TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    DigitalOcean

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/ADigitalOcean 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

    WP Engine

    Score7.4 out of 10
    N/AWP Engine is a website hosting service built to host WordPress for companies of any size, with features such as daily backups, firewall,SSL, and proprietary caching technology.

    $35

    per month

    Pricing
    DigitalOceanWP Engine
    Editions & Modules
    1GB-16GB
    $5.00
    Starting Price Per Month
    8GB-160GB
    $60.00
    Starting Price Per Month
    Startup
    $35
    per month
    Core
    $400
    per month (annual contract)
    Enterprise
    Custom
    *Per Month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    DigitalOceanWP Engine
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—Discount available for annual billing on the Startup plan.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    DigitalOceanWP Engine
    Considered Both Products
    DigitalOcean
    Chose DigitalOcean
    DigitalOcean is fast, easy to use, reliable, with few features, and at a great price. WP Engine is clunky, tricky to use, reliable, feature rich, and at a very high price. GoDaddy is clunky, difficult to use, too complex to be reliable, rife with garbage feature 'add-ons', and …
    Incentivized
    WP Engine
    Chose WP Engine
    By usability, DigitalOcean wins. I love DigitalOcean for a lot of reasons, but their setup process is clunky and their feature set is fairly limited. Their setup requires technical competence but after that they are a breeze to work with. For what they do, DigitalOcean is …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    11 Answers
    89%
    Would buy again
    17 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    11 Answers
    84%
    Delivers good value for the price
    16 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    11 Answers
    84%
    Happy with the feature set
    16 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    11 Answers
    83%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    15 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    11 Answers
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    17 Answers
    Features
    DigitalOceanWP Engine
    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
    Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of DigitalOcean and WP Engine
    Feature
    DigitalOcean
    9.2
    36 Ratings
    11% above category average
    WP Engine
    -
    Ratings
    Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.931 Ratings00 Ratings
    Dynamic scaling9.932 Ratings00 Ratings
    Elastic load balancing9.723 Ratings00 Ratings
    Pre-configured templates10.029 Ratings00 Ratings
    Monitoring tools9.035 Ratings00 Ratings
    Pre-defined machine images9.733 Ratings00 Ratings
    Operating system support9.033 Ratings00 Ratings
    Security controls8.632 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automation6.55 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    DigitalOceanWP Engine
    Small Businesses
    IBM Cloud Object Storage
    Score9 out of 10
    Flywheel
    Score4.8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Rackspace Managed Hosting
    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SAP on IBM Cloud
    Score9 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    DigitalOceanWP Engine
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.9
    (36 ratings)
    8.5
    (31 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    3.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    8.9
    (10 ratings)
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    Availability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.8
    (9 ratings)
    7.7
    (6 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    DigitalOceanWP Engine
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    WP Engine
    I am an enterprise user of WordPress and host over 7000 sites with WPEngine. Areas that I think they are well suited for include customers that need enterprise-level support and uptime and have more complex needs than a simple blog. They also manage scale well with a variety of isolated install options that you can scale up or down depending on your contract needs. They also provide premier support for enterprises and have highly knowledgable Technical Account Managers that provide a significant value add. If I were to look at where it isn't as appropriate for usage I would focus on the low-end needs and say while they do support small sites, there are options out there for cheaper hosting that lack the support a WPEngine gives you.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    WP Engine
    • I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back.
    • The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems.
    • They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    WP Engine
    • I'd like to see WP Engine offer their own monitoring solution. When I say monitoring, I mean specific use cases that may end up being something you could script. This would keep customers from having to pay for additional services like Pingdom, New Relic, etc.
    • I would like to see some proactive analysis done by WP Engine on their customer sites - at least on their home pages, and offer up suggestions. This kind of goes along with the other example.
    • Finally, it would be nice to see a "lighter" offering, perhaps a plan that costs $49 for those who want to host only a few sites, or even 1 site.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    WP Engine
    I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers.
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    WP Engine
    From the onboarding and in the days afterward, it was very easy to get into the platform and begin creating important websites and configuring user options. The interface is easy to navigate, and the platform pages load quickly. Since the platform is built for Word plus press, it has features including backup, staging, maintenance mode, and direct WP-Admin login to make configuration and site management faster. We have never had any issues on the billing side of the account.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    DigitalOcean
    Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    WP Engine
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    DigitalOcean
    Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    WP Engine
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    WP Engine
    Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    WP Engine
    While we still use GoDaddy for some services, WP Engine definitely has been a major upgrade for our WordPress hosting. In addition to faster load speeds, WP Engine has been more adept at allowing us to manage a high number of websites without straining the system. We have never used Network Solutions for our own hosting needs, but when we do interact with them on behalf of our clients, their systems always seem to be clunky and hard to use, and they often overcharge customers by selling them products they do not need.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    DigitalOcean
    Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    WP Engine
    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...
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    WP Engine
    • WP Engine reduces our time investment and upkeep costs which increases our margins.
    • WP Engine simplifies site management with a built-in development server, which saves us headaches.
    • WP Engine itself is positioned as a premium service, which allows us to use their branding as a tool to close sales.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots