DigitalOcean Droplets vs. Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

DigitalOcean Droplets

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting 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
KVM	Score 2.1 out of 10	N/A	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtualization solution developed by small Israeli software company Qumranet and supported by Red Hat since that company's acquisition in 2008.	N/A

Pricing

DigitalOcean Droplets

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

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 Droplets	KVM
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

Pricing for DigitalOcean Droplets varies depending on the size of the virtual environment and the associated data needs.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	DigitalOcean Droplets	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Considered Both Products	DigitalOcean Droplets Verified User Anonymous 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. Incentivized Helpful? Prashant Chaudhari Head of Engineering & Founding team member Chose DigitalOcean Droplets Cost is much lesser Interface is very easy to use Documentation is readily available for most of the usecases. Incentivized Helpful? Anuj Rai Senior Associate Technology 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 … Incentivized Helpful? LA Laila Abouizza Backend Developer 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. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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. Incentivized Helpful?	KVM Verified User Anonymous Chose KVM Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an open-source and free solution, compared to Virtualbox which is a product from Oracle. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose KVM The key points why I made my decision for KVM in comparison with VMWare are: Freeware software (I am using an Ubuntu server OS), Fewer resources usage, vSwitch using that provides the ability to configure dot1q trunks to/between VMs, Stability, and simplicity of … Incentivized Helpful? RM Robert Munteanu Software Engineer Chose KVM Compared to VirtualBox, KVM has simpler licensing terms and is supported by the operating system vendor. KVM also has more mature integrations with other open-source projects. Automating provisioning is simple with KVM since it is available in the package repositories of … Incentivized Helpful? Valentin Höbel Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure Chose KVM KVM is free and provides environments where guests can run their own Kernel while still performing very well. It is also very native to work with KVM since it is integrated within the Linux Kernel. Incentivized Helpful? Stenio Pereira Filho IT Group manager Chose KVM It is a very reliable solution that can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with low overhead. It is a free and open source software. Easy to use withOpenStack. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose KVM We've found KVM to be less problematic, both from a stabilty standpoint, but also in a flexibility and licensing standpoint. We love being able to deploy the hardware we want, as we want it, without needing the blessing of a specific vendor. Incentivized Helpful?

Features

DigitalOcean Droplets

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Server Virtualization

Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
	DigitalOcean Droplets - Ratings	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) 9.2 Ratings 12% above category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning	00 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Management console	00 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup	00 Ratings	9.70 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration	00 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security	00 Ratings	9.50 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	DigitalOcean Droplets	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Small Businesses	Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Score 8.9 out of 10	DigitalOcean Droplets Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	SAP on IBM Cloud Score 9.5 out of 10	VMware vSOM (discontinued) Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises	SAP on IBM Cloud Score 9.5 out of 10	VMware vSOM (discontinued) Score 10.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	DigitalOcean Droplets	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Likelihood to Recommend	9.9 (0 ratings)	9.3 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	DigitalOcean Droplets	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Kernel-based Virtual Machine is very well suited when one needs a single-node virtualization host or needs to build a complex demo setting on their own notebook (e.g. when demonstrating solutions to a customer). Incentivized Valentin Höbel Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure 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 Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Lightweight built-in implementation for all *nix based OS. Easy to deploy and manage VMs. Freeware (is you are using a free OS). Incentivized Verified User Anonymous 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. Incentivized Anuj Rai Senior Associate Technology Read full review	KVM itself doesn't ship with a management interface KVM itself is a bit complicated to handle KVM needs Qemu to virtualize Windows guests Incentivized Valentin Höbel Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure Read full review
Usability	Other platforms dashboard console is more difficult to use. DigitalOcean's dashboard is clean, simple, and straightforward Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	It does the job and stays out of the way. The specifics of usability relies on the implementation, but with things like Icarus and libvirt, things are standardizing nicely. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
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. Incentivized LA Laila Abouizza Backend Developer Read full review	The key points why I made my decision for KVM in comparison with VMWare are: Freeware software (I am using an Ubuntu server OS), Fewer resources usage, vSwitch using that provides the ability to configure dot1q trunks to/between VMs, Stability, and simplicity of using/troubleshooting, Well-known interface (for Linux geeks). Incentivized Verified User Anonymous 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 Incentivized Tom Blazek IT Manager Read full review	Capital expenditure costs are low, because is open-source and free Operational expenditure costs are medium because it's necessary [to have] an IT team with experience in Linux First step to the virtualization world. Wake up, we are in the 21st century Incentivized Stenio Pereira Filho IT Group manager Read full review
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