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DigitalOcean vs IBM SoftLayer 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

DigitalOcean
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (14th)
IBM SoftLayer
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Public Cloud Storage Services (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Cloud Services solutions, they serve different purposes. DigitalOcean is designed for Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) and holds a mindshare of 2.4%, up 2.2% compared to last year.
IBM SoftLayer, on the other hand, focuses on Public Cloud Storage Services, holds 0.4% mindshare, up 0.2% since last year.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

Featured Reviews

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.
reviewer1032702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Stable with excellent speed and agility
The most valuable aspect of the solution is simply to have the ability to host in a cloud form and out of the data center - the IBM big iron solution. It's the speed and the agility that really sell SoftLayer. The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer. The ability to extract act from your current location, load into your future location, with limited change, and then be able to take the transfer actions slowly and methodically after you're in your new location is the part that really makes this awesome. The stability and scalability are quite good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is very stable."
"The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well."
"The solution is easy to set up."
"I like Kubernetes integration."
"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."
"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."
"DigitalOcean is much cheaper compared to Oracle, Amazon, and Google, making it a better option for a startup."
"The team was particularly satisfied with the flexibility of the service and the rules for managing virtual machines on DigitalOcean."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
"The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
 

Cons

"There are disadvantages, such as machines getting stuck or disconnected, requiring restarts."
"I think something needs to be done in terms of technical support."
"I would like to see an automation feature added to send emails out using the open-source solution."
"The lack of a proper service provider model ultimately led us to cease operations with DigitalOcean."
"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."
"We found the solution to be a bit expensive."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is cheap."
"There is no licensing fee but there is a subscription cost based on how much RAM and storage you require."
"The solution provides the cheapest cloud in comparison to the other cloud solutions."
"I would rate DigitalOcean's pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive."
"The pricing is moderate and reasonable for a mid-tier cloud platform."
"The program is cheaper than others."
"I am using the cheapest option available, which costs $50 per month."
"This is a pay as you go solution. There is no license and it is usage based."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
University
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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Also Known As

Digital Ocean
CloudLayer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

jQuery Foundation, Pertino, TaskRabbit, Compose, InfluxDB, The Able Few
Whogohost Ltd., Skypicker, Infinity Computers and Communications Company, Grace Co. Ltd., Keyword, Uvionics Tech, Tennis Australia, immixGroup, Salesbox, Cxense ASA, Avnet Inc., Komsomolskaya Pravda, Seekr
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.
861,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.