warehousing, security key enforcement, application programming interface (API) management, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).

The use cases of Google Cloud can be divided into four main categories:

Big data
Compute
Services
Storage

The solution is utilized by organizations of all sizes and industries, as it is suitable for the following purposes:

Running and building applications: Google Cloud lets businesses run and build their applications anywhere because of its commitment to open-source, hybrid, and multi-cloud. This can accelerate development time as businesses avoid vendor lock-in.
Data insight: Google Cloud provides companies with advanced ML and analytics for their data. This can facilitate business decisions and improve work processes, as every team member can have access to data reports via this solution.
Security: Utilizing Google's technology, this solution helps users protect and defend their data and applications against threats and harmful activities.
Team collaboration: Google Cloud offers companies advanced collaboration features. They can integrate email, chat, video calling, and document collaboration all in one place when using this platform.

Google Cloud Features

Google Cloud offers multiple features for its clients. Some of these include:

Big data features: The solution offers full big data services through tools such as BigQuery and Google Cloud Dataflow. These tools allow users to process large data queries as well as create, monitor, and receive reports from data processing pipelines.
Containers: The solution offers containers, which allow users to speed up deployment and scale applications.
Cloud debugger: This feature allows users to debug code during the production process. In this way, businesses are able to locate issues early in the code and fix them before deploying the application.
Cloud save: This feature provides the ability to synchronize cloud-stored data across all devices an organization is supporting. Through it, users can save and retrieve information and maintain all data copies up to date.
Cloud trace: This Google Cloud feature allows users to detect the reasons for performance bottlenecks and fix the issues. It also provides users with information on the time their product takes to process certain requests, allowing them to follow performance more closely.
Hosting features: The solution offers two hosting options. App Engine is the PaaS of Google Cloud and Computes Engine is their IaaS.
Load balancing: This feature balances the traffic of multiple compute instances across various geographic regions.
Maintenance: Users receive frequent insight into the performance of their applications and through automations, Google Cloud lets them know of any issues that need to be fixed.

Google Cloud Benefits

Google Cloud brings various benefits to its users. Some of these include the following:

The pricing model of Google Cloud allows users to pay only for the selected features and tools they wish to use, which saves their organizations money.
Users can rely on accelerated content delivery through Google Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Google Cloud offers a wide variety of tools and libraries, which assist users in the development of cloud applications.
The tool has an advanced admin control that allows users to easily add or remove new users and maintain the security of business platforms.
Google Cloud offers consulting services whereby experts provide assistance with cloud strategy development.
The platform is updated on a frequent basis, which can increase companies' productivity through consistent innovations.
Google Cloud offers remote access from anywhere at all times via Google's web applications.
The solution reduces the risks of data breaches as it offers minimal storage of offline data.
Users can expect support not only from the platform but from the growing online community as well, where their questions can be answered in a timely manner.
The product provides detailed documentation for its clients, allowing them to benefit from tutorials and other samples, in order to learn to work with it in the most efficient way.

Reviews from Real Users

Isuru P., an assistant vice president at a tech services company, likes Google Cloud because it is easy to deploy next-generation applications using it.

An IT solutions consultant at a tech services company rates Google Cloud highly because they find the solution stable with a good user experience and a straightforward setup.

Google

Sample Customers

jQuery Foundation, Pertino, TaskRabbit, Compose, InfluxDB, The Able Few

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

DigitalOcean vs. Google Cloud

March 2025

Free Report: DigitalOcean vs. Google Cloud

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