Cloudflare vs. DigitalOcean

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cloudflare
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.
$20
per month
DigitalOcean
Score 8.4 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
CloudflareDigitalOcean
Editions & Modules
Pro
$20
per month
Business
$200
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CloudflareDigitalOcean
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CloudflareDigitalOcean
Considered Both Products
Cloudflare
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a powerful and effective tool for DNS management on WordPress websites. It offers several advantages over Sucuri, including enhanced speed, advanced security features, improved user experience and better customization options. We use Sucuri only when we have …
Chose Cloudflare
I view GoDaddy and Oracle Dyn as two ends of the spectrum. In full disclosure I'm a former employee at Dyn. GoDaddy DNS comes free with our domains and is nice and basic. A bit harder to use than CloudFlare, though. Dyn is fantastic but more than we need for a basic site. Plus …
Chose Cloudflare
CloudFlare has Incapsula beat in terms of ease of use and features for their lower level plans. Incapsula only allows API use on their Enterprise plan where-as CloudFlare allows it on all plans. Both great options, but CloudFlare is by far my preferred service.
DigitalOcean
Chose DigitalOcean
I chose DigitalOcean over Oracle Cloud because it's simpler, more cost-effective, and quicker to deploy. DigitalOcean’s intuitive interface allows me to manage servers easily, while Oracle Cloud is more complex and suited for larger enterprises. Also, DigitalOcean’s transparent …
Chose DigitalOcean
Site5's customer service and support have declined over the recent years. The last couple of tickets that I submitted in 2016 were never addressed by their help team. The only customer service agent seems to be on their Twitter account. Site5 does not allow any configuration of …
Chose DigitalOcean
My cost savings were significant and I felt like I was much more in control of the hardware and processes. I also had issues with certain marketing decisions my former hosting company made, DigitalOcean was an easy choice!
Chose DigitalOcean
Linode was my long time go-to and we still have several sites hosted and maintained on their servers. Initially, I was skeptical of DigitalOcean's pricing, but they've proven to be an excellent alternative. Linode is more mature in their toolset, but both are really great …
Features
CloudflareDigitalOcean
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Cloudflare
-
Ratings
DigitalOcean
9.1
35 Ratings
10% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings9.730 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings9.731 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings9.023 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings10.028 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings9.734 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings9.032 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings8.632 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings9.031 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings7.54 Ratings
Best Alternatives
CloudflareDigitalOcean
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Internet Services
IBM Cloud Internet Services
Score 8.8 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CloudflareDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(175 ratings)
9.0
(35 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.3
(4 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
8.6
(8 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(2 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
7.9
(142 ratings)
8.8
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CloudflareDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudflare
Based on my experience, Cloudflare is well-suited for high-traffic websites and probably e-commerce platforms. Cloudflare can mitigate the risk of attacks on these websites using WAF and DNS protection mechanisms and provide cached content to the end-users quickly. The websites where it is not suitable are those that need high security and compliance requirements as Cloudflare might not meet all those criteria.
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
Cloudflare
  • Registrar and DNS services are impeccable, with registrations done at cost and without ADs. DNS services setting standards for speed of resolution.
  • DDOS protection. With their content distribution network to back them they have the bandwidth and tools to be both proactive and reactive to bad actors.
  • WAF - Their Web Application Firewall helps mitigate common site vulnerabilities and has active zero-day protection running for breaking exploits
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
Cloudflare
  • In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
  • Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
  • While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
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
Cloudflare
lower cost
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
Cloudflare
Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Cloudflare
In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
Read full review
DigitalOcean
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
Read full review
Performance
Cloudflare
Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
Read full review
DigitalOcean
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
Read full review
Support Rating
Cloudflare
I have only used their support a few times, and most times, they are responsive and able to resolve my issue with a minimal amount of time and effort. However, there was one instance where I simply asked about how to purchase some more resources (redirect rules), and I received some type of automated/AI response that was very unhelpful and gave me no opportunity to escalate to a person.
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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.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Cloudflare
Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
Read full review
DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Cloudflare
They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.
They have very good reputation.
They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Scalability
Cloudflare
They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
Read full review
DigitalOcean
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Cloudflare
  • A lot of requests are cached and so egress costs from downstream providers are mitigated.
  • DDoS protection has also managed to keep our site up and our cloud computing bill down.
  • Setting up a proxy with a worker made putting various Google Cloud Functions running behind a single URL very easy and performant. Plus they offer API Shield on top of this.
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