DigitalOcean vs Zeit Now: What are the differences?
- Pricing and Plans: DigitalOcean offers a wide range of pricing options, allowing users to pay for the resources they need, with options such as Droplets, Block Storage, Load Balancers, and more. Zeit Now, on the other hand, provides a free tier for small projects and usage-based pricing for larger deployments, which can be more cost-effective for specific use cases.
- Deployment Workflow: DigitalOcean follows a more traditional deployment process where developers have to manually push their code to the server, configure the environment, and manage scaling. In contrast, Zeit Now provides a seamless and automated deployment workflow, where developers can simply push their code and Zeit Now takes care of the rest, including scaling, configuration, and deployment.
- Databases and Managed Services: DigitalOcean offers various managed databases and additional services like Spaces (object storage), Kubernetes, and container registry. Zeit Now focuses primarily on serving static sites, serverless functions, and APIs, and does not offer managed databases or other additional services like DigitalOcean does.
- Customization and Flexibility: DigitalOcean provides users with more control and flexibility, allowing them to customize their infrastructure, install and configure software as per their requirements. Zeit Now, on the other hand, has a more opinionated approach, where developers have limited control but can take advantage of the simplicity and ease of use provided by the platform.
- Community and Ecosystem: DigitalOcean has a larger community and ecosystem with a wide range of resources, tutorials, and community-driven plugins and integrations. Zeit Now, although growing rapidly, has a smaller community and ecosystem compared to DigitalOcean.
- Integration and Continuous Deployment: DigitalOcean integrates with popular CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Travis CI, and GitLab CI/CD, providing developers with more options for continuous deployment. Zeit Now has its own CI/CD integrations and offers a GitHub app, making it easier to automate deployments directly from GitHub repositories.
In Summary, DigitalOcean offers extensive customization, more managed services, and a larger community, while Zeit Now simplifies the deployment workflow, provides a more opinionated approach, and offers a more cost-effective option for certain use cases.
