Staxly

DigitalOcean vs Temporal

The developer cloud — Droplets, Kubernetes, Managed DBs, App Platform
vs. Durable execution platform for mission-critical workflows

DigitalOcean website ↗Temporal website ↗

Pricing tiers

DigitalOcean

Functions (Serverless)
Free 90k GB-sec/month. $0.0000185 per GB-sec after.
$0 base (usage-based)
App Platform — Free
Static sites free forever. 3 static sites per account.
Free
Droplet — Basic 512MB
Shared CPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD, 500 GiB transfer. Cheapest starting tier.
$4/mo
Spaces Object Storage
$5/month — 250 GB storage + 1 TB outbound. S3-compatible.
$5/mo
App Platform — Basic
$5/month per app. 512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 1 GB bandwidth.
$5/mo
Droplet — Basic 1GB
Shared CPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB SSD.
$6/mo
Kubernetes (DOKS)
Starts at $12/month (1 node). Control plane free.
$12/mo
Droplet — Basic 2GB
1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD, 2 TB transfer.
$12/mo
Load Balancer
$12/month. Supports HTTP/3 + Let's Encrypt.
$12/mo
Managed Postgres — Basic
1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10 GB SSD. Single node.
$15/mo
Droplet — CPU Optimized
2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM dedicated. Best for CPU-bound workloads.
$42/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Volume discounts, dedicated support.
Custom
DigitalOcean website ↗

Temporal

Self-Hosted (OSS)
Free forever. MIT license. Run the Temporal cluster yourself on K8s/Docker.
$0 base (usage-based)
Cloud (usage-based)
Temporal Cloud. Pay per action ($25 per 1M actions base). Active user + storage also billed.
$0 base (usage-based)
Business Plan
Starts ~$100/mo commit. Multi-region, SSO, priority support.
Custom
Enterprise
Custom. HIPAA, PCI, dedicated clusters, enterprise SLA.
Custom
Temporal website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing functions on DigitalOcean vs oss on Temporal.

MetricDigitalOceanTemporal
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

DigitalOcean · 14 features

  • App Platform — Heroku-style PaaS. Deploy from Git. Auto-HTTPS, auto-scale, zero-downtime deploy…
  • Backups — Weekly automated backups (20% of Droplet cost). Manual snapshots.
  • Block Storage Volumes — SSD block storage attachable to Droplets. Snapshot support.
  • DigitalOcean GenAI Platform — Managed AI agents, model-as-a-service (Llama, Mistral), knowledge bases.
  • DNS — Free DNS hosting for your domains.
  • DOKS (Kubernetes) — Managed Kubernetes. Free control plane. Node auto-repair.
  • Droplets — Virtual machines with shared or dedicated CPU. 20+ one-click Marketplace images.
  • Functions — Serverless functions. Node, Python, Go, PHP, Ruby. Pay-per-execution.
  • Load Balancers — Layer 4/7 load balancing with HTTP/3 + Let's Encrypt.
  • Managed Databases — Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, OpenSearch, Valkey. Automated backups + …
  • Marketplace — 300+ one-click Droplet + Kubernetes apps.
  • Monitoring — Built-in metrics + alerts for Droplets, DBs, Load Balancers.
  • Spaces — S3-compatible object storage with built-in CDN.
  • VPC — Private networking. Free. Automatic default VPC per region.

Temporal · 16 features

  • Activities — Retryable units of work.
  • Activity Retries — Declarative retry policies.
  • Child Workflows — Nested workflow composition.
  • Continue-As-New — Close + restart workflow to prune history.
  • Nexus (cross-namespace) — Call workflows across namespaces/teams.
  • Queries — Synchronous read of workflow state.
  • Saga / Compensations — Rollback pattern via compensating activities.
  • Schedules — Cron-like recurring workflows.
  • Self-Host — Deploy cluster on your infra.
  • Signals — Async messages into a running workflow.
  • Timers — Durable sleeps — hours, days, months.
  • Update — Synchronous RPC into workflow with validation.
  • Visibility + Search Attrs — Query workflow state via Elasticsearch/native store.
  • Web UI — Inspect workflow history, events, stack.
  • Workflows — Durable, replayable, long-running functions.
  • Workflow Versioning — Patch workflow code without breaking in-flight runs.

Developer interfaces

KindDigitalOceanTemporal
CLIdoctl CLItemporal CLI
SDKgodo (Go), pydo (official py), python-digitaloceanTemporal Go SDK, temporalio (Python), @temporalio (TypeScript), Temporal Java SDK, Temporal .NET SDK, Temporal PHP SDK
RESTDigitalOcean REST API—
MCPDigitalOcean MCP—
OTHER—Temporal gRPC API, Temporal Web UI
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to DigitalOcean and Temporal are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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