DigitalOcean Vs. AWS: Which Solution Offers The Best Value?

Whether you’re a startup looking for simplicity or an enterprise needing high-performance scalability, this guide breaks down the key differences between DigitalOcean vs. AWS — pricing, features, use cases, and more. 

We’ll start with a quick overview of each provider. And, right away, you’ll notice their different focus areas, target customers, and what makes each platform unique.

What Does DigitalOcean Do?

DigitalOcean is often called the “developer cloud,” and for good reason. It leans heavily on open-source frameworks and libraries, to begin with. 

There is also the App Platform. This is a place for dev teams to automate builds and deployments directly from Git repositories like GitHub and GitLab — complete with built-in CI/CD workflows.

Additionally, DigitalOcean delivers a user-friendly UI. This is excellent for managing your Droplets (virtual machines), Kubernetes clusters, web hosting tools, and real-time logging insights. The platform also integrates seamlessly with popular databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.

A more recent but welcome addition is Auto-scaling. This lets you dynamically adjust compute resources, scaling up to handle traffic spikes and scaling down when demand drops.

If you’re running a startup, small business, or an unpredictable workload, auto-scaling can be a lifesaver (saving you money while delivering optimal performance).

And then there’s pricing transparency. 

Unlike AWS, where pricing varies by region, for example, DigitalOcean keeps its pricing consistent across all regions. This predictability can make budgeting a lot easier, especially for lean teams on a budget.

What Does Amazon Web Services (AWS) Do?

While DigitalOcean focuses on simplicity and developer-centric capabilities, AWS seeks to be the all-in-one cloud computing platform you can begin with, scale, and thrive on. 

One of AWS’s biggest draws is its massive service portfolio. With over 245 fully featured services, AWS offers tailored cloud solutions for almost any application. Whether you need compute power, cloud storage, managed Kubernetes, AI/ML tools, data analytics, or serverless solutions, AWS has you covered.

Another major advantage is AWS’s global infrastructure. It boasts the largest cloud data center network of any provider, spanning multiple regions worldwide — everywhere except Antarctica. This is a big deal if you need multi-region backups for disaster recovery or want to deploy applications closer to your users for low latency and high availability.

AWS also pioneered the pay-as-you-go pricing model. You pay only for what you use by the end of each billing cycle (typically monthly).

Oh, one more thing: AWS Lightsail, which is Amazon’s answer to DigitalOcean. Much like DigitalOcean’s Droplets, Lightsail provides an easy-to-use, flat-rate virtual private server (VPS) solution for users who don’t need the full complexity of AWS’s more advanced services.

Lightsail is essentially AWS “lite.” It offers developers, startups, and small businesses pre-configured compute instances, managed databases, storage, and networking.

Ultimately, Lightsail users can later transition to more advanced AWS services (like Amazon EC2, Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), or Amazon Redshift) when they outgrow Lightsail.

How DigitalOcean And AWS Usage And Pricing Compare

One of the most common questions we hear is: “Is DigitalOcean cheaper than AWS?” But more often than not, what people want to know is whether DigitalOcean delivers the same speed, performance, and reliability as AWS — but more affordably.

We get it. So, let’s break it down and help you decide.

Both DigitalOcean and AWS offer free trials. DigitalOcean provides $200 in credits to explore its platform in 60 days. The AWS Free Tier offers a wider range of options, including 750 free compute hours per month for Amazon EC2. This offers more flexibility for testing and small-scale deployments.

Plus, AWS offers free forever products for certain services, making it easier to continue using some features without cost.

However, DigitalOcean is generally less expensive than AWS. For example, a DigitalOcean Droplet (virtual private server) with 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 1TB transfer, and 25GB SSD storage is about 40% to 50% cheaper than a similar Amazon EC2 instance (virtual machine) on AWS. 

That’s not all.

1. AWS vs DigitalOcean pricing models

DigitalOcean offers a straightforward pricing model with flat rates and monthly caps. For example, their virtual private servers (Droplets) start at $4 per month for shared CPU options. Prices start at $15 per month for managed databases and $10 per month for Volumes (block storage). This provides predictability, which is a good thing when you want to forecast your monthly bill without surprises.

