DigitalOcean App Platform vs. Google App Engine

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
Google App Engine
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Google App Engine is Google Cloud's platform-as-a-service offering. It features pay-per-use pricing and support for a broad array of programming languages.
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Pricing
DigitalOcean App PlatformGoogle App Engine
Editions & Modules
Basic
$5
per month
Professional
$12
per month
Starting Price
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Max Price
$0.30
Per Hour Per Instance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean App PlatformGoogle App Engine
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOcean App PlatformGoogle App Engine
Features
DigitalOcean App PlatformGoogle App Engine
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
Google App Engine
8.7
Ratings
9% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces7.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Scalability4.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Platform management overhead4.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Platform access control4.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration9.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Development environment creation10.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Development environment replication10.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification6.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Issue recovery8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes6.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOcean App PlatformGoogle App Engine
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOcean App PlatformGoogle App Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOcean App PlatformGoogle App Engine
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.
Read full review
Google App Engine is especially well suited for situations where there is a variable workload during the day, e.g. inbound task processing with task queues. In this situation queues can be setup with parameters governing the process speed/scaling which allows you to easily balance performance with cost and meet a good balance.
Read full review
Pros
  • Hosting of serverless application
  • Hosting of load balancer
  • Hosting of virtual appliances
Read full review
  • Building an application that uses Google's Authentication, means users no longer need to remember an different user id and password. Once they are logged into to Google, they can seamlessly access your application hosted on Google App Engine.
  • Google App Engine automatically scales up and down. SO if your application receives a spike in user traffic, App Engine automatically launches additional instances of your application to cater for the increased traffic. Once App Engine detects that the spike is usage is over, it automatically scales down to handle the current traffic.
  • Google App Engine can be easily integrated with Google Cloud SQL, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage etc, so that you can build out a full application using one or more of Google's Cloud Platform products.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
  • For beginners, there is a learning curve that can be reduced by decluttering the functionalities.
  • For much big migrations it takes to a lot of time to deploy which can be reduced.
  • The scaling of applications based on the user count is not seamless and it requires improvement.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
App Engine is a solid choice for deployments to Google Cloud Platform that do not want to move entirely to a Kubernetes-based container architecture using a different Google product. For rapid prototyping of new applications and fairly straightforward web application deployments, we'll continue to leverage the capabilities that App Engine affords us.
Read full review
Usability
No answers on this topic
Google App Engine is very intuitive. It has the common programming language most would use. Google is a dependable name and I have not had issues with their servers being down....ever. You can safely use their service and store your data on their servers without worrying about downtime or loss of data.
Read full review
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Good amount of documentation available for Google App Engine and in general there is large developer community around Google App Engine and other products it interacts with. Lastly, Google support is great in general. No issues so far with them.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
App Engine is a much more streamlined system than EC2. There is a fundamental difference between them, but they are used for basically the same thing as far a I could tell -- to serve applications EC2 is certainly more complicated, but if offers more machine-level control if that's what you need. It can tend to cost more as well. App Engine is far more straightforward but there are limitations if you need to change the environment. But even then, Google Compute Engine also compares to EC2 and stays within GCP.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
  • App Engine can scale basically infinitely so our users can always expect fast responsiveness.
  • App Engine has saved us money by only using the resources we need when we need them.
  • The security and IAM policies surrounding App Engine have saved a lot of head aches.
Read full review
ScreenShots