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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)
11th
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
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 5.2%, down from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DigitalOcean is 2.0%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alibaba Cloud5.2%
DigitalOcean2.0%
Other92.8%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Min HtetOo - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Marketing Officer at Soft Intelligence
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
Senior Software Engineer at Checkit
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

"What's good about Alibaba Cloud is its database service. It's also good in the virtual machine area."
"Alibaba Cloud has lower costs and good support."
"I rate Alibaba Cloud's scalability an eight out of ten."
"Feature-wise, it provides many features, and ECS, VM, SP, bucket object storage, and databases are the most valuable."
"We use the product for storage and as a VPN."
"It is a scalable product. So, scaling up or scaling down is possible."
"The installation is easy."
"The most valuable feature of Alibaba Cloud is the communication it allows between two servers."
"I like Kubernetes integration."
"The team was particularly satisfied with the flexibility of the service and the rules for managing virtual machines on DigitalOcean."
"The user interface is nice, and it is very easy to use. Anyone can use it."
"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."
"DigitalOcean is a good solution and I would recommend it to others."
"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 performs very well in this context. All the assets go on DigitalOcean."
"The most valuable feature is the ease with which you can create a phishing server and use it."
"The technical support services are good."
 

Cons

"The majority of the tools and processes, in general, have a lot of room for improvement."
"From a performance point of view, Huawei and Azure are faster. Alibaba isn't as good."
"The user experience must be improved."
"I wouldn't recommend Alibaba. I think other companies should just use Azure instead, as it's a much simpler solution."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved."
"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."
"It is not robust."
"If you want more accuracy, stability, and 24/7 customer support, primarily relying on the SDKs and APIs, you should think twice."
"The technical support for this solution could be improved."
"I would like to see improvements to the logging and user interface. The verification process could be more streamlined."
"I think the support can be improved, and I also think DigitalOcean needs to work on the reliability of the droplets."
"I would like to see an automation feature added to send emails out using the open-source solution."
"We found the solution to be a bit expensive."
"The issue with DigitalOcean is primarily the latency. So, when you have a mixed system with some components staying here, and then we encounter network latency, it's not optimal. Our"
"The lack of a proper service provider model ultimately led us to cease operations with DigitalOcean."
"The platform could enhance its features, particularly for ETL processes. Additionally, more integration features would be highly beneficial."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"The price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"The cost is better than similar solutions."
"I don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."
"The product is not that expensive."
"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."
"The cost of Alibaba Cloud is lower than that of AWS, but I feel that its price is on the higher end of the spectrum. Alibaba Cloud charges its users a price in dollars"
"The solution provides the cheapest cloud in comparison to the other cloud solutions."
"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."
"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 would rate DigitalOcean's pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive."
"The pricing is cheap."
"The pricing is moderate and reasonable for a mid-tier cloud platform."
"There is no licensing fee but there is a subscription cost based on how much RAM and storage you require."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

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 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...
What advice do you have for others considering DigitalOcean?
I am a lead developer, currently working in that role. We are a customer of DigitalOcean. They can reach me via email to confirm anything regarding my review. I am willing to be a reference for Dig...
 

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: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.