DigitalOcean vs Scaleway

What DigitalOcean is

DigitalOcean is a developer-friendly hosting platform designed to 'simplify' cloud computing. For those fleeing the complexity of AWS, its 'Droplets' allow you to spin up virtual servers in seconds. Its transparent, predictable monthly pricing is a favorite for startups. Known for excellent documentation and community guides, it is the best 'middle ground' for those who want to deploy their code fast without corporate bloat.

What Scaleway is

Scaleway is a proprietary European cloud with virtual and GPU instances, bare metal, object/block storage, networking, Kubernetes, databases and serverless services. Virtual instances are pay-as-you-go by powered-on time; the advertised compute rate excludes storage and attached public IPv4, while list prices include IPv6 and egress. Savings Plans trade commitment for discounts. On raw instances the customer owns operating-system updates, access, application security, availability and backup design; managed products move only specified responsibilities to Scaleway.

What DigitalOcean is built to do

Droplets

Flexible, SSD-based virtual servers that spin up in a matter of seconds.

Managed Databases

Professionally manage MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis without setup chores.

Spaces Storage

AWS S3-compatible, affordable, and easy object storage for your data.

Kubernetes

An affordable K8s service that simplifies container management.

What Scaleway is built to do

Virtual instances

Offers development, general-purpose, memory, compute, GPU and other VM families.

Storage choices

Attaches local or block volumes and provides object, archive and snapshot services.

Managed cloud products

Includes Kubernetes, databases, registries and serverless services with product-specific boundaries.

Usage and commitments

Combines hourly use with optional Savings Plan discounts for committed consumption.

Choose DigitalOcean if

• Solo Developers, Startups, and Small Businesses.

Choose Scaleway if

• Development and production VMs whose instance family exists in the required availability zones
• European cloud strategies after legal, residency and disaster-recovery review
• Workloads benefiting from included VM egress and explicit hourly component pricing

Skip Scaleway if

• The architecture requires a service or global region footprint absent from the current catalog
• The team assumes storage, IPv4, snapshots and support are included in the compute price
• No owner exists for instance hardening, OS updates, backups and multi-zone recovery

DigitalOcean: pros & cons

• Extreme Simplicity: Offers a very understandable dashboard instead of complex jargon.
• Predictable Pricing: No surprise bills at the end of the month; package prices are fixed.
• Great Documentation: Boasts some of the best technical guides on the entire internet.
• App Platform: A PaaS solution that automatically deploys your code from GitHub.
• Enterprise Limit: Does not offer as many highly specific services (200+) as AWS.
• High Availability: Can be limited for extremely complex, multi-region backup scenarios.
• Advanced Networking: May fall short for highly specialized custom network configs.

Scaleway: pros & cons

• Published component pricing: Instance families show hourly and approximate monthly compute rates by availability zone.
• Egress-inclusive VM pricing: Current list rates include outbound traffic and IPv6 for virtual instances.
• European footprint: Products run in named European regions and availability zones.
• Automation options: Console, APIs, CLI and infrastructure-as-code tooling support programmatic operations.
• Compute is not the full bill: Local/block storage, snapshots and attached public IPv4 are separate line items.
• Powered-on time bills: CPU instances accrue charges during startup and standby, not only active workload execution.
• Availability varies: Instance families, SLAs and products differ by region and availability zone.
• VM operations are customer-owned: OS patching, configuration, access control, backups and application resilience are not managed away.