AWS CloudFormation vs. DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
AWS CloudFormation	Score 8.8 out of 10	N/A	AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run an application. Users don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work.…	$0
DigitalOcean	Score 8.9 out of 10	N/A	DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.	$5 Starting Price Per Month

Pricing

AWS CloudFormation

DigitalOcean

Editions & Modules

Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account: $0.00
Handler Operation: $0.0009
per handler operation

1GB-16GB: $5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB: $60.00
Starting Price Per Month

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormation	DigitalOcean
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

There is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with resource providers in the following namespaces: AWS::*, Alexa::*, and Custom::*. In this case you pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation as if you created them manually. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no required upfront commitments. When you use resource providers with AWS CloudFormation outside the namespaces mentioned above, you incur charges per handler operation. Handler operations are create, update, delete, read, or list actions on a resource.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	AWS CloudFormation	DigitalOcean
Considered Both Products	AWS CloudFormation Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation Since the product I'm involved is primarily hosted on AWS we use CloudFormation but in some other products where we have hybrid cloud deployments we prefer terraform which is opensource. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation As we have our whole infrastructure on AWS, that is why we selected AWS CloudFormation. AWS CloudFormation is better integrated with AWS services than other available products and also provides visibility and tracking on AWS. AWS CloudFormation is free while Terraform … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation We didn't look into anything else as Cloudformation was "built-in" for AWS, it just kind of made sense to go with that. Terraform was something that we briefly looked into Terraform but decides to stick with Cloudformation because our task was relatively "simple". Apparently if … Incentivized Helpful? Manuela Jacqueline Mercado Rodríguez Senior Full Stack Developer Chose AWS CloudFormation AWS CloudFormation has more features and robustness. It is suited for professional projects since it provides stability and a wide variety of options for configurations. These include not only dividing stacks by specific code changes, but also in regions. This allows more … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation The only real comparison would be to Terraform, which is another IaC technology at the infra level. Terraform is cloud-agnostic, which means most popular cloud providers are supported. While AWS CloudFormation is AWS-only. Although, if you consider CDK, CDK for Terraform … Incentivized Helpful?	DigitalOcean Vinaya Kumar B Engineering Lead Chose DigitalOcean The target segment of DigitalOcean is application developers and small teams working in startups for easily configuring and deploying infrastructure in the cloud. We selected DigitalOcean for some of our usecases as it is cost effective and easy to integrate with compared to … Incentivized Helpful? Jan Saggiori Director Chose DigitalOcean Simple, and quick setup, competitive pricing as well as geographically you can choose the location of the datacenter. The setup of the machine with RAM / CPU and SDD gives all options, it is just what we always needed and find our self very well with such type of service by … Incentivized Helpful? Fernando Orozco CTO Chose DigitalOcean I chose DigitalOcean over Oracle Cloud because it's simpler, more cost-effective, and quicker to deploy. DigitalOcean’s intuitive interface allows me to manage servers easily, while Oracle Cloud is more complex and suited for larger enterprises. Also, DigitalOcean’s transparent … Incentivized Helpful? Krzysztof Falcman Lead Backend Engineer Chose DigitalOcean DigitalOcean Spaces Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose DigitalOcean DigitalOcean is an inexpensive product as compared to other products available in the market. The UI is easy and the beginner can also understand the UI with the step by step guide. It provides a lot of custom features and the user needs to pay only for what they are using. … Incentivized Helpful? AS Antoine St-Pierre Digital Automation Manager Chose DigitalOcean DigitalOcean is really one of the cheapest options out there for dedicated servers. Plus, their pay-per-use pricing helps companies to grow at their own pace without having to pay for a higher performance or service they don't need initially. Their platform is well built and … Incentivized Helpful? Marco Carnevali VP Products Chose DigitalOcean DigitalOcean is an easier and cheaper way to [set up] new machines. The UX is really good and it's easy to find what you need. Competition offer[s] a complicated way to manage machines and the cost is sometimes more than [...] double of what DigitalOcean offer[s]. However[,] … Incentivized Helpful? Bobby Johnson Co-Founder / Full Stack Dev Chose DigitalOcean As I have said, DigitalOcean was slightly more expensive than something like HostGator, but the amount of customization and quality of service make it worth any difference. AWS was always a pain to set up and use, but DigitalOcean makes it cake. