Amazon Elastic Transcoder vs. DigitalOcean

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
The Amazon Elastic Transcoder from AWS is a cloud-based media transcoding service available to AWS users which is priced on the volume of media transcoded by minute and the media's resolution. The service is scalable and anticipates transcoding of very large files or high volumes of files.
$0
per minute
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
Amazon Elastic TranscoderDigitalOcean
Editions & Modules
Audio Only
$0.0045
per minute
Less than 720p
$0.015
per minute
720p and above
$0.03
per minute
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic TranscoderDigitalOcean
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAmazon Elastic Transcoder offers a monthly free usage tier. The free tier consists of: 20 minutes of free audio-only output per month, 20 minutes of free SD output per month and 10 minutes of free HD output per month. Once you exceed the number of minutes in this free usage tier, you will be charged at the prevailing rates.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic TranscoderDigitalOcean
Features
Amazon Elastic TranscoderDigitalOcean
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
9.2
Ratings
13% above category average
DigitalOcean
8.3
Ratings
3% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime10.00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Dynamic scaling10.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.50 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates9.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Monitoring tools9.50 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images8.00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Operating system support9.00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Security controls8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Automation9.50 Ratings5.00 Ratings
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Amazon Elastic TranscoderDigitalOcean
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DigitalOcean Droplets
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Score 8.7 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
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Score 8.7 out of 10
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SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
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Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
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User Ratings
Amazon Elastic TranscoderDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(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
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic TranscoderDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
If your entire stack is in AWS. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is easier to integrate into your workflow. As input and output files can be in S3. You can get notifications when your job is complete. If you want real-time transcoding it is not possible with this service.
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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.
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Pros
  • converting and playing audio and video files on the go
  • cloud capability
  • speed and reliability
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  • 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.
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Cons
  • Cannot transcode videos in real time
  • The quality of transcoded videos is average. There are other services that provide better quality output.
  • Slow AWS support
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  • 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.
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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!
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Usability
No answers on this topic
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.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
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Support Rating
Support for Amazon Elastic Transcoder is the same as any other service within AWS. If you are familiar with AWS, it is easy to start using Elastic Transcoder
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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.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon Elastic Transcoder is in a league of its own when compared to other alternatives in the market. The most noticeable competitor would be either Microsoft or Adobe or Google. When I had a chance to compare Azure products and Amazon products, the difference is obvious and the experience provided by both the products are very different in terms of user experience and interaction with the application. The cost and availability also were taken into consideration when choosing between the two shortlisted choices. So we went with Amazon's product as it is widely used and has support and maintenance which is basically better than the competition.
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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.
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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.
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Return on Investment
  • Amazon Elastic Transcoder is faster and costs less than most competitors
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  • 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.
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