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Amazon AWS 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
Amazon AWS offers cost-effective, scalable solutions with pay-as-you-go pricing, enabling quick deployment and significant financial benefits.
Sentiment score
6.1
Users generally found DigitalOcean cost-effective, noticing initial savings, though some lacked details to quantify exact financial impact.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon AWS customer service is highly effective and responsive, with knowledgeable support and comprehensive documentation, enhancing user satisfaction.
Sentiment score
6.5
DigitalOcean's customer service is responsive yet inconsistent, needing improved technical support and quicker resolutions compared to AWS.
Reaching out to them and talking is different from receiving a complete solution to your problem.
Principal Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
We have a direct line to Amazon AWS, with premium support and AWS members located within the company.
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet
Amazon AWS has good technical engineers available, making their customer service reliable.
Cloud Technical Program Manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
DigitalOcean support is rated lower than AWS's because we encounter issues more frequently.
Lead Developer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon AWS offers exceptional scalability, enabling effortless resource expansion and efficient scaling to support diverse user needs globally.
Sentiment score
7.2
DigitalOcean is highly rated for scalability, offering tools to manage increased loads and easily add resources like RAM or CPUs.
The scalability of Amazon AWS is excellent.
Principal Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
When setting up resources, the maximum limit can go high or low, at which time instances are increased, which helps maintain latency standards.
Architect at ebzss
Amazon AWS provides strong scalability features, but the scaling process could be made more straightforward.
Cloud Technical Program Manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have not tried vertical scaling yet, but from the documentation, it seems very easy to scale the system.
Senior Software Engineer at Checkit
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon AWS is highly reliable, with strong performance and minimal outages, earning high satisfaction for robustness and stability.
Sentiment score
7.8
DigitalOcean offers reliable stability, though some users note occasional downtimes and performance fluctuations based on extended use.
If I am spinning up any managed service from the console, sometimes it fails to start up, and there will be no information about why it failed.
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet
During one of our latest projects over the New Year, we utilized Amazon AWS's scalability to manage an over-provisioning situation involving 1.5 million subscribers transferring between service data points, which prevented system instability and enhanced performance.
Technical Support Engineer at Ericsson Global
DigitalOcean is quite stable, and I would rate its stability at nine out of ten.
Senior Software Engineer at Checkit
It is approximately 50 to 60% stable, reaching 60 to 70% depending on usage levels.
Lead Developer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon AWS users seek better cost management, integration, user interfaces, security, performance, support, and simplified billing and setup processes.
DigitalOcean struggles with performance, customer dissatisfaction, and service issues, prompting calls for improved features and better support.
The use of fault injection services to simulate failures and improve test labs for daily use could be beneficial.
Technical Support Engineer at Ericsson Global
Amazon AWS should revisit the pricing options and adopt more flexible strategies, allowing for increased usage and not restricting services to paying users only.
Architect at ebzss
Amazon AWS could improve its user interface to make it more user-friendly, especially for people who are not highly technical.
Cloud Technical Program Manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
The lack of a proper service provider model ultimately led us to cease operations with DigitalOcean.
Commercial Manager at Uranium For IT Solutions
There are issues where even with 8 GB RAM, the performance doesn't meet expectations.
Lead Developer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
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.
Senior Software Engineer at Checkit
 

Setup Cost

Amazon AWS offers flexible pricing with cost-effectiveness, but managing expenses can be complex compared to Azure or GCP.
DigitalOcean's pricing ranges from $5 to $50 monthly, with costs depending on configuration and perceived as competitive by some.
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.
Principal Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Currently, Amazon AWS is known to be on the higher price range because popular and in-demand services often come at a premium.
Cloud Technical Program Manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
DigitalOcean offers affordable pricing, especially for startups.
Senior Software Engineer at Checkit
 

Valuable Features

Amazon AWS provides scalable compute, flexible pricing, high security, and integration, ideal for building efficient applications with minimal infrastructure.
DigitalOcean provides reliable, cost-effective servers with an intuitive interface, database management, flexible hosting, and easy installation.
Amazon AWS provides IAM features for user access management as well as KMS through key management service with private and public key encryption methodology.
Architect at ebzss
Its scalability ensures resources can be adjusted based on demand to prevent over-provisioning and maintain high performance, making it cost-effective and agile for daily use in our network.
Technical Support Engineer at Ericsson Global
Overall, there is a lot of fine-grained flexibility that Amazon AWS provides compared to other platforms.
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet
The droplet feature is valuable for hosting my applications as it is particularly cost-effective and serves my needs well.
Senior Software Engineer at Checkit
Some customers had compliance issues with Microsoft that did not exist in DigitalOcean, which provided more flexibility to use the solution.
Commercial Manager at Uranium For IT Solutions
The most significant aspect is that we can connect directly to the system from anywhere.
Lead Developer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon AWS
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
259
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (2nd)
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 January 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 17.2%, up from 16.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DigitalOcean is 2.0%, 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 (%)
Amazon AWS17.2%
DigitalOcean2.0%
Other80.8%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Asif  Meem - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet
Managed cloud services have helped accelerate experiments with flexible configuration options
Sometimes the costs associated with spinning up a service, especially managed services, have implications. For example, if I create a Glue job, that will create S3 buckets and other resources that have cost implications, but once I clean up a Glue job, it does not delete the other accessory resources. Sometimes, I have to go hunting for what resources Amazon AWS might have provisioned and how it is costing behind the scenes. It can be complex depending on your level of expertise. It is not as easy to get started, especially when it comes to secure practices. Amazon AWS is more hands-on than other platforms.
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.
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) solutions are best for your needs.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
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
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
7%
Manufacturing Company
12%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Media Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise114
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...
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 flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...
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

Amazon Web Services, AWS
Digital Ocean
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
jQuery Foundation, Pertino, TaskRabbit, Compose, InfluxDB, The Able Few
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS vs. DigitalOcean and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.