DigitalOcean App Platform vs. DigitalOcean Droplets

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DigitalOcean App Platform
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
The DigitalOcean App Platform enables developers to build, deploy, and scale apps on what they describe as a simple, fully managed PaaS. Users of the former Nanobox, acquired by DigitalOcean in 2019, have been migrated to the App Platform upon Nanobox's end of life in March 2021.
$5
per month
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean's Droplets is designed to help the user spin up a virtual machine in just 55 seconds. Standard, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, or Memory-Optimized configurations provide flexibility to build, test, and grow an app from startup to scale.
$4
per month
Pricing
DigitalOcean App PlatformDigitalOcean Droplets
Editions & Modules
Basic
$5
per month
Professional
$12
per month
Basic
$4
per month
CPU-Optimized
$42
per month
General Purpose
$63
per month
Memory-Optimized
$84
per month
Storage-Optimized
$131
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean App PlatformDigitalOcean Droplets
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPricing for DigitalOcean Droplets varies depending on the size of the virtual environment and the associated data needs.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOcean App PlatformDigitalOcean Droplets
Features
DigitalOcean App PlatformDigitalOcean Droplets
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean App Platform
6.8
Ratings
16% below category average
DigitalOcean Droplets
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability4.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead4.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control4.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
User Ratings
DigitalOcean App PlatformDigitalOcean Droplets
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOcean App PlatformDigitalOcean Droplets
Likelihood to Recommend
It can help you to host your virtual appliance or serverless application at very low cost. DigitalOcean marketplace also helps you to deploy the serverless app or virtual appliance effortlessly. It is suitable for small-scale deployment and the process to set up an account and rolling out your app via the marketplace is easy and cheap.
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There are some other platforms that compete with DigitalOcean Droplets that have more performant servers for a very minimal price decrease. However, DigitalOcean's servers still have great performance, and the experience is better when you consider the developer console, managed options, and uptime that DigitalOcean offers. DigitalOcean is the better all-around package.
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Pros
  • Hosting of serverless application
  • Hosting of load balancer
  • Hosting of virtual appliances
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  • Simplicity to scale services--the interface is very quick and effective to use
  • Reliability--this is key for us, as any downtime effects our reputation
  • Keeps the costs down--hosting our own equivalent infrastructure would cost a lot more
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Cons
  • The company has not been very communicative as of lately. Not much news, no apparent work on missing features.
  • Some components are incomplete as far as some critical features. For example, I use RethinkDB as my database and it's missing critical features like backup and clustering, so It is unusable and they should have made that clear from the get go.
  • The pricing on the support plan is vague. I do have the feeling it is actually well worth the money, but it's hard to form a decisions based without more predictable specific.
  • Seems to me like the platform's future is unclear.
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  • In terms of an availability zone, they have limitations not available in most of the geographical locations.
  • No live support is available which can cause problem if you have outage.
  • Number of service is quite limited.
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Usability
No answers on this topic
Other platforms dashboard console is more difficult to use. DigitalOcean's dashboard is clean, simple, and straightforward
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Alternatives Considered
The ability to choose your own cloud provider is huge, especially for a small start up like I have. We have a lot of free credit from AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Azure, etc... The data layer is baked into the system which is better for integration then an external provider. There are also a lot fewer differences between environment as everything is Docker based which gives me the confidence that what works on my machine is going to work in production. Heroku doesn't have good support for Docker containers yet and although Heroku has served me well in the past, it is limited in some aspects.
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DigitalOcean Droplets has more advanced options and the devs at our team are extremely geeky and they prefer to have full control on the server via SSH rather than cPanel.
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Return on Investment
  • The platform is saving me a lot of time I would have been wasting on operations instead of development.
  • The platform is saving me a lot of money as I can easily switch between cloud providers to find the best price.
  • I am worried though for the price I might have to pay in case of an unexpected system issue.
  • Hopefully I will be able to pay the support plan before that.
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  • Digital Ocean has been great helping us move web apps to the cloud
  • Digital Ocean has been really helpful when hiring contractors
  • The interface could use some work, but overall its not terrible
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ScreenShots