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Amazon AWS 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.9
AWS offers cost savings, scalability, and agility with a pay-as-you-go model, attracting clients and reducing overhead.
Sentiment score
6.1
Most users saved significantly in the first month using DigitalOcean, although some didn't notice financial gains.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
AWS is favored for reliable support and problem-solving despite concerns over response times and communication efficiency.
Sentiment score
6.5
DigitalOcean's customer service is responsive, but users seek improved 24/7 technical support, with no phone contact available.
Reaching out to them and talking is different from receiving a complete solution to your problem.
Amazon AWS has good technical engineers available, making their customer service reliable.
DigitalOcean support is rated lower than AWS's because we encounter issues more frequently.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Amazon AWS provides seamless vertical and horizontal scalability, supporting diverse customer needs from startups to large enterprises efficiently.
Sentiment score
7.2
DigitalOcean enables scalable infrastructure, easily managing increased demands with tools and load balancers, supported by comprehensive documentation.
The scalability of Amazon AWS is excellent.
Amazon AWS provides strong scalability features, but the scaling process could be made more straightforward.
I have not tried vertical scaling yet, but from the documentation, it seems very easy to scale the system.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon AWS is highly reliable with minimal issues, strong infrastructure, and stability often rated between eight and nine.
Sentiment score
7.9
DigitalOcean is largely stable and reliable, with occasional downtime, but mostly meets user expectations for uninterrupted performance.
DigitalOcean is quite stable, and I would rate its stability at nine out of ten.
It is approximately 50 to 60% stable, reaching 60 to 70% depending on usage levels.
 

Room For Improvement

AWS users face challenges in cost, support, complexity, security, documentation, and features, with improvements needed in usability and integration.
DigitalOcean struggles with reliability, security, and performance, needing better flexibility, monitoring, and user experience for improved functionality.
Amazon AWS could improve its user interface to make it more user-friendly, especially for people who are not highly technical.
When using scripts for APIs to fetch data, they don't match the data exactly with the request.
There are issues where even with 8 GB RAM, the performance doesn't meet expectations.
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.
 

Setup Cost

AWS offers scalable, flexible pricing suited for enterprises but requires careful management to avoid high costs from storage and data transfer.
DigitalOcean provides flexible enterprise pricing, starting at $5/month, valued for scalability despite some users finding it slightly costly.
After three to four years, if you are not managing it correctly, you will be paying more than an on-premise solution, which applies to all cloud providers, so you must regularly maintain and manage for efficiency.
Currently, Amazon AWS is known to be on the higher price range because popular and in-demand services often come at a premium.
DigitalOcean offers affordable pricing, especially for startups.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon AWS offers scalable, secure, and flexible cloud services with automation, diverse tools, and excellent support for efficient resource management.
DigitalOcean offers user-friendly, reliable cloud servers with cost-effective features like droplets, managed databases, and easy scaling integration.
One aspect I appreciate in Amazon AWS is their support team, which is excellent.
Their infrastructure is robust, allowing for increased capacity as user volume grows.
The most significant aspect is that we can connect directly to the system from anywhere.
The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon AWS
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
256
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (2nd)
DigitalOcean
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 12.7%, down from 22.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DigitalOcean is 2.4%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Arun Srivastav - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows for automatic scaling of resources and provides built-in firewalls and security features, eliminating the need for external security solutions
One thing that's a bit different is that we're still accustomed to speaking to someone directly. AWS doesn't offer that kind of support. It's only through bots. You're speaking to chatbots, and that can sometimes be frustrating because there's no person on the other side. AI is not a substitute for a person. AWS marketplace is very strong, but somehow AWS doesn't promote it much. They have a huge customer base across the globe, and if products were launched in their marketplace, they could sell like hotcakes. They should improve their marketplace and promote the same product across the globe. They can take a cut, but they should promote it. That's something they don't do very much. So, AWS should promote its marketplace software. The company should promote it aggressively. Currently, they keep it very subtle. If you ask for it, they'll help you out. But they don't seem to advertise, "You're building a product on our platform? Why don't you sell it in our marketplace?" Improvement in AI: AWS is a little behind Microsoft Azure in terms of AI. AWS is still getting there, but the kind of examples and help files available in Azure for AI are much better. So AWS still needs to work on its AI functionality.
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) solutions are best for your needs.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...
Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure
We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...
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?
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. It would be beneficial to have more flexibility without fixed paym...
What is your primary use case for DigitalOcean?
I primarily use DigitalOcean to deploy applications. I rent the system from them, where I deploy my web servers and application servers. I use it to host my applications since moving from Oracle. I...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
Digital Ocean
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
jQuery Foundation, Pertino, TaskRabbit, Compose, InfluxDB, The Able Few
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS vs. DigitalOcean and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.