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Amazon AWS vs DigitalOcean vs Microsoft Azure 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
7.2
Microsoft Azure saves costs and boosts efficiency with scalable cloud services, pay-as-you-go pricing, and reduced maintenance expenses.
The value for money is good, and Microsoft Azure has positively impacted our operational costs.
When we use Microsoft Azure, it provides enhanced security from our perspective, though I am not certain about the financial return on investment or benefits for our users as I do not have that information.
 

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
6.5
Customer service is mixed; paid support is praised for responsiveness, while free options may face delays and complexity.
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.
The support from Microsoft Azure is good.
Regarding technical support from Microsoft, I find they are responsive and helpful, depending on which support package you're on.
I rate technical support as excellent because we have not experienced many problems when calling for assistance.
 

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
7.8
Microsoft Azure excels in scalability and flexibility, supporting various workloads, though cost and limitations may concern some users.
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.
Microsoft Azure is not just one product; it is a platform with multiple products within Microsoft Azure, and I would say it is scalable and would rate it a nine.
The scalability of Microsoft Azure is excellent for growth and adaptation, depending on company requirements.
Scalability with Microsoft Azure is amazing, which is a primary reason for using cloud solutions.
 

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
7.8
Microsoft Azure is highly reliable and scalable, despite occasional outages; users confidently rate it high for stability and 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.
Microsoft Azure is quite stable, but recent outages and security issues have slightly decreased my confidence.
 

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.
Microsoft Azure needs pricing transparency, intuitive interface, improved support, better technical features, and refined management tools for users.
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.
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.
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.
Recent outages and security issues are also a concern, causing a decrease in confidence, especially when partnering with third-party companies.
The administrative side is suitable for technical people, but our finance and HR super users find it less user-friendly, as they prefer drag-and-drop features to build their own solutions without contacting IT.
There is still room for improvement in terms of pricing.
 

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.
Microsoft Azure offers flexible, competitive pricing, yet complexity makes AWS and GCP potentially more cost-effective for enterprises.
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.
Microsoft solutions might be cheaper than some services like AWS, but some solutions may be more expensive depending on the services compared.
Copilot is expensive based on recent pricing for our POC.
Regarding the pricing for Microsoft Azure services, I would rate our satisfaction as very good.
 

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.
Microsoft Azure offers flexibility, scalability, global presence, integration, security, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness for enhanced organizational infrastructure.
Amazon AWS offers flexibility and scalability.
One aspect I appreciate in Amazon AWS is their support team, which is excellent.
The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well.
The most significant aspect is that we can connect directly to the system from anywhere.
The team was particularly satisfied with the flexibility of the service and the rules for managing virtual machines on DigitalOcean.
Power BI, another feature of Azure, is extremely elegant and has robust features that support forecasting using R and Python.
Data integrations are particularly effective on Microsoft Azure, especially with our banner services that we automate through Power Automate.
Microsoft Azure's scalability feature obviously supports business growth by scaling with the growth of the business, which is great, and it also scales with your requirements and aligns with your data strategies.
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.5%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DigitalOcean is 2.4%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure is 17.3%, down from 18.2% 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.
SubodhThakar - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrates various functionalities and have good documentation but have high pricing
Cosmos DB offered better scalability. In Azure SQL, we had to carefully manage the storage tier, switching back and forth based on needs. But when we first implemented Cosmos DB, we had a good understanding of the required data volume over the past three months. This helped us select the appropriate tier because we had those figures. If we had done it the other way around, it would have been much harder to estimate the data accurately. While you can get a rough idea, whether it works out in practice is more of a hit-and-miss approach, which we have already experienced with Cosmos DB. We applied the knowledge gained from that exercise to build a similar solution over Azure SQL. On the DevOps side, our team consisted of five members, ranging from senior to junior roles. We would raise requests for specific services needed in the development environment. The process typically takes three to five business days, including all necessary approvals, from submitting the request to receiving the resources and verifying access.
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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
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
7%
Educational Organization
26%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to ...
Which is better - SAP Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure?
One of the best features of SAP Cloud Platform is that it is web-based and you can log in from anywhere in the world....
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. ...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
Digital Ocean
Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
jQuery Foundation, Pertino, TaskRabbit, Compose, InfluxDB, The Able Few
BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Akamai and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: June 2025.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.