AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs. DigitalOcean

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the platform-as-a-service offering provided by Amazon and designed to leverage AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
$35
per month
DigitalOcean
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
$5
Starting Price Per Month
Pricing
AWS Elastic BeanstalkDigitalOcean
Editions & Modules
No Charge
$0
Users pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2, S3 buckets, etc.) used to store and run the application.
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS Elastic BeanstalkDigitalOcean
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AWS Elastic BeanstalkDigitalOcean
Considered Both Products
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk
In some of the other companies that I've worked in, I've had the opportunity to work with the above softwares where the structure and architecture of the services was much complicated but the above softwares were able to handle it with more ease and efficiency. The complex …
Chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk
The AWS platform provides a great deal of configurability that is abstracted and provided very well through AWS Elastic Beanstalk. This is the main reason for choosing Elastic Beanstalk over competing services. Another reason for selecting AWS Beanstalk was vendor …
DigitalOcean

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
AWS Elastic BeanstalkDigitalOcean
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
8.9
29 Ratings
10% above category average
DigitalOcean
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces9.019 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability8.529 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead9.028 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability8.423 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control8.928 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration9.028 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation8.428 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication9.029 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification8.928 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery9.526 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes9.027 Ratings00 Ratings
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
-
Ratings
DigitalOcean
8.5
33 Ratings
4% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings9.528 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings9.029 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings7.021 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings10.027 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings10.032 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.531 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings9.031 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings9.029 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings5.03 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AWS Elastic BeanstalkDigitalOcean
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.8 out of 10
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AWS Elastic BeanstalkDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(29 ratings)
8.5
(33 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.9
(2 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(10 ratings)
8.0
(7 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(12 ratings)
8.8
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
AWS Elastic BeanstalkDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
I have been using AWS Elastic Beanstalk for more than 5 years, and it has made our life so easy and hassle-free. Here are some scenarios where it excels -
  • I have been using different AWS services like EC2, S3, Cloudfront, Serverless, etc. And Elastic Beanstalk makes our lives easier by tieing each service together and making the deployment a smooth process.
  • N number of integrations with different CI/CD pipelines make this most engineer's favourite service.
  • Scalability & Security comes with the service, which makes it the absolute perfect product for your business.
Personally, I haven't found any situations where it's not appropriate for the use cases it can be used. The pricing is also very cost-effective.
Read full review
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is perfect for hosting client websites, running marketing tools, and managing media storage with Spaces and CDN. The use of Droplets to quickly launch landing pages or WordPress sites for campaigns is a Godsend. It’s great for fast, cheap, and scalable solutions. But for complex microservices or projects needing strict compliance (like HIPAA), DigitalOcean may not always be the best fit, but that depends heavily on your project.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Getting a project set up using the console or CLI is easy compared to other [computing] platforms.
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports a variety of programming languages so teams can experiment with different frameworks but still use the same compute platform for rapid prototyping.
  • Common application architectures can be referenced as patterns during project [setup].
  • Multiple environments can be deployed for an application giving more flexibility for experimentation.
Read full review
DigitalOcean
  • DigitalOcean provides some of the best cost-to-value services available
  • The DigitalOcean cloud console is very intuitive and easy to navigate
  • DigitalOcean has great support for Docker and other dev ops tools like Terraform.
  • DigitalOcean iterates quickly and provides cutting edge features for organizations that want to keep up with the latest and greatest dev ops tooling
  • DigitalOcean has a great developer community and numerous support docs/tutorials
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Limited to the frameworks and configurations that AWS supports. There is no native way to use Elastic Beanstalk to deploy a Go application behind Nginx, for example.
  • It's not always clear what's changed on an underlying system when AWS updates an EB stack; the new version is announced, but AWS does not say what specifically changed in the underlying configuration. This can have unintended consequences and result in additional work in order to figure out what changes were made.
Read full review
DigitalOcean
  • Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
  • While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
  • There are no regions available on South America.
  • They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
As our technology grows, it makes more sense to individually provision each server rather than have it done via beanstalk. There are several reasons to do so, which I cannot explain without further diving into the architecture itself, but I can tell you this. With automation, you also loose the flexibility to morph the system for your specific needs. So if you expect that in future you need more customization to your deployment process, then there is a good chance that you might try to do things individually rather than use an automation like beanstalk.
Read full review
DigitalOcean
I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
The overall usability is good enough, as far as the scaling, interactive UI and logging system is concerned, could do a lot better when it comes to the efficiency, in case of complicated node logics and complicated node architectures. It can have better software compatibility and can try to support collaboration with more softwares
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DigitalOcean
I honestly can't think of an easier way to set up and maintain your own server. Being able to set up a server in minutes and have fully control is awesome. The UX is incredibly intuitive for first-time users as well so there's no reason to be intimidated when it comes to giving DigitalOcean a shot.
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Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
Read full review
Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
Read full review
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
As I described earlier it has been really cost effective and really easy for fellow developers who don't want to waste weeks and weeks into learning and manually deploying stuff which basically takes month to create and go live with the Minimal viable product (MVP). With AWS Beanstalk within a week a developer can go live with the Minimal viable product easily.
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DigitalOcean
They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces.
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Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
- Do as many experiments as you can before you commit on using beanstalk or other AWS features. - Keep future state in mind. Think through what comes next, and if that is technically possible to do so. - Always factor in cost in terms of scaling. - We learned a valuable lesson when we wanted to go multi-region, because then we realized many things needs to change in code. So if you plan on using this a lot, factor multiple regions.
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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
We also use Heroku and it is a great platform for smaller projects and light Node.js services, but we have found that in terms of cost, the Elastic Beanstalk option is more affordable for the projects that we undertake. The fact that it sits inside of the greater AWS Cloud offering also compels us to use it, since integration is simpler. We have also evaluated Microsoft Azure and gave up trying to get an extremely basic implementation up and running after a few days of struggling with its mediocre user interface and constant issues with documentation being outdated. The authentication model is also badly broken and trying to manage resources is a pain. One cannot compare Azure with anything that Amazon has created in the cloud space since Azure really isn't a mature platform and we are always left wanting when we have to interface with it.
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DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is an inexpensive product as compared to other products available in the market. The UI is easy and the beginner can also understand the UI with the step by step guide. It provides a lot of custom features and the user needs to pay only for what they are using. Amazon has a complex UI and is on the expensive side. DigitalOcean is simple to use and is easily manageable and the servers can easily be set up without additional cost and such.
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Scalability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • till now we had not Calculated ROI as the project is still evolving and we had to keep on changing the environment implementation
  • it meets our purpose of quick deployment as compared to on-premises deployment
  • till now we look good as we also controlled our expenses which increased suddenly in the middle of deployment activity
Read full review
DigitalOcean
  • Positive - Elastic computer instances make it possible to pay for only for what you need.
  • Positive - Competitive pricing - some of the products that DigitalOcean offers are much cheaper than those offered by competitors.
  • Negative - Having to go to other cloud computing platforms for more specific, advanced services like Computer Vision optimized services, GPU cloud compute instances, etc...
Read full review
ScreenShots