DigitalOcean Droplets vs. DigitalOcean Kubernetes

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
DigitalOcean Kubernetes
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean's Managed Kubernetes is designed for simple and cost effective container orchestration.N/A
Pricing
DigitalOcean DropletsDigitalOcean Kubernetes
Editions & Modules
Basic
$4
per month
CPU-Optimized
$42
per month
General Purpose
$63
per month
Memory-Optimized
$84
per month
Storage-Optimized
$131
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean DropletsDigitalOcean Kubernetes
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
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 DropletsDigitalOcean Kubernetes
Considered Both Products
DigitalOcean Droplets
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
Vultr had better performance in some instances but overall the dashboard was a mess to use a lot of times. When you zoom out from server performance and price, DigitalOcean offered more useful features, and the API was more consistent in some of the use cases we needed.
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
Cost is much lesser
Interface is very easy to use
Documentation is readily available for most of the usecases.
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
The reason for selecting digital ocean was since we require a cloud solution for testing applications internally without being bothered about servers needing to be deployed in different geographical locations. As Droplets can be deployed very easily and boot faster than any …
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
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.
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets is continuously evolving to be more and more powerful. It has great features and has low cost options, which is really great for developers. Its CDN, Loadbalancer, etc. make it a good place to host a high-traffic application. Moroever, DigitalOcean …
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
Both Linode and DigitalOcean Droplets perform about the same and cost about the same. However we prefer the DigitalOcean Droplets interface, and the Cloud Firewall service is a must for us.
DigitalOcean Kubernetes
Chose DigitalOcean Kubernetes
DigitalOcean is the most affordable and straightforward of the hosted Kubernetes options we evaluated. All features that we require are supported without an excess of complication of extraneous features. Straightforward billing is also very important for us in comparison to the …
Best Alternatives
DigitalOcean DropletsDigitalOcean Kubernetes
Small Businesses
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.9 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOcean DropletsDigitalOcean Kubernetes
Likelihood to Recommend
9.9
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOcean DropletsDigitalOcean Kubernetes
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Read full review
DO Kubernetes is well-suited for: - deploying APIs - deploying workers - log collection and analysis (ie ELK stack) - deploying Helm charts and anything that can be mapped on to K8s concepts Less appropriate for anything requiring no public Internet access (ie VPC only). Less appropriate for anything requiring integration with the DO app platform via VPC, at the moment.
Read full review
Pros
  • 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
Read full review
  • Hosted dashboard
  • Hosted container registry
  • Horizontal auto-scaling
  • LetsEncrypt SSL termination
Read full review
Cons
  • 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.
Read full review
  • Option for internal VPC-only deployment
  • Better integration with cloud firewall
  • Better integration with DO App platform via VPC
Read full review
Usability
Other platforms dashboard console is more difficult to use. DigitalOcean's dashboard is clean, simple, and straightforward
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
DigitalOcean is the most affordable and straightforward of the hosted Kubernetes options we evaluated. All features that we require are supported without an excess of complication of extraneous features. Straightforward billing is also very important for us in comparison to the Big Three cloud hosts, which have very complicated billing practices. DigitalOcean also provides a platform with very little vendor lock-in.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • 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
Read full review
  • Excellent uptime
  • Low cost for provided value
  • Good integration with the rest of the DO platform to provide additional value
Read full review
ScreenShots