DigitalOcean vs. DigitalOcean App Platform

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DigitalOcean
Score 8.6 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
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
DigitalOceanDigitalOcean App Platform
Editions & Modules
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Basic
$5
per month
Professional
$12
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOceanDigitalOcean App Platform
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOceanDigitalOcean App Platform
Features
DigitalOceanDigitalOcean App Platform
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean
9.1
36 Ratings
10% above category average
DigitalOcean App Platform
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.931 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.832 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.423 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates10.029 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools9.235 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images9.433 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support8.933 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls8.732 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation6.55 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean
-
Ratings
DigitalOcean App Platform
6.8
2 Ratings
13% below category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings4.02 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings4.02 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings4.02 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings6.01 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings6.02 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOceanDigitalOcean App Platform
Small Businesses
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.4 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOceanDigitalOcean App Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(36 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(10 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(9 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOceanDigitalOcean App Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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DigitalOcean
I would only get into it if I where willing to pay for the support plan and getting some assurances from the team as to where they are headed. The platform itself is great and can save you a ton of hard work and money. but it's hard to be confidant in it's sustainability.
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Pros
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
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DigitalOcean
  • Hosting of serverless application
  • Hosting of load balancer
  • Hosting of virtual appliances
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Cons
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.
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DigitalOcean
  • 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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Likelihood to Renew
DigitalOcean
I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!
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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Usability
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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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
DigitalOcean
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Performance
DigitalOcean
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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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DigitalOcean
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 roll out your app via marketplace is easy and cheap.
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Scalability
DigitalOcean
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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...
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DigitalOcean
  • 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