Azure App Service vs. DigitalOcean App Platform

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure App Service
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
The Microsoft Azure App Service is a PaaS that enables users to build, deploy, and scale web apps and APIs, a fully managed service with built-in infrastructure maintenance, security patching, and scaling. Includes Azure Web Apps, Azure Mobile Apps, Azure API Apps, allowing developers to use popular frameworks including .NET, .NET Core, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, and Ruby.
$9.49
per month
DigitalOcean App Platform
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
The DigitalOcean App Platform enables developers to build, deploy, and scale apps on what they describe as a simple, fully managed PaaS. Users of the former Nanobox, acquired by DigitalOcean in 2019, have been migrated to the App Platform upon Nanobox's end of life in March 2021.
$5
per month
Pricing
Azure App ServiceDigitalOcean App Platform
Editions & Modules
Shared Environment for dev/test
$9.49
per month
Basic Dedicated environment for dev/test
$54.75
per month
Standard Run production workloads
$73
per month
Premium Enhanced performance and scale
$146
per month
Basic
$5
per month
Professional
$12
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure App ServiceDigitalOcean App Platform
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsFree and Shared (preview) plans are ideal for testing applications in a managed Azure environment. Basic, Standard and Premium plans are for production workloads and run on dedicated Virtual Machine instances. Each instance can support multiple applications and domains.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure App ServiceDigitalOcean App Platform
Considered Both Products
Azure App Service
Chose Azure App Service
AWS CodeDeploy certainly feels powerful; however, to perform some tasks with it will require some scripting experience. Azure App Service provides deployment, scaling, and hosting in a single, managed platform, and it feels easy and very well laid out. It is also dev- and …
Chose Azure App Service
When we chose it, we did so because of its integration with Microsoft applications; now we need to integrate with AI, and Azure doesn't offer a good integration. That is the main reason to change it. It is still great to develop Windows- and Microsoft-based applications, but if …
Chose Azure App Service
AppServices that's easier to manage than its competitors, specially if you have everything in Azure. But also that's the most expensive service when you escalate or start using it for massive data processing. It would be an excellent containers platform if were easier to deal …
Chose Azure App Service
Azure is some what easy to use and we can learn the azure platform easily. And mainly for students they are giving free credits. So by using the credits we can learn or deploy using that credit
Chose Azure App Service
In terms of deploying your apps, Azure App Service provides a solid foundation. You may use either the Azure command-line interface or the Web Portal to administer these apps. As a whole, I find You may easily deploy your apps to Azure App Service to be a really difficult …
Chose Azure App Service
We didn't use other App services because we use Azure as our cloud provider and our first experience was with Azure App Service
Chose Azure App Service
Azure has many data center, their services are more reliable. Azure has way more features than both linode and digitalocean. If someone wants a complete reliable service, he/she must go to Azure instead of linode and digitalocean because even though azure charges more, it is …
Chose Azure App Service
  1. We selected Azure over Linode because of the CI/CD integration with DevOps.
  2. Azure has integration with docker containers.
  3. Azure has intehration with Sprint Planning.
Chose Azure App Service
Azure App Service will give you a very solid and strong platform to deploy your applications. It gives you great interfaces to manage those applications either through a Web Portal or the Azure command-line interface. However, I consider Azure overall to be very complex and …
DigitalOcean App Platform
Chose DigitalOcean App Platform
It can help you to host your virtual appliance or serverless application at very low cost. DigitalOcean marketplace also helps you to deploy the serverless app or virtual appliance effortlessly. It is suitable for small scale deployment and the process to setup an account and …
Chose DigitalOcean App Platform
The ability to choose your own cloud provider is huge, especially for a small start up like I have. We have a lot of free credit from AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Azure, etc...

The data layer is baked into the system which is better for integration then an external provider.
