DigitalOcean vs Scaleway
Split decision: DigitalOcean is cheaper in 1 of the 2 contested categories, Scaleway in 1. Neither is the cheaper provider outright.
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 | DigitalOcean | Rate | Scaleway | Rate | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud compute & VPS | DigitalOcean Droplets | $0.0060 | Scaleway Instances | $0.0060 | DigitalOcean1× cheaper |
| Object storage | DigitalOcean Spaces | $0.020 | Scaleway Object Storage | $0.018 | Scaleway1.1× cheaper |
| Application platforms | DigitalOcean App Platform | $5.00 | — | — | only one competes |
| Managed databases | — | — | Scaleway Managed Database | $13.00 | only one competes |
About each provider
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.
Scaleway
Headquartered in FR · 3 priced services
A French cloud with EU data residency as its main pitch, covering compute, object storage, and managed databases at rates between Hetzner and the hyperscalers.
Questions
- Is DigitalOcean or Scaleway cheaper in 2026?
- Split decision: DigitalOcean is cheaper in 1 of the 2 contested categories, Scaleway in 1. Neither is the cheaper provider outright. 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 DigitalOcean offer that Scaleway does not?
- In this dataset: Application platforms. Scaleway has no priced equivalent in that category.
- What does Scaleway offer that DigitalOcean does not?
- In this dataset: Managed databases. DigitalOcean 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.