DigitalOcean Droplets vs. Docker

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean's Droplets is designed to help the user spin up a virtual machine in just 55 seconds. Standard, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, or Memory-Optimized configurations provide flexibility to build, test, and grow an app from startup to scale.
$4
per month
Docker
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Docker Enterprise was sold to Mirantis in 2019; that product is now sold as Mirantis Kubernetes Engine. But Docker now offers a 2-product suite that includes Docker Desktop, which they present as a fast way to containerize applications on a desktop; and, Docker Hub, a service for finding and sharing container images with a team and the Docker community, a repository of container images with an array of…
$0
unlimited public repositories
Pricing
DigitalOcean DropletsDocker
Editions & Modules
Basic
$4
per month
CPU-Optimized
$42
per month
General Purpose
$63
per month
Memory-Optimized
$84
per month
Storage-Optimized
$131
per month
Free
$0
unlimited public repositories
Pro
$5.00
per month per user
Team
$7.00
per month per user
Business
$21
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean DropletsDocker
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPricing for DigitalOcean Droplets varies depending on the size of the virtual environment and the associated data needs.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOcean DropletsDocker
Considered Both Products
DigitalOcean Droplets
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
Vultr had better performance in some instances but overall the dashboard was a mess to use a lot of times. When you zoom out from server performance and price, DigitalOcean offered more useful features, and the API was more consistent in some of the use cases we needed.
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
Cost is much lesser
Interface is very easy to use
Documentation is readily available for most of the usecases.
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
The reason for selecting digital ocean was since we require a cloud solution for testing applications internally without being bothered about servers needing to be deployed in different geographical locations. As Droplets can be deployed very easily and boot faster than any …
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets has more advanced options and the devs at our team are extremely geeky and they prefer to have full control on the server via SSH rather than cPanel.
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets is continuously evolving to be more and more powerful. It has great features and has low cost options, which is really great for developers. Its CDN, Loadbalancer, etc. make it a good place to host a high-traffic application. Moroever, DigitalOcean …
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
Both Linode and DigitalOcean Droplets perform about the same and cost about the same. However we prefer the DigitalOcean Droplets interface, and the Cloud Firewall service is a must for us.
Docker
Chose Docker
Our team uses Lando which is built on top of Docker. This makes using Docker even easier.
Chose Docker
It is easy to use. we can manage multiple images in docker hub. Docker desktop is for accessing images in our desktop. It is very much user friendly as compare to podman.
Chose Docker
Docker is by far the industry leader and mainstay when it comes to virtual machines, its really hard to justify using another service like Vagrant. The upcoming monetization of Docker desktop should make things interesting though.
Chose Docker
We need a solution where initially we can use an OS to trigger our pipeline to be used by terraform and then later in ansible. After doing all work it automatically get exited and we can reclaim the space of our VM. So we created a gitlab pipeline and at the initial stage we …
Chose Docker
The features and capabilities provided by Docker are incomparable and much vast in nature. Docker is much light weight and easy to onboard into the tech stack. It is also well supported by Container orchestration systems like Kubernetes which will be critical when applications …
Chose Docker
Did use containerd or LXC for brief evaluation in the past, but settled on Docker and only see Docker as the mainstay for most organizations I worked in, as the container tool of choice so far. Docker is matured, feature-rich, and reliable enough to be the main choice all …
Chose Docker
The reason why we are still using Docker right now is due to that is the best among its peers and suits our needs the best. However, the trend we foresee for the future might indicate Amazon lambda could potentially fit our needs to code enviornmentless in the near future.
Chose Docker
Podman has been used within our Red Hat environment, and although it supports deployments outside of RHEL, it's not as easy as Docker.
Chose Docker
Docker provides is effective container management and orchestration platform. It is highly suitable for Linux environments and allows the easy and quick deployment of production applications Other alternatives use replication and management of the virtual machines. Docker …
Features
DigitalOcean DropletsDocker
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean Droplets
8.8
Ratings
7% above category average
Docker
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing5.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates5.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOcean DropletsDocker
Small Businesses
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.8 out of 10
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOcean DropletsDocker
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOcean DropletsDocker
Likelihood to Recommend
There are some other platforms that compete with DigitalOcean Droplets that have more performant servers for a very minimal price decrease. However, DigitalOcean's servers still have great performance, and the experience is better when you consider the developer console, managed options, and uptime that DigitalOcean offers. DigitalOcean is the better all-around package.
Read full review
You are going to be able to find the most resources and examples using Docker whenever you are working with a container orchestration software like Kubernetes. There will always some entropy when you run in a container, a containerized application will never be as purely performant as an app running directly on the OS. However, in most scenarios this loss will be negligible to the time saved in deployment, monitoring, etc.
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Pros
  • Simplicity to scale services--the interface is very quick and effective to use
  • Reliability--this is key for us, as any downtime effects our reputation
  • Keeps the costs down--hosting our own equivalent infrastructure would cost a lot more
Read full review
  • Kubernetes context switching - very handy
  • Integrate well and seamless - No complicated setup and or UX
  • Ease of updating images and etc - very important
Read full review
Cons
  • In terms of an availability zone, they have limitations not available in most of the geographical locations.
  • No live support is available which can cause problem if you have outage.
  • Number of service is quite limited.
Read full review
  • It will be nice to see an admin UI for configuration of images
  • Container networking can be simplified
  • Data storage/volume management can be simplified
Read full review
Usability
Other platforms dashboard console is more difficult to use. DigitalOcean's dashboard is clean, simple, and straightforward
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I have been using Docker for more than 3 years and it really simplifies the modern application development and deployment. I like the ability of Docker to improve efficiency, portability and scalability for developers and operations teams. Another reason for giving this rating is because Docker integrates CI/CD pipelines very well
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
Haven't seen any outages, fatal/unrecoverable errors in my usage so far. Enough said.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
Docker Desktop. The CPU high usage is a known issue. Needs fixing. Otherwise, it is great overall. Would not use anything else still.
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Alternatives Considered
DigitalOcean Droplets has more advanced options and the devs at our team are extremely geeky and they prefer to have full control on the server via SSH rather than cPanel.
Read full review
We need a solution where initially we can use an OS to trigger our pipeline to be used by terraform and then later in ansible. After doing all work it automatically get exited and we can reclaim the space of our VM. So we created a gitlab pipeline and at the initial stage we defined a docker file which will be our base image and we performed all our activities inside that image to build infrastructure using terraform. Integration we have done in our gitlab pipeline and finally we remove the docker image so that the space can be reclaimed immediately.
Read full review
Scalability
No answers on this topic
It is the only tool in our toolset that has not [had] any issues so far. That is really a mark of reliability, and it's a testimony to how well the product is made, and a tool that does its job well is a tool well worth having. It is the base tool that I would say any organisation must have if they do scalable deployment.
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Return on Investment
  • Digital Ocean has been great helping us move web apps to the cloud
  • Digital Ocean has been really helpful when hiring contractors
  • The interface could use some work, but overall its not terrible
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  • With Docker adoption, were able to reduce 40% of the time taken to complete workspace setup
  • Provided the environment packaging / configurability capability which enabled resource sharing and interoperability across teams
  • Were able to leverage off the shelf images provided by leading product companies which increased reliability and security exponently
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ScreenShots