DigitalOcean vs Vultr

Note: Pricing and product information correct as of August 18, 2025, and subject to change.

As a business, choosing a cloud infrastructure provider is a decision that should not be taken lightly. Migrating from one cloud provider to another is a time-consuming (and often costly) process, which means that the provider you choose to build your application on is likely the one you will be using for years to come as your application scales.

DigitalOcean and Vultr are both alternatives to the large hyperscaler cloud providers, and both offer cloud services ranging from virtual machines and virtual private servers to managed databases. Both providers have also expanded their portfolios to include AI offerings and GPU-powered instances for machine learning workloads. While the two cloud providers may look similar on initial inspection, there are key differences in their product suite and how they serve their customers. Notably, DigitalOcean is a larger company with a wider range of products, a more robust customer support program, a large library of documentation and community tutorials, and a simple interface praised by developers and businesses.

Comparing DigitalOcean vs Vultr: Key differences

Company size and background

DigitalOcean was founded in 2012 as a developer-friendly cloud service provider. DigitalOcean differentiated itself by having affordable pricing for high-performance SSD-based virtual machines, called Droplets, and a simple user interface and API/CLI for infrastructure management. Over the years DigitalOcean has expanded its range of products and become the cloud of choice for many businesses due to its simplicity, transparent pricing, excellent developer tutorials, and comprehensive customer support. In 2021, DigitalOcean went public on the New York Stock Exchange, and as of 2025 DigitalOcean has over 1,400 employees around the world. DigitalOcean has acquired Cloudways, a managed hosting provider to expand its product portfolio.

Vultr was founded in 2014 as another developer-friendly cloud infrastructure provider. Their parent company is Constant, and Vultr is their flagship product. In 2025, Vultr remains a privately held company, with approximately 250 employees according to LinkedIn data (at the time of publication). Vultr serves both developers and small-to-medium sized businesses.

Ease of use and documentation

Both Vultr and DigitalOcean are less complex in their interface than hyperscalers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure, which makes them appealing options for businesses looking for simple but scalable cloud solutions. Both cloud hosting providers offer API and CLIs, but DigitalOcean emphasizes its simplicity and user-friendly interface as a key differentiator for their platform.

DigitalOcean also stands apart in terms of both product documentation and technical tutorials. The company has wide-ranging and clear product documentation on all of their products, in addition to a library of over 6,000 technical tutorials and articles, and over 28,000 community-answered Q&As.

Pricing

Pricing for DigitalOcean vs Vultr differs by product. For example, DigitalOcean’s virtual machines start at $4.00/month for 1 vCPU, 512 MiB memory, 500 TiB transfer, and SSD of 10 GiB. A similar machine from Vultr costs $2.50/month, however is only available for IPv6.

While Vultr is slightly cheaper than DigitalOcean for entry-level virtual machines, Vultr pricing for the two cloud service providers is more similar for more performant virtual machines. For example, a “General Purpose” machine from Vultr with 2 vCPUs, 8 GB memory, 5.00 TB bandwidth, and 50 GB storage costs $60/month. DigitalOcean’s General Purpose offering with 2 vCPUs, 8 GiB memory, 4,000 GiB (or 4 TB) transfer, and 25 GiB storage costs $63/month.

Both cloud infrastructure providers offer a wide range of virtual machine configurations, for those who have the need for additional CPU, memory, or storage. Included features may also differ—for example, DigitalOcean offers free DDoS protection, while Vultr’s DDoS protection comes at an additional cost of $10/month. Customers comparing DigitalOcean vs Vultr prices should use their pricing calculators and look at what additional features they may need to pay for to get an accurate picture of the cost for their specific needs.

Customer support

DigitalOcean and Vultr both have customer support, with differing offerings. Vultr offers support through FAQs, docs, and a support ticketing system, but they do not have a stated response time for support inquiries. Vultr does not offer upgraded support for customers who need more assistance or a faster response time, which may be a downside for those running business-critical applications.

Support is an area where DigitalOcean excels. In addition to a free support tier for all customers, which is offered 24/7, DigitalOcean also offers three other support tiers, ranging from $24/month to $999/month. These upgraded support offerings give customers peace of mind that their inquiries will be responded to quickly, with an 8 hour service level objective for the lowest priced tier, and a less than 30 minute response time for the Premium Support tier. DigitalOcean’s Premium Support services include additional features that go above and beyond the support given by most cloud providers, including a dedicated Slack Channel, team of technical advisors, and the ability to conduct architecture reviews and strategy consultations so customers can see the highest cloud ROI possible.

Products from DigitalOcean vs Vultr

In addition to the range of virtual machines that both DigitalOcean and Vultr offer, both companies also provide customers with a choice of other products, including Managed Databases, Managed Kubernetes, and storage.

DigitalOcean shines when it comes to cloud products like their managed databases, which include MongoDB and Kafka, and their Platform as a Service solution (App Platform) and serverless solution (DigitalOcean Functions),. DigitalOcean also offers fully managed hosting from its subsidiary, Cloudways, which is an appealing choice for businesses who do not have the technical expertise to set up and manage their own servers, but want to quickly spin up a website or application.

