DigitalOcean vs. Google Cloud Platform

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DigitalOcean
Score 8.8 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
Google Cloud Platform
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Google Cloud Platform is a suite of cloud computing services used to build apps or take advantage of cloud infrastructural services, achieve legacy infrastructure modernization, or manage enterprise data and analytic needs.N/A
Pricing
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Platform
Editions & Modules
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Platform
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Platform
Features
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Platform
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean
8.3
Ratings
3% above category average
Google Cloud Platform
8.9
Ratings
10% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.20 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing7.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates10.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Monitoring tools10.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images7.60 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Operating system support8.40 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Security controls9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Automation5.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Platform
Small Businesses
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 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
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
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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For how it helps our team with data storage and connecting to GA4 as a backup option, and the incredibly low cost for us to use it and reliably back up our data, I would highly recommend using this tool for all of your cloud storage needs. It's easy to use and their customer service is always responsive and easy to get a hold of.
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Pros
  • 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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  • Google Cloud Platform provide the autoscale workload when the workload need to scale up or down
  • Great pay-as-you-go pricing model and dashboard report of pricing that help user monitor and optimize the cost
  • Using simpler than other cloud provider
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Cons
  • 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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  • The Logs Explorer is quite hard to dig into and find logs of interest
  • BigQuery transparency for BigLake vs External tables isn't the best
  • Google Group management for permissions can get hairy.
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Likelihood to Renew
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
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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I've found it incredibly easy to use since day one of deployment.
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Reliability and Availability
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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Performance
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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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I feel GCS buckets are pretty interchangeable with Amazon S3 as far as I have typically used them. It just depends on who or your company wants to give money to. I have liked the Google Cloud Platform BigQuery console better than the interface for Snowflake, but that may be due to familiarity and the proportion of time I've used Google Cloud Platform over Snowflake.
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Scalability
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
  • 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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  • Approx 30% cost savings after moving from on-prem to GCP due to reduced hardware, maintenance of DC support, and energy costs.
  • There are much faster release cycles due to CI/CD pipelines with cloud build and scalable infrastructure using GKE. It works very nicely.
  • We use BigQuery a lot, and what used to take hours now takes minutes, speeding up business decisions across teams. Clients.
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ScreenShots

Google Cloud Platform Screenshots

Screenshot of a view of Google Compute EngineScreenshot of the GCP consoleScreenshot of SLIsScreenshot of various homepages