Amazon CloudFront vs DigitalOcean Comparison

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Why choose Amazon CloudFront

• Has a free plan (DigitalOcean does not)
• Lower estimated cost for 10 users: Free vs $4/mo
• Higher Scalability score (10/10 vs 7/10)
• Higher Customization score (9/10 vs 7/10)
• Better fit for enterprise (8/10 vs 5/10)

Why choose DigitalOcean

• Higher Ease of Use score (9/10 vs 5/10)
• Higher Cost score (7/10 vs 6/10)
• Better fit for small business (7/10 vs 5/10)
• Better fit for startups (9/10 vs 7/10)

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Amazon CloudFront

Pros

• The network is very large, with more than 750 PoPs plus over 1,140 PoPs embedded inside ISP networks.
• Data transfer from AWS origins such as S3 and EC2 to CloudFront costs nothing, which lowers costs for workloads hosted on AWS.
• Flat-rate plans start at $15 a month with no overage charges, which makes bills predictable.
• It has strong compliance coverage, including PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, SOC, ISO and FedRAMP Moderate.
• Two tiers of edge compute are available: CloudFront Functions at $0.10 per million invocations and Lambda@Edge for heavier code.

Cons

• G2 and Capterra reviewers report complex configuration and a steep learning curve for people new to AWS.
• Capterra-network reviewers rate customer support poorly, around 3.4 out of 5.
• Flat-rate plans lack some features, such as real-time logs, dedicated IP SSL and continuous deployment, and going over the allowance reduces performance.
• Dedicated IP SSL at $600 a month and Anycast Static IPs at $3,000 a month are expensive extras.
• Users on AWS re:Post and GitHub report cache invalidations that occasionally hang for hours or time out during deploys.

DigitalOcean

Pros

• Flat, published hourly and monthly rates with no promotional first-term pricing or renewal price jumps.
• A $4 per month entry Droplet and per-second billing make it cheap to test and run small workloads.
• One account covers a full set of managed services, including Kubernetes, databases, Spaces with CDN, load balancers, App Platform and Functions.
• Developers can automate everything through the API, the doctl CLI and a Terraform provider, and the tutorials are widely used.

Cons

• Free support is ticket-only with a target response under 24 hours, chat starts at $99 per month, and no plan includes phone support.
• Outbound SMTP ports 25, 465 and 587 are blocked on new Droplets, so you cannot self-host email.
• Raw compute costs noticeably more than budget providers such as Hetzner.
• No refunds, and Droplets on suspended accounts are deleted after a grace period.