Here is a comprehensive list of products offered by DigitalOcean and Vultr:

DigitalOcean Products

• Virtual Machines (called Droplets) in a range of configurations

• DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI products

• Managed databases - MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka, Valkey, and OpenSearch (log management, search, and analytics)

• DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes (DOKS)

• Spaces Object Storage

• Volumes Block Storage

• Cloud Firewalls

• Load Balancers

• DNS

• DDoS Protection (included for free with Droplets)

• App Platform - Platform as a Service product

• DigitalOcean Functions - Serverless product

• AI/ML deployment notebooks through Paperspace by DigitalOcean

• Managed Hosting through Cloudways by DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcean Support Plans

Vultr Products

• Virtual machines in a range of configurations

• Bare metal servers

• Vultr AI products

• GPU compute

• Managed databases - MySQL, PostgreSQL, Valkey, Kafka

• Managed Kubernetes

• Object storage

• Block storage

• Load balancers

• DDoS protection (paid add-on)

When comparing DigitalOcean vs Vultr, think beyond your current cloud needs and consider what other products you may need as your business scales.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN accelerates content delivery and improves web performance by caching static assets closer to end-users around the globe. When comparing CDN options among popular cloud providers, DigitalOcean stands out with its unique offering.

With DigitalOcean Spaces, S3-compatible object storage, CDN functionality is included at no extra cost. This integration allows you to deliver static assets globally without additional fees, making it an attractive option for businesses seeking cost-effective performance improvements for international audiences.

Vultr offers a CDN service priced at $10 per month. While flat pricing structure is easy to understand, it does add to the overall expenditure for CDN services.

AI/ML products

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean provides a strong suite of AI/ML infrastructure under Gradient™ AI platform, for developers and businesses who want to build, train, and deploy AI without the complexity of hyperscale cloud providers. Its AI/ML product portfolio includes GPU Droplets, Bare metal GPUs, serverless inference APIs, and 1-Click models.

Vultr

Vultr provides a cloud GPU platform that scales from fractional GPU usage to full bare-metal clusters.

GPU pricing

When it comes to GPU pricing, both DigitalOcean and Vultr provide flexible options, but the value proposition looks different depending on your workload type and commitment.

With reserved GPU pricing, GPUs like the NVIDIA H100 GPUs, H200 GPUs, and AMD MI300X, reserved instances start as low as $1.49–$1.99 per GPU-hour, and L40S GPU Droplets (on-demand price) at $1.57 per GPU-hour. This makes DigitalOcean attractive for organizations running large-scale training or production workloads where long-term usage is expected. Even its on-demand pricing, ranging between $1.99 and $3.44 per GPU-hour, remains straightforward and cost-effective compared to hyperscalers, along with transparent billing.

Vultr positions itself with a lower entry price point for smaller workloads. Its L40S GPUs start at $1.67 per GPU-hour, making it suitable for lighter inference or graphics-focused tasks. However, for high-performance GPUs like the NVIDIA H100 GPUs, Vultr’s pricing is around $2.30 per GPU-hour, which is higher more than DigitalOcean’s reserved rates for the same class of hardware.

Global availability and reliability

DigitalOcean and Vultr both have data centers around the globe—DigitalOcean has 17 data centers in regions including New York, San Francisco, Bangalore, London, and Sydney. The vast majority of DigitalOcean products are offered in all of their data centers. Vultr has 32 data centers in a range of locations, however not all of their products are available across all data centers.

Despite DigitalOcean’s smaller global footprint, DigitalOcean customers experience fast response times and low latency. Here’s what one DigitalOcean customer, JiJi, a large online marketplace based in Nigeria, said about DigitalOcean’s response times:

“We see that the response time from our server latency decreases when we use Premium CPU-optimized Droplets. Aside from achieving low latency, the product impacts our backend. They are CPU bound, so it provides lots of additional processing power, which helps us.” — Nick Zorin, Co-Founder and CTO of Jiji

Both DigitalOcean and Vultr offer service level agreements that guarantee uptime or give customers a credit.

References

• Vultr LinkedIn

• Vultr support

DigitalOcean vs Vultr FAQs

1. Which is better for AI/ML workloads, DigitalOcean or Vultr?

DigitalOcean’s AI/ML products like GPU Droplets, bare metal GPUs, serverless inference, and 1-Click models are cost-effective for building AI/ML applications. GPUs like H100, H200, and MI300X, makes it a strong choice for large-scale training and production workloads. Vultr offers fractional GPUs and a wide range of NVIDIA/AMD GPUs, which may be suitable for teams experimenting with smaller workloads.

2. Which cloud platform is easy for developers to use?

DigitalOcean is known for its developer-friendly experience, with a simple UI, transparent pricing, and seamless integrations across its cloud services. The Gradient™ AI platform deploys AI/ML workloads straightforwardly with 1-Click models and serverless inference. Vultr differentiates itself with GPU fractionalization and broader global presence, which can be appealing for distributed teams.

Choose DigitalOcean for your web hosting needs

Ready to choose DigitalOcean for your cloud infrastructure? DigitalOcean stands out as the developer-friendly alternative to major cloud platforms, offering transparent pricing, simple-yet-scalable solutions, and enterprise-grade reliability. Whether you’re building your first web application or scaling a digital-native enterprise, DigitalOcean’s straightforward approach eliminates complexity while delivering the performance and features modern businesses demand.

Here’s what DigitalOcean offers:

• Droplets (Virtual Machines). Starting at $4/month with predictable pricing and simple configurations.

• Gradient Portfolio. AI platform with serverless inference for GPT-4o and Claude 3.5, GPU Droplets with NVIDIA H100/H200, Bare Metal GPUs for dedicated training, and one-click model deployment.

• App Platform. Deploy applications directly from GitHub with automatic scaling and built-in CI/CD.

• Managed Databases. PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis with automated backups and monitoring.

• Spaces Object Storage. S3-compatible storage starting at $5/month for 250GB.

• Load Balancers. High-availability load balancing starting at $12/month.

• Kubernetes. Managed clusters with free control plane (you only pay for worker nodes).

Sign up for DigitalOcean and try it out today, or contact our sales team if you need assistance migrating from Vultr or another cloud provider to DigitalOcean.