I'm not sure they are comparable. I have a bunch of servers with both Scacleway and DO and, despite the slow disk access on Scacleway's, you get 2GB of memory per server which works well for some microservices.
A DO instance with the same amount of memory costs $20, compared to €2 for an IP-less server on Scacleway.
Are you (and parent) looking at something other than their pricing pages? It seems to me that scaleway costs 0.6 euro cents/hour, but also generally has higher numbers for most features than Digital Ocean: more cores, more RAM, more disk, more bandwidth.
My comparison was between the C1 offering from Scaleway and the lowest DigitalOcean package. Scaleway has far larger disk and memory, but the disk is remote over the network link and the 4 ARM cores are 32bit and terribly slow. I really like Scaleways configuration and control panel but the performance just isn't there. It's likely better for a lot of things other people are doing but I needed the IO and CPu performance.
How did you measure CPU performance? With DO you have propably a high "burst" cpu performance but if you keep using a lot of CPU ressources they will probably supsense your VM because of "abuse" or something (my experience with other VM providers). On Scaleway you have worse CPU performance but you can use the full CPU 24/7.
Compiling software is a somewhat meaningful metric across architectures (with caveats), but openssl speed is not really indicative of the CPU performance, rather it's benchmarking its own fast assembly routines. That only matters if your workload is crypto-bound.
