DigitalOcean vs. Netlify 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
Netlify Platform
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Netlify is a platform for developers from the company of the same name in San Francisco, used to build performant and dynamic web sites, e-commerce stores and applications. By uniting an ecosystem of technologies, services and APIs into one workflow.
$0
Pricing
DigitalOceanNetlify Platform
Editions & Modules
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Starter
$0
Pro
$19
per month per user
Business
$99
per month per user
Enterprise
Custom Quote
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOceanNetlify Platform
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOceanNetlify Platform
Features
DigitalOceanNetlify 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
Netlify Platform
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images7.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support8.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation5.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOceanNetlify Platform
Small Businesses
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
ManageWP
ManageWP
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOceanNetlify Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(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
DigitalOceanNetlify 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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Any frontend hosting solution is just great. It's also available for users in China to access. I don't know if this will be a permanent fixture as it's more dependent on China, but our project requires access from China, and Vercel is not accessible there. Netlify is hugely CI-friendly, so I would also recommend it to anyone with a solid CI/CD workflow.
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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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  • Hosting multiple websites and having multiple projects
  • Updating the site by directly connecting to Github repository as new code is pushed
  • Temporary deployment to show preview on GitHub pull requests
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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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  • it is not aimed at it but first party laravel support would be nice.
  • their free tier was so handy, i wish they start some similar efforts
  • incorporate more WebOps mindset
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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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No answers on this topic
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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Netlify is extremely user friendly while having several notable features including, but not limited to: - Managing deploys - Form integration - Domain management - Use of plugins From a user standpoint, they have made it incredibly easy to manage and review our websites deployment processes while incorporating the above optional features
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Reliability and Availability
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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No answers on this topic
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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To me, Netlify is the gold standard for static web hosting, but each alternative has specific situations where it might fit better. If building a Next.js site, then Vercel is the easiest solution for hosting. For Jekyll, GitHub Pages might make more sense. Other than that, I would turn to Netlify as my first choice for any static site hosting.
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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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No answers on this topic
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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  • Netlify Platform has reduced our cost of additional server capabilities for PoC projects
  • Netlify Platform has simplified CI CD pipelines for small standalone applications, thereby improving developer productivity
  • Junior developers mainly working on Netlify Platform are often unable to get a low level understanding of server configuration, which is a drawback
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ScreenShots

Netlify Platform Screenshots

Screenshot of Netlify: Build with anything, connect to everything.Screenshot of Gather feedback right from the browser with Netlify collaborative Deploy Previews. Share progress early and often with preview links created automatically for every deploy. Netlify automatically builds a new Deploy Preview as a unique permanent URL for each Pull/Merge Request. With no coding or setup, every preview enables reviewers to submit feedback complete with screenshots, videos, and annotations.Screenshot of Team overview in the Netlify platform helps you monitor your team's usage, showing you the number of team members and how much build capacity and bandwidth your team is using.Screenshot of Netlify Edge Functions help you run code at the edge, close to your users. Netlify Edge Functions use Deno and the powerful V8 JavaScript runtime to let you run globally distributed functions for the fastest possible response times.Screenshot of Discover, connect, and configure dev tools and APIs all within the Netlify Integrations Hub to extend the limits of web performance and team productivity.Screenshot of Build interactive and connected web applications faster with Netlify Graph. Start using API services without spending time writing glue code, learning every API’s unique structure, or composing endless API endpoints to get data into your app. Token management becomes a non-issue. Graph Authentication handles token refresh and scope management so your APIs stay connected over time.