DigitalOcean App Platform vs. Vercel

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
Vercel
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
​Vercel (made by the creators of Next.js) is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions for a workflow. It enables developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervision, all with no configuration. The platform aims to enable frontend teams to work while combining the best developer experience with a focus on end-user performance.N/A
Pricing
DigitalOcean App PlatformVercel
Editions & Modules
Basic
$5
per month
Professional
$12
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean App PlatformVercel
Free Trial
NoYes
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 PlatformVercel
Features
DigitalOcean App PlatformVercel
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
Vercel
8.0
Ratings
0% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces7.00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Scalability4.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Platform management overhead4.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Platform access control4.00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration9.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Development environment creation10.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Development environment replication10.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification6.00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Issue recovery8.00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes6.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings4.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOcean App PlatformVercel
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 PlatformVercel
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOcean App PlatformVercel
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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As a result, there are no specific drawbacks, but if it supports Python applications, one can deploy even dynamic applications on Vercel without having to look for another hosting platform. I've used it to host one of my documentation websites. I edited and deployed the documentation using the pre-built template. It was very quick because all I had to do was enter the data; no coding was required.
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Pros
  • Hosting of serverless application
  • Hosting of load balancer
  • Hosting of virtual appliances
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  • Deploy Site
  • Integrate Giithub
  • Functions to use at scale and free
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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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  • Interface Revamp
  • Cost reduction
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Usability
No answers on this topic
Vercel's good usability and developer experience make me happy to visit their website when I need to configure my deployments. It's very easy to navigate, configure, and manage my projects, and the developer experience is so seamless that I don't have to think much when I push changes to git.
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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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Vercel beats Heroku and DigitalOcean by a mile with pricing. Since Vercel uses serverless infrastructure, we don't pay for servers that don't get used, which is great for smaller platforms. Vercel Support is also very quick to respond, unlike DigitalOcean who took a while to get back to me after they didn't honor platform credits they sent me.
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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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  • Reduced amount of staff time required to deploy applications and websites
  • Improved staging environments by automatically deploying changes on pull requests
  • Allowed for collaboration from members of the open source community with strong git integrations
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ScreenShots