DigitalOcean App Platform vs. Microsoft Azure

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
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
DigitalOcean App PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Editions & Modules
Basic
$5
per month
Professional
$12
per month
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean App PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsThe free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOcean App PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Features
DigitalOcean App PlatformMicrosoft Azure
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
Microsoft Azure
-
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
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean App Platform
-
Ratings
Microsoft Azure
8.5
Ratings
6% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOcean App PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOcean App PlatformMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
6.8
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOcean App PlatformMicrosoft Azure
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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Actually, migrating to Microsoft Azure is a good solution for almost any situation, especially when all components of your network are ready to become cloud-based. The only drawback I personally encounter frequently is that older software packages cannot always be easily picked up and moved to Microsoft Azure in an optimal manner.
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Pros
  • Hosting of serverless application
  • Hosting of load balancer
  • Hosting of virtual appliances
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  • Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
  • Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
  • BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
  • Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.
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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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  • In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
  • Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
  • Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We have been very satisfied with Windows Azure and now a lot of our business depends on it as more teams are now deploying their applications into Azure. Our next step is to have our Infrastructure team move their resources to Azure. It will take awhile for that to happen but we are positive that it will.
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Usability
No answers on this topic
Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
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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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I feel that Microsoft Azure typically outperforms Google Cloud Platform in hybrid cloud capabilities, integration aspects, and, primarily, security compliance features. Azure offered superior integration with Microsoft's enterprise software ecosystem, and it's second to none in my opinion. This made it the natural choice for most, especially if heavily invested in Windows, Office 365, or Active Directory deployments. We chose Azure over GCP because we simply needed Windows workload support as a strong driver, more access to global regions, and let's not forget that most tech teams in an organization are Microsoft Certified, which makes skillset transfer from on-prem to cloud a minimal learning curve over shifting to a different provider.
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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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  • Times and growth went into it. By balancing on-premises maintenance with continuous cloud improvements, we’ve budgeted and planned endlessly increased capacity.
  • In today’s world of cyber-crime, clients can put even more faith in what they’ve heard. We built an innovative single-sign-on hub for all users. Also, other business platforms use Azure application gateways, reducing worker switching time and increasing productivity.
  • Its step can automate to improve the investment. In addition, we can integrate our organization’s credentials into an authorization for other systems.
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ScreenShots