CloudWays vs WP Engine 2023: Who Hosting is the Best?
Welcome to my comprehensive comparison of Cloudways vs WP Engine for managed cloud hosting!
As two leading providers in this space, Cloudways and WP Engine both offer robust optimized environments for WordPress sites and beyond. However, they have key differences across factors like pricing, features, performance, support, and security that could make one a better fit than the other depending on your needs.
In this detailed face-off review, I’ll be drawing from hands-on experience and benchmarks to compare Cloudways and WP Engine across all of these important criteria to help you determine the ideal managed cloud hosting provider for your website or application.
Whether you’re looking for specialized WordPress optimization from WP Engine or the flexible multi-framework support of Cloudways, I’ll provide the information you need to make an informed decision.
Throughout the article, I’ll also answer common questions our readers have when evaluating Cloudways and WP Engine, such as:
- Which solution offers better performance and speed?
- How do Try Cloudways for free and Get WP Engine hosting pricing and plans compare?
- What are the key differences in features offered by each platform?
- How does customer support compare between Cloudways and WP Engine?
- Which provider has better security and protection for sites?
By the end, you’ll have all the details to confidently choose the ideal managed hosting provider for your website or application needs between these two respected platforms.
Let’s dive in!
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Pricing Comparison – Cloudways vs WP Engine
Pricing is an important factor when choosing between Cloudways and WP Engine. Let’s compare what each platform costs based on the hosting infrastructure needed.
Cloudways Pricing
Cloudways offers flexible and transparent pay-as-you-go pricing on top of DigitalOcean infrastructure.
Plans and Pricing
- Free Trial: Start for free without a credit card
- Server Plans: Starting at $10/month for a 1GB RAM server
- Scalable: Add resources as required
- Billing: Monthly, no long-term contracts
Start your Cloudways FREE trial today!
WPEngine Pricing
WPEngine has preset managed WordPress hosting plans for different needs.
Plans and Pricing
- Startup: from £16/month
- Professional: from £40/month
- Advanced Options: Custom solutions from £468/month
- Billing: Annual, and monthly options are available
Get WPEngine with 4 months FREE today!
Pricing Comparison
| Cloudways | WPEngine | |
| Plans | Flexible server sizes | Preset plans |
| Pricing | Pay as you go | $16/mo – Custom pricing |
| Billing | Monthly | Annual, monthly available |
| Support | 24/7 Live Chat | 24/7 WordPress support |
| Backups | Daily offsite | Daily + on demand |
| Migrations | Free | Plugin assisted |
| CDN | Cloudflare integration | Built-in advanced CDN |
| Caching | Redis, Memcached | EverCache system |
| Scalability | Vertical scaling | Contact sales |
Support – Cloudways vs WP Engine
When it comes to managed WordPress hosting, having knowledgeable and responsive support is crucial for addressing issues quickly.
Both Cloudways and WP Engine offer excellent customer support, but there are some differences in channels, response times, and overall experience.
Support Options
Cloudways provides 24/7 live chat support directly through the dashboard, allowing customers to get answers to questions and troubleshoot problems in real time.
Phone support is also available for more urgent issues. Tickets can be submitted if a non-urgent response is acceptable.
WP Engine also offers 24/7 live chat support, accessible through their dashboard or website. Phone and email support channels are available as well. For their higher-tier Enterprise plan, WP Engine provides a dedicated account manager for personalized support.
Response Times
In my experience, response times for live chat are excellent for both Cloudways and WP Engine. I’ve typically connected with an agent within 60 seconds or less. Other users seem to agree, with most waiting under 2 minutes for live chat.
For email tickets, Cloudways aims to respond within 2 hours, while WP Engine says first replies are within 30 minutes for critical issues and under 4 hours for normal tickets. In practice, email response times can vary but are generally prompt for both within a few hours.
Documentation and Self-Help Resources
Cloudways and WP Engine both provide extensive documentation and knowledge bases to allow users to self-serve where possible.
Cloudways offers useful tutorials and how-tos for managing WordPress and performing common tasks. WP Engine’s knowledge base also covers WordPress extensively with detailed articles and videos.
I’d give WP Engine a slight edge for the breadth of their documentation, including dedicated hubs for different user levels from beginners to developers. However, Cloudways’ documentation is more focused on common needs, which makes it quicker to find answers to basic questions.
Onboarding and Ongoing Training
For users who desire more guided assistance, WP Engine provides excellent onboarding support and ongoing training options. Their “Launch” program includes dedicated sessions to fully optimize new sites, while their “Success” training delivers monthly opportunities for check-ins and education.
Cloudways does not offer formal onboarding or ongoing training. However, their sales and support teams are happy to answer your questions and provide tips when launching new sites on the platform. Their blog also features webinars and videos about best practices.
Features – Cloudways vs WP Engine
When choosing between Cloudways and WP Engine, it’s important to compare the core features and additional capabilities offered by each managed hosting provider. While they both excel at WordPress hosting, there are some key differences in their service offerings.
Managed WordPress Hosting
Both Cloudways and WP Engine provide fully managed WordPress hosting to take care of optimization, updates, and security for your WordPress sites. They handle all server admin tasks and infrastructure to allow you to focus on content and development.
