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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)
8th
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)
14th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 13.3%, up from 6.6% 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

Min HtetOo - PeerSpot reviewer
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
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

"We use the product for storage and as a VPN."
"It's easy to use, cheaper than other solutions, and more secure."
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"We use the solution's AI features for data analysis."
"Flexibility and costs were probably the most important thing for us. The cost was one of the big factors for choosing Alibaba Cloud relative to other cloud solutions, especially in Asia"
"It is easy to set up."
"Alibaba Cloud has lower costs and good support."
"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"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."
"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 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."
"The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well."
"The most valuable feature is the ease with which you can create a phishing server and use it."
"The user interface is nice, and it is very easy to use. Anyone can use it."
"The solution is easy to set up."
 

Cons

"The solution name is not favorable in some markets and could cause us some problems gaining customers."
"A big area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is its support. Another area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is SDK-based service because sometimes, the SDKs don't work correctly. Support for API-based services also needs improvement in Alibaba Cloud because, at the moment, it's not that stable."
"The majority of the tools and processes, in general, have a lot of room for improvement."
"Alibaba Cloud's initial setup is somewhat complex."
"Users use websites as a tutorial. However, the Alibaba Cloud website has the content, and the scripts are copied from Amazon Web Services. We had received customer feedback where the customer asked us to get formulate original content instead of copying from Amazon Web Services. It’s very odd and awkward."
"I think that sometimes the customer service for Alibaba Cloud is inefficient.... Sometimes it's hard to reach out to them."
"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."
"The support offered by the tool is ridiculous."
"There are disadvantages, such as machines getting stuck or disconnected, requiring restarts."
"I would like to see improvements to the logging and user interface. The verification process could be more streamlined."
"The deployment time can be improved in DigitalOcean. While deployment is automated, the process can take a minute and a half to five minutes, and for more complex applications, this time increases even further. This is not optimal for applications that receive frequent updates."
"The technical support for this solution could be improved."
"We found the solution to be a bit expensive."
"The platform could enhance its features, particularly for ETL processes. Additionally, more integration features would be highly beneficial."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is not that expensive."
"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"
"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."
"I don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."
"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."
"We cut our costs significantly by migrating our infrastructure to the cloud. Alibaba Cloud employs a pay-as-you-go model, so that minimizes many costs for us."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"The cost is better than similar solutions."
"The solution provides the cheapest cloud in comparison to the other cloud solutions."
"The pricing is moderate and reasonable for a mid-tier cloud platform."
"The program is cheaper than others."
"There is no licensing fee but there is a subscription cost based on how much RAM and storage you require."
"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."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"The pricing is cheap."
"I am using the cheapest option available, which costs $50 per month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Alibaba Cloud?
ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution.
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 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...
 

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 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.