Amazon Web Services vs DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is cheaper in all 2 categories where both compete.
Category by category
Each provider's cheapest published option in each category, on the axis that category is billed on. A dash means they do not sell into it.
| Category | Amazon Web Services | Rate | DigitalOcean | Rate | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CDN & edge delivery | AWS CloudFront | $0.085 | — | — | only one competes |
| Cloud compute & VPS | AWS EC2 | $0.042 | DigitalOcean Droplets | $0.0060 | DigitalOcean7× cheaper |
| GPU cloud | AWS EC2 P5 | $7.57 | — | — | only one competes |
| Object storage | AWS S3 | $0.023 | DigitalOcean Spaces | $0.020 | DigitalOcean1.2× cheaper |
| Application platforms | — | — | DigitalOcean App Platform | $5.00 | only one competes |
| Managed databases | AWS RDS for PostgreSQL | $12.40 | — | — | only one competes |
About each provider
Amazon Web Services
Headquartered in US · 7 priced services
The largest cloud provider by revenue, with the broadest service catalogue and the most complex pricing. Rates are rarely the cheapest on any single axis, and egress in particular is priced well above the market.
DigitalOcean
Headquartered in US · 4 priced services
Flat-rate infrastructure aimed at small teams, priced for predictability rather than for the lowest possible unit cost. Bandwidth is pooled across an account's droplets.
Questions
- Is Amazon Web Services or DigitalOcean cheaper in 2026?
- DigitalOcean is cheaper in all 2 categories where both compete. Picking a provider on an aggregate "cheaper" verdict is usually a mistake — what matters is which of them is cheaper in the categories you actually buy.
- What does Amazon Web Services offer that DigitalOcean does not?
- In this dataset: CDN & edge delivery, GPU cloud, Managed databases. DigitalOcean has no priced equivalent in those categories.
- What does DigitalOcean offer that Amazon Web Services does not?
- In this dataset: Application platforms. Amazon Web Services has no priced equivalent in that category.
- Should I use both?
- Often the cheapest answer, and the table above shows where the seams are. Splitting workloads across providers costs you cross-provider data transfer and a second bill to reason about, so it pays off when the per-category gap is large and the traffic between them is small.