Features
Azure App ServiceDigitalOcean App Platform
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Azure App Service
6.3
Ratings
21% below category average
DigitalOcean App Platform
6.8
Ratings
13% below category average
Ease of building user interfaces7.30 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Scalability7.00 Ratings4.00 Ratings
Platform management overhead7.30 Ratings4.00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability6.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control7.50 Ratings4.00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration6.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Development environment creation6.30 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Development environment replication6.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification6.30 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Issue recovery4.40 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes4.80 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure App ServiceDigitalOcean App Platform
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.3 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.1 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.1 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure App ServiceDigitalOcean App Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure App ServiceDigitalOcean App Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
You may easily deploy your apps to Azure App Service if they were written in Visual Studio IDE (typically.NET applications). With a few clicks of the mouse, you may already deploy your application to a remote server using the Visual Studio IDE. As a result of the portal's bulk and complexity, I propose Heroku for less-experienced developers.
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It can help you to host your virtual appliance or serverless application at very low cost. DigitalOcean marketplace also helps you to deploy the serverless app or virtual appliance effortlessly. It is suitable for small-scale deployment and the process to set up an account and rolling out your app via the marketplace is easy and cheap.
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Pros
  • Extremely easy to deploy and update from Visual Studio
  • It integrates seamlessly with other Azure PaaS resources
  • It has an in-depth integration with AppInsights, so you can understand errors and their root cause easily.
  • Easy to create and delete, what is not the same case in a IaaS resource
  • It escalates based on CPU workload and some other resource variables.
  • Configuration changes are almost immediate
  • Offers an excellent abstraction from hardware backend of the platform
  • That's updated very often, saving time and the risk of a self-performed update over a IaaS
  • That's really easy to develop for Web Apps
  • It supports Function Apps and Web Apps into the same "cost black box"
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  • Hosting of serverless application
  • Hosting of load balancer
  • Hosting of virtual appliances
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Cons
  • The Azure is providing little less amount of data centers, so they can increase the data centers.
  • Customized development; Azure needs to provide some more options to customize
  • Some of the essential things about the viewers and logs must be provided. Currently I feel they are putting limit on monitoring.
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  • The company has not been very communicative as of lately. Not much news, no apparent work on missing features.
  • Some components are incomplete as far as some critical features. For example, I use RethinkDB as my database and it's missing critical features like backup and clustering, so It is unusable and they should have made that clear from the get go.
  • The pricing on the support plan is vague. I do have the feeling it is actually well worth the money, but it's hard to form a decisions based without more predictable specific.
  • Seems to me like the platform's future is unclear.
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Usability
To change from one tech stack to another is very hard. Converting from the .NET environment to an agnostic environment without AI takes a long time, and if we want to use AI to make the conversion, it's better to use external solutions like Claude. Copilot can't handle the conversion, generating tons of errors and hallucinations.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Microsoft has always been known for providing a high standard in terms of customer support and Azure App Service (and as a matter of fact the whole Azure Platform) is no exception. Azure App Service never caused us any issues and we only contacted their customer support for questions regarding server locations and pricing. I feel pretty satisfied with how they treat their customers.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
AWS CodeDeploy certainly feels powerful; however, to perform some tasks with it will require some scripting experience. Azure App Service provides deployment, scaling, and hosting in a single, managed platform, and it feels easy and very well laid out. It is also dev- and qa-friendly, enabling faster deployments and improving overall team productivity.
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The ability to choose your own cloud provider is huge, especially for a small start up like I have. We have a lot of free credit from AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Azure, etc... The data layer is baked into the system which is better for integration then an external provider. There are also a lot fewer differences between environment as everything is Docker based which gives me the confidence that what works on my machine is going to work in production. Heroku doesn't have good support for Docker containers yet and although Heroku has served me well in the past, it is limited in some aspects.
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Return on Investment
  • Azure App Service has allowed us to quickly deploy high-budget projects very quickly, netting us a healthy profit vs the cost to develop. (We make, on average, about 10x what it costs to get up and running per project thanks to how easy it is to implement a skeleton framework.)
  • Costs are low to run the services thanks to the scaling functionality that comes with Azure App Service. We can utilize less resources during slow times and save hundreds of dollars per month vs costs of traditional servers.
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  • The platform is saving me a lot of time I would have been wasting on operations instead of development.
  • The platform is saving me a lot of money as I can easily switch between cloud providers to find the best price.
  • I am worried though for the price I might have to pay in case of an unexpected system issue.
  • Hopefully I will be able to pay the support plan before that.
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ScreenShots