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Alibaba Cloud vs DigitalOcean comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alibaba Cloud
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
7th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
DigitalOcean
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
13th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 11.0%, up from 8.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DigitalOcean is 2.1%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Alibaba Cloud11.0%
DigitalOcean2.1%
Other86.9%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Min HtetOo - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution is useful for application development, but the user interface and user experience must be improved
The product must be made easier to use. The design is a bit tricky. When we log in to the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace and browse products, they look very small. The user experience must be improved. Alibaba Cloud must increase its partner network and brand awareness in our country. It will give our customers more opportunities to scale and save in the long run.
Michael Olayemi - PeerSpot reviewer
Enjoy cost-effective hosting with flexible deployment and room for payment model improvement
I use only one feature, which is the droplet, and it has been satisfactory. The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well. I also have total freedom over what I use, and I have a better user interface and documentation compared to Oracle.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Flexibility and costs were probably the most important thing for us. The cost was one of the big factors for choosing Alibaba Cloud relative to other cloud solutions, especially in Asia"
"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"I rate Alibaba Cloud's scalability an eight out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Alibaba Cloud is the communication it allows between two servers."
"We use the solution to run VMs."
"We use the solution's AI features for data analysis."
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"The customer support team are very responsive."
"DigitalOcean is much cheaper compared to Oracle, Amazon, and Google, making it a better option for a startup."
"The Droplets feature is beneficial and easy to use."
"The user interface is nice, and it is very easy to use. Anyone can use it."
"The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well."
"The most outstanding aspect of DigitalOcean is its user interface and ease of use. Compared to more complex solutions, such as AWS, DigitalOcean's platform is highly intuitive and user-friendly."
"The technical support services are good."
"The solution's app platform simplifies many tasks a developer must handle manually. For instance, when serving a website, the app platform uses NGINX to manage the app's serving, caching, and automatic rerunning in case of failure."
 

Cons

"The support offered by the tool is ridiculous."
"Alibaba Cloud's initial setup is somewhat complex."
"From the improvement point of view, there are lots of issues that we are facing. In all the areas, it seems like it is not mature. For example, a customer wants to provision some VM that has many configurations. If I want to show the price to the customer, it is very challenging. The SDK that Alibaba has provided is very limited. We can have the pricing for VM, but we cannot have pricing for RDS databases or some other services. This is a big concern area for us. They should put more effort into the SDKs or APIs that they provide, for example, pricing APIs or pricing SDK. They do not provide support for most of the services they provide. For example, if I want to get the price of MongoDB, that SDK is not available from Alibaba. Similarly, robust API support is required for S3, which is OSS or Object Storage, so that we can read the data in a faster manner, for example, in chunks. We have raised many issues with the Alibaba support team, and they have been fixing the issues after we report them."
"The user experience must be improved."
"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"It is not robust."
"The solution name is not favorable in some markets and could cause us some problems gaining customers."
"The solution should have more integration."
"The deployment time can be improved in DigitalOcean. While deployment is automated, the process can take a minute and a half to five minutes, and for more complex applications, this time increases even further. This is not optimal for applications that receive frequent updates."
"DigitalOcean could offer a pay-as-you-go model similar to AWS, where I would pay for what I use rather than having fixed payments."
"The lack of a proper service provider model ultimately led us to cease operations with DigitalOcean."
"We found the solution to be a bit expensive."
"I would like to see an automation feature added to send emails out using the open-source solution."
"Other solutions are proving the monitoring feature, like AWS having GuardDuty and SAP having services for logs and monitoring. DigitalOcean doesn’t have any other benefits."
"I would like to see improvements to the logging and user interface. The verification process could be more streamlined."
"The solution could improve by having integration with GitHub."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We cut our costs significantly by migrating our infrastructure to the cloud. Alibaba Cloud employs a pay-as-you-go model, so that minimizes many costs for us."
"The price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."
"I'm not sure about the exact pricing, but let's just say if it cost a dollar for Amazon AWS, it was closer to 70 to 80 cents for Alibaba Cloud."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"The product is not that expensive."
"I don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."
"I noticed on the pricing that it's quite expensive. It is the price you pay for making a practical choice for enterprise-level companies since it has so many features and it fits an enterprise-level company just like our company right now."
"The price of DigitalOcean could be lower. It is expensive. it's higher than other solutions available in the market. We pay approximately $20 to $25 a month to use the solution. The price we pay is for the shared CPU option."
"I am using the cheapest option available, which costs $50 per month."
"There is no licensing fee but there is a subscription cost based on how much RAM and storage you require."
"The pricing is cheap."
"I would rate DigitalOcean's pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive."
"The program is cheaper than others."
"The solution provides the cheapest cloud in comparison to the other cloud solutions."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Alibaba Cloud?
ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alibaba Cloud?
On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten.
What needs improvement with Alibaba Cloud?
Alibaba Cloud needs to improve emails. Its pricing can also be lower. Regarding security issues, Alibaba Cloud is more complex and better suited for developers and R&D teams. On the other hand,...
What do you like most about DigitalOcean?
It's been a good choice for us for some services. We generally have several deployments. For instance, for some static Angular applications, it was a clear choice to run them on Cloudflare, which p...
What needs improvement with DigitalOcean?
There are disadvantages, such as machines getting stuck or disconnected, requiring restarts. Sometimes we lose connection and need to check with the IT service provider from the DigitalOcean servic...
What is your primary use case for DigitalOcean?
We use DigitalOcean mostly for RDS services and cloud-related systems where we want to deploy codes and run them using nginx or other services where it is cheaper to use, and we use it to extract d...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Digital Ocean
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
jQuery Foundation, Pertino, TaskRabbit, Compose, InfluxDB, The Able Few
Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. DigitalOcean and other solutions. Updated: November 2025.
872,869 professionals have used our research since 2012.