WorkOS vs DigitalOcean
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
vs. The developer cloud — Droplets, Kubernetes, Managed DBs, App Platform
Pricing tiers
WorkOS
AuthKit Free
First 1M MAUs free. Unlimited organizations, user management, social OAuth, passwordless.
Free
AuthKit Scale
Per 1M additional MAUs.
$2500/mo
Enterprise / Annual Credits
Custom with 99.99% SLA, guided migration, dedicated support.
Custom
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
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing authkit-free on WorkOS vs functions on DigitalOcean.
| Metric | WorkOS | DigitalOcean |
|---|---|---|
| mau included | 1000000 users/month | — |
| organizations | unlimited orgs | — |
| staging environments | free envs | — |
Features
WorkOS · 13 features
- Audit Logs — Standardized audit log pipeline with streaming to SIEMs (Splunk, Datadog, Sumo L…
- AuthKit — Complete drop-in user management UI + hosted auth flows. Built on top of WorkOS.
- Directory Sync — SCIM-based user provisioning/deprovisioning from Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspac…
- FGA (WorkOS) — Fine-grained authorization based on Google Zanzibar / OpenFGA.
- Magic Auth — Passwordless email codes + links. Good alternative to password auth for B2B.
- Multi-Factor Auth — TOTP + SMS MFA enrollment and verification APIs.
- Organizations — Multi-tenant B2B primitive. Attach SSO/Directory/Audit to specific customer orgs…
- Passkeys — WebAuthn passkeys as a first-class factor.
- Radar — Fraud protection: device fingerprinting + risk scoring at signup and login.
- Single Sign-On — Plug-and-play SAML 2.0 + OIDC SSO with 30+ identity providers pre-mapped.
- User Management — REST API + webhooks for user CRUD, email verification, sessions, MFA, metadata.
- Vault — Secret storage for tokens + per-tenant credentials.
- Widgets — Embeddable admin portals (SSO setup, directory mapping) that your customers self…
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.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | WorkOS | DigitalOcean |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | doctl CLI |
| SDK | workos-go, @workos-inc/authkit-nextjs, workos-java, workos-node, workos-php, workos-python, workos-ruby | godo (Go), pydo (official py), python-digitalocean |
| REST | WorkOS REST API | DigitalOcean REST API |
| MCP | — | DigitalOcean MCP |
| OTHER | Webhooks | — |
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