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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)
7th
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 February 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 7.7%, down from 10.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DigitalOcean is 1.9%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Alibaba Cloud7.7%
DigitalOcean1.9%
Other90.4%
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.
VinodKumar9 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Developer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Private cloud deployment offers cost-effective solutions but needs improved connectivity and issues mitigation
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 service team to reboot. There are issues where even with 8 GB RAM, the performance doesn't meet expectations. The lower cost comes with more issues and disadvantages.

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 solution to run VMs."
"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."
"The cost of hosting the solution is very reasonable. It's quite inexpensive."
"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"It's easy to use, cheaper than other solutions, and more secure."
"We use the solution's AI features for data analysis."
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"The technical support services are good."
"The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well."
"The user interface is nice, and it is very easy to use. Anyone can use it."
"The customer support team are very responsive."
"The most valuable feature is the ease with which you can create a phishing server and use it."
"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 Droplets feature is beneficial and easy to use."
"I like Kubernetes integration."
 

Cons

"The solution’s user interface could be improved."
"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."
"It is not robust."
"I think that sometimes the customer service for Alibaba Cloud is inefficient.... Sometimes it's hard to reach out to them."
"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."
"The solution name is not favorable in some markets and could cause us some problems gaining customers."
"Alibaba Cloud needs to increase availability in Thailand."
"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"The lack of a proper service provider model ultimately led us to cease operations with DigitalOcean."
"I would like to see an automation feature added to send emails out using the open-source solution."
"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"
"I would like to see improvements to the logging and user interface. The verification process could be more streamlined."
"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."
"The technical support for this solution could be improved."
"We found the solution to be a bit expensive."
"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."
"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."
"The cost is better than similar solutions."
"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"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."
"The program is cheaper than others."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"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 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."
"The pricing is cheap."
"This is a pay as you go solution. There is no license and it is usage based."
"I would rate DigitalOcean's pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
 

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 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: February 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.