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Amazon EC2 vs DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean provides droplets and managed services aimed at simplicity, while EC2 offers a broader range of instance types and enterprise features.
Short answer: Pick Amazon EC2 if you want general-purpose and specialized cloud compute; pick DigitalOcean if you want full-stack cloud with integrated AI inference. Both have a free plan.
Amazon EC2Virtual servers in the AWS cloud
DigitalOceanCloud for developers: droplets, databases and app hostingWhich to pick
Pick Amazon EC2 if you want…
- General-purpose and specialized cloud compute
Pick DigitalOcean if you want…
- Full-stack cloud with integrated AI inference
- Simple cloud VMs
Side by side
- What it is
- Amazon EC2:Amazon EC2 provides secure, resizable virtual servers with a wide choice of processors, storage, networking, OS, and purchase models.
- DigitalOcean:DigitalOcean provides a unified cloud platform with compute, storage, managed databases, and AI/ML services for building and scaling applications.
- Best for
- Amazon EC2:General-purpose and specialized cloud compute
- DigitalOcean:Full-stack cloud with integrated AI inference
- Who it’s for
- Amazon EC2:Developers, enterprises, and teams needing flexible cloud compute.
- DigitalOcean:Developers and teams building AI agents, web apps, and data-intensive workloads.
- Pricing
- Amazon EC2:Freemium
- DigitalOcean:Freemium
- Free plan or trial
- Amazon EC2:Free trial
- DigitalOcean:Free plan (App Platform)
- Plans
- Amazon EC2:—
- DigitalOcean:DigitalOcean Harness Runtime $0.0535/hr per hour · Action Gateway $0.10/1,000 calls · Inference $0.05/M tokens · GPU Droplets $1.91/GPU/hour per hour · App Platform $0/month
- Works with
- Amazon EC2:—
- DigitalOcean:Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Valkey, OpenSearch, Prometheus, Grafana
Amazon EC2 features
- Resizable compute. Scale virtual servers up or down on demand with over 1,000 instance types.
- Processor choice. Select Intel, AMD, or Arm CPUs, including Graviton for price-performance.
- AWS Nitro security. Hardware-based isolation and virtualization for secure workloads.
- Flexible pricing. Pay-as-you-go On-Demand, Spot discounts up to 90%, or Savings Plans up to 72% off.
- High availability SLA. 99.99% availability with capacity reservations for critical events.
- GPU & ML support. Dedicated GPU instances and Capacity Blocks for machine-learning training and inference.
- Dedicated Hosts. Physical servers for license-bound software with optional Savings Plans.
- Per-second billing. Charges in one-second increments, removing cost of unused compute time.
DigitalOcean features
- Managed Agents. Run production AI agents on the same stack as data, inference and infrastructure without cross-vendor hops.
- Inference Engine. Serverless, dedicated or batch inference on 70+ models with an intelligent router that selects the best model per call.
- Core Cloud Compute. Droplets, GPU Droplets, Managed Kubernetes and App Platform for any workload, with per-second billing.
- Managed Databases & Vector Stores. Fully managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Valkey, OpenSearch and vector databases with automated backups.
- Functions & Serverless. Event-driven serverless functions that scale automatically and charge only for usage.
- Networking & Security. Load balancers, VPC, firewall, CSPM and global CDN with flat pricing and free data transfer within regions.
Amazon EC2 vs DigitalOcean FAQ
What is the difference between Amazon EC2 and DigitalOcean?+
DigitalOcean provides droplets and managed services aimed at simplicity, while EC2 offers a broader range of instance types and enterprise features.
Should I use Amazon EC2 or DigitalOcean?+
Pick Amazon EC2 if you want general-purpose and specialized cloud compute. Pick DigitalOcean if you want full-stack cloud with integrated AI inference or simple cloud VMs.
Is Amazon EC2 or DigitalOcean free?+
Amazon EC2 has a free plan and paid plans. DigitalOcean has a free plan (App Platform) and paid plans.
On DevHunt
Based on each tool's website and DevHunt data. Details may change; check the official sites.