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose DigitalOcean DigitalOcean is not quite as simple as Heroku to get up and running, but it provides a better price point and more configurability. However, in my opinion it's much simpler to get up and running with than AWS Opsworks and even Google App Engine. It also provides a better price … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose DigitalOcean Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Heroku Platform and Google Compute Engine Incentivized Helpful? Leonel Quinteros Director of Technology Chose DigitalOcean Digital Ocean is easier to start with and was a great choice for that project. On other projects, I may choose Google Cloud products because of their more complex product offerings and advanced features. Products like Storage or Pub/Sub isn't available on Digital Ocean and the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose DigitalOcean DigitalOcean can be seen more like a Rackspace or a similar provider. They aren't offering more extended services such as AWS Redshift of something on a larger scale. They are great for just vanilla virtualization and maintaining uptime for those resources across a large set of … Incentivized Helpful? Fedor Paretsky Co-Founder/CEO Chose DigitalOcean Amazon has a very complex UI and many products to offer. They haven't polished up their UI and it has a much greater learning curve compared to DigitalOcean. However, Amazon Web Services (AWS) does have more comprehensive cloud computing services, which forces some companies to … Incentivized Helpful? Tarun Mangukiya Co-Founder Chose DigitalOcean Initially we started using DigitalOcean due to their pricing point as we were in development phase. Slowly when we used it, we starting liking it a lot as it is very fast & easy to get started, compared to the other Cloud Providers we've used. Also they have blogs and … Incentivized Helpful? Jeanine Schoessler Web Developer Chose DigitalOcean Site5's customer service and support have declined over the recent years. The last couple of tickets that I submitted in 2016 were never addressed by their help team. The only customer service agent seems to be on their Twitter account. Site5 does not allow any configuration of … Incentivized Helpful? Praneeth Karnena Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief Chose DigitalOcean Vultr is a new player in the game. They don't advertise their hardware model and for that reason, people may not trust them. I have run few benchmarks on Vultr, they performed slightly better than DigitalOcean but they aren't trustworthy. Their transparency index is very low … Incentivized Helpful? Craig Nash Sr. Network Engineer Chose DigitalOcean Compared service to service, Digitalocean comes out on top usually, for smaller better spec servers. This is what they do, and specialty shops are always the best route, with no exception here. However, if you need more than a server, or are not comfortable doing more than … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose DigitalOcean Cheaper than Heroku which is prohibitively expensive for a small self-funded startup. We quickly outgrew their free tier and migrated to DigitalOcean. AWS is more feature complete however, we found its maintenance overly confusing and not as well thought out. For many use cases … Incentivized Helpful? Chris Putnam Senior Web Developer Chose DigitalOcean DigitalOcean has a much lower price point for VPS - but they are not fully managed as with other services. DigitalOcean VPSs are good for quick simple applications that we are comfortable and efficient at deploying ourselves. We do not generally recommend them for clients, as … Incentivized Helpful? Tyler Longren IT Consultant Chose DigitalOcean DigitalOcean isn't nearly as robust as Google Cloud. DigitalOcean provides VPSs, as does Google Cloud. However, Google Cloud offers many other products as well. ChunkHost is very similar to DigitalOcean, but doesn't have the infrastructure that DigitalOcean has. Geographical … Incentivized Helpful? Hernán Silva Front-end developer Chose DigitalOcean AWS: Too complex to set things up. Period. Mediatemple: Great features, services and customer service. Prices are a bit high for what they offer. Linode: Outstanding features and customer support. Difficult to start with for novice users. Incentivized Helpful? Chris Gabriel Interactive Designer & Developer Chose DigitalOcean My cost savings were significant and I felt like I was much more in control of the hardware and processes. I also had issues with certain marketing decisions my former hosting company made, DigitalOcean was an easy choice! Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose DigitalOcean DigitalOcean's dead simple pricing and solid but basic feature set combine for a no-nonsense way to get your product shipped. Its API makes it nicely scriptable/automate-able compared to traditional shared hosting providers like Dreamhost. I think it compares most closely with … Incentivized Helpful? Joey Yax Web Developer Chose DigitalOcean Linode was my long time go-to and we still have several sites hosted and maintained on their servers. Initially, I was skeptical of DigitalOcean's pricing, but they've proven to be an excellent alternative. Linode is more mature in their toolset, but both are really great … Incentivized Helpful? Edward Larkey Linux System Administrator Chose DigitalOcean It was the right balance of cost, ease of use, and support. Incentivized Helpful?

