DigitalOcean App Platform vs. IBM Cloud Functions

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
IBM Cloud Functions
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud Functions is a PaaS platform based on Apache OpenWhisk. With it, developers write code (“actions”) that respond to external events. Actions are hosted, executed, and scaled on demand based on the number of events coming in. No servers or infrastructure to provision and manage.
$0
per second of execution
Pricing
DigitalOcean App PlatformIBM Cloud Functions
Editions & Modules
Basic
$5
per month
Professional
$12
per month
Basic Cloud Functions Rate
$0.00017
per second of execution
API Gateway Rate
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean App PlatformIBM Cloud Functions
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOcean App PlatformIBM Cloud Functions
Features
DigitalOcean App PlatformIBM Cloud Functions
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
IBM Cloud Functions
-
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
Best Alternatives
DigitalOcean App PlatformIBM Cloud Functions
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 PlatformIBM Cloud Functions
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
3.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOcean App PlatformIBM Cloud Functions
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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IBM Cloud Functions [is] not the worse product on the IBM cloud. I decided to write this review as I thought it would be balanced. I would still use functions to set up a serverless architecture where execution time is pretty quick and the code is relatively simple. I wouldn't use IBM Cloud Functions for async calls obviously, as costs could be higher. The functions documentation is lacking in terms of CI/CD, and there are unexplainable errors occurring - like the network connection that I mentioned. So I wouldn't just rely on IBM Cloud Functions too much for the entire system, but make sure it's diversified.
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Pros
  • Hosting of serverless application
  • Hosting of load balancer
  • Hosting of virtual appliances
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  • Validate raw data files - check the validity of raw data input to the system, to make sure we analyze only the relevant data. The raw data stream rate is hard to be predicted, since it depends on real world activities.
  • Analyze raw data - analyzing of valid raw data, described above.
  • Insert data to LOCAL data base.
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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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  • Billing can be a hassle, not the most responsive customer service/support team
  • Handles & executes most functionalities, but other platforms offer more scalability if you're seeking consistent and stable growth
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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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AWS Lambda is 100 times more robust than IBM cloud functions. They essentially do the same thing, but AWS works. AWS is stable. we have had epic failures with cloud functions. Support was horrible. We literally had an open ticket with them for 2 months and it literally went nowhere. They said it could do 100 calls a minute. We proved over and over that we couldn't get above 20 without getting failures. They had NO explanation whatsoever. The ticket got closed because we were tired of asking them questions and getting no understandable or usable response.
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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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  • Definitely has positive impact due to the pay only when used feature
  • Lightweight cloud services help with scaling without high investment in infrastructure
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ScreenShots