AWS, meanwhile, follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model across its extensive range of services. You are billed based on the resources you consume, such as compute hours, storage space, and data transfer volumes. It’s a flexible but complex billing approach.

AWS lets you pay by the second, hour, month, or year, while DigitalOcean primarily offers hourly and monthly billing. Though it’s worth mentioning that DigitalOcean only charges you for 28 days per month, even if a month has 31 days.

However, AWS provides significant long-term discounts. If you have predictable usage, you can save up to 72% by committing to a one or three-year plan using AWS Reserved Instances or Savings Plans. In contrast, DO lets you change your virtual servers month to month to suit your workload changes. No long-term commitments are required.

2. Data transfer and bandwidth charges

DigitalOcean includes a generous amount of outbound data transfer with each Droplet plan. For example, you get 500 GiB of outbound data transfer per month at no additional cost. 

AWS, on the flip side, charges separately for data transfer. Egress costs vary based on the service and region you choose. 

Image: AWS data transfer fees

This tiered approach can further reduce predictability. 

Meanwhile, DigitalOcean’s pricing is uniform across all data centers. AWS uses region-based pricing, which varies operating costs depending on which data center you choose.

Related reads: 

How AWS Regions Affect Pricing (And How to Reduce Your Fees)

AWS Data Transfer Pricing: 7 Ways To Reduce Unexpected Costs

3. Support plans

DigitalOcean provides free, personalized support with all plans. You can also opt for paid support plans that offer dedicated assistance and faster response times. If you require more immediate support, DO may be the better option over AWS.

AWS offers multiple support plans, each with its own pricing structure. For example, the Business Support plan starts at a minimum of $100 per month or a percentage of your monthly AWS costs, whichever is higher. This plan includes 24/7 access to support engineers and other benefits, but the costs can be significant, especially for smaller businesses or individual developers.

Digital Ocean Vs. AWS: How To Choose The Right Cloud Platform For Your Needs

Now that we’ve covered pricing, let’s dive into other use case questions to help you decide which cloud platform, AWS or DigitalOcean, is the right fit for you.

What kind of cloud services are you looking for?

DigitalOcean offers Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions tailored for developers, startups, and small to medium-sized businesses. Meanwhile, AWS provides IaaS, PaaS, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), all within a single platform. It is also optimized for on-premises, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud deployments.

Do you need lots of customization, or will pre-configured servers do just fine? 

One of AWS’s biggest advantages over DigitalOcean is its customizability. For example, you can access over 200 instance types, each optimized for specific workloads, whether compute-optimized, memory-optimized, or storage-optimized.

Related read: Amazon EC2 Instance Types 101: The Definitive Guide For 2025

This extensive selection can help fine-tune your infrastructure for optimal performance and cost efficiency. The flip side is managing this level of variety and complexity often requires advanced skills and a larger team.

AWS also provides granular control over instance configurations. This means you can specify virtual CPU counts, memory allocations, and other parameters during instance launch.

In contrast, DigitalOcean offers a more limited selection of predefined Droplet types.

This may or may not support highly specialized workloads. 

However, DigitalOcean still delivers high-performance virtual machines with some key advantages. For example, you can provision Droplets in about 55 seconds, use SSD-based storage for fast and reliable performance, and scale resources to handle traffic spikes without downtime.

How much storage and bandwidth do you need?

Take DigitalOcean’s Spaces (object storage) service. Its pricing starts at $5 per month for 250 GiB of storage. You get 1,024 GiB of outbound data transfer included in the subscription, with overages costing $0.01 per GiB.

In contrast, AWS S3 pricing is based on storage volume. Costs also vary depending on how frequently you access your data. See our guide to Amazon S3 storage classes, such as Intelligent Tiering.

New S3 users get 5GB of storage to get started.

