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Amazon AWS vs DigitalOcean vs Google Firebase comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Users generally found DigitalOcean cost-effective, noticing initial savings, though some lacked details to quantify exact financial impact.
Sentiment score
6.7
Google Firebase is cost-effective for large apps, with valuable features and manageable for small teams, despite some expenses.
 

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 yet inconsistent, needing improved technical support and quicker resolutions compared to AWS.
Sentiment score
7.1
Users rarely need support due to excellent documentation and community resources, but views on direct support vary.
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.
If the community doesn't have the answers, then I contact the Google Firebase team directly.
I do not currently find any other competitors that match its offering.
 

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 is highly rated for scalability, offering tools to manage increased loads and easily add resources like RAM or CPUs.
Sentiment score
6.8
Firebase is scalable and flexible, though some users face challenges with pricing and configuration as usage increases.
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.
It can handle all tiers of the market effectively.
Google also has some other cloud services, but when we compare Google Firebase, it is not as scalable.
I would rate the scalability of Google Firebase as eight because I miss some features from MS SQL, particularly the SQL functions.
 

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
7.8
DigitalOcean offers reliable stability, though some users note occasional downtimes and performance fluctuations based on extended use.
Sentiment score
8.0
Google Firebase is praised for its stability and reliability, with minor concerns about downtime and performance by some users.
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.
In our company, we have prototypes on Google Firebase and productions on AWS Cloud.
 

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 performance, customer dissatisfaction, and service issues, prompting calls for improved features and better support.
Users want improved control, logging, queries, pricing, support, interface, documentation, and integration for better Cloud Function performance.
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.
The lack of a proper service provider model ultimately led us to cease operations 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.
Since Google Firebase is a NoSQL platform, areas for improvement include enhancing query functionalities to be more equivalent to SQL, like MS SQL.
Automation testing with mobile devices could be improved, especially in regression testing to ensure that new feature launches do not affect other features.
 

Setup Cost

AWS offers scalable, flexible pricing suited for enterprises but requires careful management to avoid high costs from storage and data transfer.
DigitalOcean's pricing ranges from $5 to $50 monthly, with costs depending on configuration and perceived as competitive by some.
Google Firebase offers a free tier and scalable pricing, but users should carefully manage costs due to potential fluctuations.
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.
They could have implemented credits based on usage so that users would be able to easily calculate the pricing and provide it to customers.
Google Firebase offers a reasonable pricing structure.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon AWS offers scalable, secure, and flexible cloud services with automation, diverse tools, and excellent support for efficient resource management.
DigitalOcean provides reliable, cost-effective servers with an intuitive interface, database management, flexible hosting, and easy installation.
Firebase excels with real-time database, authentication, cloud functions, push notifications, and scalability, ideal for rapid app development.
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 team was particularly satisfied with the flexibility of the service and the rules for managing virtual machines on DigitalOcean.
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.
A real-time database.
These features are invaluable for mobile development and ensuring smooth internal operations.
What I appreciate most about Google Firebase is the speed, accuracy, and security it offers.
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 15.0%, down from 21.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DigitalOcean is 2.3%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Firebase is 4.4%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

HarishMahanta - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable cloud service enhances ERP management with advanced security features
I use Amazon AWS for ERP implementation. My responsibility is to integrate our application into the AWS cloud and provide AI solutions to the infrastructure AWS is stable and has provided a reliable infrastructure for my organization. AWS offers add-on services such as security and automated…
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.
Shravan Revanna - PeerSpot reviewer
Simple to get started with and offers integration features in multiple programming languages
The product provides integration features in multiple languages, such as Python, JavaScript, Golang, and all other languages. Google Firebase has documentation, which might seem a bit confusing, but one with decent knowledge can easily explore and get started with Firebase quickly. Before jumping into any cloud infrastructure, the tool should analyze how much it would cost to run the database. Google Firebase provides a certain number of reads and writes per day, which is approximately 40,000 reads and writes. If there are more than 200 to 300 active users per day, there will be plenty of reads and writes to the database. In such a case, one can't use Google Firebase and has to upgrade to Spark, which is where it is based on usage. The tool is fairly simple to get started with. Utilize all the features can get very complicated. One must be a pretty good developer who has a lot of experience to be able to utilize the best features. It gets really complicated over time. The basic functionality and basic usage are easy to use and easy to get started. There are plenty of deprecated versions, and frequently upgrading them causes inconvenience. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.
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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
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
University
7%
University
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
9%
 

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 wonderfu...
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 expand...
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 fle...
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 stati...
What needs improvement with DigitalOcean?
There are disadvantages, such as machines getting stuck or disconnected, requiring restarts. Sometimes we lose connec...
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 usin...
How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?
I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. ...
What do you like most about Google Firebase?
Google Analytics for Firebase is the best feature of the solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Firebase?
Google Firebase is much cheaper compared to other popular solutions.
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
Digital Ocean
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
jQuery Foundation, Pertino, TaskRabbit, Compose, InfluxDB, The Able Few
Fabulous, Pic Collage, Shazam, SkyScanner
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Akamai and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: July 2025.
864,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.