Features

AWS CloudFormation

DigitalOcean

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
	AWS CloudFormation - Ratings	DigitalOcean 8.3 Ratings 3% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime	00 Ratings	9.20 Ratings
Dynamic scaling	00 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing	00 Ratings	7.00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates	00 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
Monitoring tools	00 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images	00 Ratings	7.50 Ratings
Operating system support	00 Ratings	8.40 Ratings
Security controls	00 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Automation	00 Ratings	5.00 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	AWS CloudFormation	DigitalOcean
Small Businesses	HashiCorp Terraform Score 8.5 out of 10	DigitalOcean Droplets Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10	SAP on IBM Cloud Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10	SAP on IBM Cloud Score 9.5 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	AWS CloudFormation	DigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend	7.6 (0 ratings)	8.2 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	8.0 (0 ratings)
Availability	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Performance	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	8.8 (0 ratings)
Product Scalability	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	AWS CloudFormation	DigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend	Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the Cloning Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource. Management guide. For information virtual hardware, installed software cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	IaC, transactional on top of that Support for "mainstream" general programming languages Sharable IaC "snippets" that can setup standardized environments for individuals quickly OOP techniques are available thanks to OOP languages Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Ease of use - You can get set up with a new server in a matter of minutes. It doesn't get any easier than that. Support - The public forums are incredibly helpful as are the official help articles. I've never needed to contact the support team because of this. All of the information is at my fingertips. Pricing - We're only paying $10/mo for a solution that gives our customers more confidence in us and is a selling point for us. Incentivized Chris Widner VP of Technology & Human Resources Read full review
Cons	Error Description upon Failure Needs to be Improved. Slow to create, delete or update. Need to delete resources manually. It can ask before starting deletion whether to skip those resources or delete them. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs. While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux. There are no regions available on South America. They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc. Incentivized Leonel Quinteros Director of Technology Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	No answers on this topic	I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future! Incentivized Creede Lambard Devops Engineer Read full review
Usability	It's easy enough to get a shared template & apply it. You don't even have to download-then-upload or copy-and-paste, a publicly-accessible url works. Diving deeper, it has enough powerful capabilities to make the life of a platform / DevOps engineer bearable. However, you need equally deep knowledge to troubleshoot issues, when they inevitably pop up. This is the same for all IaC technologies, as they are additional abstraction layers on top of the native API provided by the cloud providers. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	With DigitalOcean it is very easy to start up a server/droplet. They have several templates and server images to select from, and they have good instructions on how to get a server set up and started. The monitoring tools in the dashboard look good and are easy to understand. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Reliability and Availability	No answers on this topic	Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability. Incentivized Hernán Silva Front-end developer Read full review
Performance	No answers on this topic	Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though. Incentivized Hernán Silva Front-end developer Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces. Incentivized Bobby Johnson Co-Founder / Full Stack Dev Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Since the product I'm involved is primarily hosted on AWS we use CloudFormation but in some other products where we have hybrid cloud deployments we prefer Terraform which is opensource. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	I chose DigitalOcean over Oracle Cloud because it's simpler, more cost-effective, and quicker to deploy. DigitalOcean’s intuitive interface allows me to manage servers easily, while Oracle Cloud is more complex and suited for larger enterprises. Also, DigitalOcean’s transparent pricing helps control costs, unlike Oracle’s more intricate and complex pricing model. Incentivized Fernando Orozco CTO Read full review
Scalability	No answers on this topic	Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price. Incentivized Hernán Silva Front-end developer Read full review
Return on Investment	+ We can standup a VPC in minutes - It took a lot of inital time to set up + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	DigitalOcean has very competitive egress pricing, which has been positive for reducing our costs when running services with a large amounts of data transfer DigitalOcean templates have helped us quickly launch services that would otherwise require a lot of configuration (saving time) We haven't had much in the way of negative ROI impacts using DigitalOcean as we don't use it extensively for our core product, but based on personal project experience it can require more engineering time to get up and running with than some other infrastructure services like Heroku. This has been one of the greatest barriers in pushing its adoption in our organization. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots	AWS CloudFormation Screenshots