The free tier also includes S3 Standard Storage with 20,000 GET requests per month, along with 2,000 LIST, POST, COPY, or PUT requests. Additionally, AWS provides 15GB of data transfer out (egress) per month at no cost, allowing you to move data out of S3 without incurring extra charges — provided you’re within these limits.

Do you need to take services closer to your customers to improve performance and user experience?

AWS has a much larger global footprint than DigitalOcean’s 15 data centers. The benefit of this global footprint is multi-region data backups. This supports robust disaster recovery by ensuring your data remains accessible even if one or more regional data centers are down.

Additionally, AWS’s extensive network supports edge computing. And this supports low-latency content delivery and improves performance for applications that need to be closer to end users. So, AWS may be the better choice if you need scalability and global reach without compromising resilience.

AWS vs DigitalOcean: Which is better for cloud hosting?

DigitalOcean’s Cloudways offers managed cloud hosting services designed to simplify website deployment and management. It supports various applications, including WordPress and Magento. It also provides automatic scaling, server-level caching, and built-in security measures such as firewalls and SSL certificates.

On the other hand, AWS’s Lightsail is also a user-friendly cloud hosting service that provides virtual private servers (VPS) with pre-configured blueprints for popular applications like WordPress, LAMP, and Node.js. Like Cloudways, each Lightsail instance comes with fixed amounts of memory, processing power, and SSD storage, making resource management simple and predictable.

Additionally, Lightsail offers easy-to-use networking options, including static IP addresses and DNS management. This means you can configure your hosting environment with minimal effort.

Are you concerned about vendor lock-in?

For example, AWS Outposts, AWS Direct Connect, and VMware Cloud on AWS allow businesses to run workloads across AWS and their existing infrastructure, creating a true hybrid cloud environment.

Beyond the hybrid cloud, AWS also excels in multi-cloud networking. This is a significant advantage for organizations that need to connect AWS workloads with other cloud providers.

In contrast, DigitalOcean is primarily built as a developer-friendly, single-cloud platform. It does not provide built-in hybrid cloud solutions or deep integrations with other cloud providers.

That said, once you’ve built a significant footprint on either platform, leaving can be challenging. Data migration complexities and potential downtime add to the difficulty. And, moving from AWS to DigitalOcean can be even more challenging (and costly) due to AWS’s data transfer pricing.

DO vs AWS: Which is the better platform for AI and Machine Learning applications?

AWS has been the superior platform for AI and machine learning applications. Its deep integration with third-party AI frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Hugging Face further expands its capabilities.

With Amazon SageMaker, your developers and data scientists can efficiently build, train, and deploy ML models.

AWS also offers specialized AI services, including Amazon Lex for conversational interfaces, Amazon Rekognition for image and video analysis, and Amazon Polly for text-to-speech conversion.

These services run on AWS’s robust infrastructure and advanced GPU instances tailored for intensive AI workloads. The services also integrate seamlessly with AWS’s data lakes and analytics tools, such as AWS Glue and Amazon Redshift, to process vast amounts of data.

However, DigitalOcean now offers GPU Droplets with NVIDIA H100 machines for AI/ML workloads. These Droplets provide flexibility and scalability for AI developers needing on-demand GPU compute. DO also simplifies AI model deployment with one-click installations of popular third-party models.

Additionally, DO offers integrations like access to Hugging Face datasets through DigitalOcean’s 1-Click Models. More resources you can expect include tutorials on Jupyter Notebook setup and deploying models with LLM CLI.

Verdict: Do You Choose DigitalOcean Or AWS?

Hopefully, this guide has shared some clear differences to help you choose the right platform for your business.

But choosing the right cloud provider is just one part of the challenge. 

Are you also struggling with unexplained cloud costs? Or are you looking for a robust cloud cost optimization platform you can rely on from day one?

Then CloudZero can help.

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CloudZero makes it easy:

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Author: Cody Slingerland

Cody Slingerland, a FinOps certified practitioner, is an avid content creator with over 10 years of experience creating content for SaaS and technology companies. Cody collaborates with internal team members and subject matter experts to create expert-written content on the CloudZero blog.