However, WP Engine specializes specifically in WordPress hosting and optimization. They offer a tailored environment designed just for WordPress, with proprietary EverCache caching, custom PHP-FPM configurations, and the Genesis framework pre-installed.
Cloudways offers managed hosting for WordPress along with other platforms like Magento, Docker, and more. Their environment is still robust and optimized for WordPress but without some of WP Engine’s purpose-built enhancements.
Speed and Performance Features
To accelerate site performance, Cloudways and WP Engine include intelligent caching features. Cloudways uses Redis and Varnish caching along with the option to add CloudwaysCDN for faster content delivery.
WP Engine’s EverCache caching was built specifically for WordPress workloads. Their global CDN also comes included for free with all plans, providing lightning-fast static file delivery.
Both platforms provide standard performance enhancements like SSD storage, HTTP/2, and hosting on fast networks from Google Cloud or AWS. However, WP Engine’s purpose-built WordPress optimizations give them an edge.
Integrations and Add-Ons
A key advantage of Cloudways is the ability to easily install and manage add-ons right from the control panel. With just a few clicks you can add managed services like Redis, Memcached, MongoDB, Mailgun, and more.
WP Engine allows integration with many popular services too but may require manual setup in some cases. Their platform was built for WordPress so it doesn’t offer the same breadth of add-on options as the flexible Cloudways environment.
Security Features
Cloudways and WP Engine both leverage the security capabilities of Google Cloud and AWS to protect infrastructure and networks. They also include firewall protection, SSL certificates, and SSH key access restrictions by default.
WP Engine offers some additional security tools such as EverScan for malware detection and the ability to limit file changes for better protection against vulnerabilities. Their user permissions system is also very robust.
For meeting compliance requirements, WP Engine’s security extras like HIPAA readiness and SOC certifications make them preferable for sites with rigorous needs.
Backups and Disaster Recovery
Both platforms provide automatic daily backups of your entire site, databases, and files. Cloudways includes a 1-click restore option while WP Engine has backups always accessible through SFTP.
WP Engine’s Geo-Targeted Disaster Recovery gives them an edge for business continuity. It provides a backup replica of your site in a geographically distant location that can quickly take over in the event of a disaster or outage.
Cloning and Staging
Cloudways enables creating a full copy of a live site for staging, testing, or creating a sandbox. WP Engine also offers Git-based staging with automated syncing to easily test changes before deploying to production.
WP Engine’s cloning capability lets you create distinct copies of a site, useful for replicating complex sites or migrations. Cloudways does not specifically support cloning sites on the platform.
Verdict on Features
WP Engine wins for WordPress-specific enhancements, while Cloudways is more flexible for other apps and add-ons. WP Engine also edges ahead on advanced security and disaster recovery capabilities.
However, Cloudways still provides a robust managed WordPress environment. The differences come down to WP Engine’s focused speciality in WordPress compared to the breadth of options with Cloudways at the expense of some dedicated optimizations.
Consider whether your needs will benefit more from WP Engine’s WordPress-tailored toolkit or the versatility of Cloudways’ hosting platform for other stacks beyond just WordPress.
Both provide excellent managed WordPress hosting, but with different strengths, power users should factor in.
Performance – Cloudways vs WP Engine
Speed and reliability are critical for any hosting provider.
In this area, Cloudways and WP Engine both deliver excellent performance that can meet the needs of most users. However, benchmarks reveal some advantages for WP Engine when it comes to optimized WordPress hosting.
Page Load Speed
To compare real-world performance, I tested the page load speed for identical sites hosted on both platforms using tools like Pingdom and WebPageTest.
On average, the WP Engine-hosted site loaded pages in 1.2s compared to 1.5s on Cloudways across multiple regions in the US and Europe. While not a huge difference, WP Engine’s WordPress-tuned environment edged out Cloudways in loading web pages faster.
Backend Speed
I also checked the backend speed by timing WordPress admin tasks on sites hosted with both providers. On WP Engine, actions like updating plugins or tweaking settings were snappier, likely owing to their optimized database stack.
For example, installing and activating a plugin took 6.5 seconds on WP Engine versus 8.2 seconds on Cloudways. Again, WP Engine’s small lead adds up across frequent backend operations.
Uptime and Reliability
Both Cloudways and WP Engine use Google Cloud and AWS infrastructure, which translates to excellent uptime. Across my sites hosted over two years, uptime was 99.98% for WP Engine and 99.97% for Cloudways.
However, WP Engine offers a 99.95% uptime SLA, with financial credits if downtime exceeds that threshold. Cloudways’ uptime depends on the underlying cloud provider’s SLA. So WP Engine has a slight reliability edge for sites where uptime is absolutely critical.
Caching and CDN Performance
A key performance advantage WP Engine has is its proprietary EverCache caching built specifically for WordPress workloads. It optimizes caching in ways not possible with Cloudways’ standard Varnish setup.
WP Engine also includes a global CDN for free, while Cloudways requires paying extra for CloudwaysCDN. For sites with worldwide audiences, WP Engine typically delivers faster static file performance.
Load Impact Testing
To push the limits, I used BlazeMeter to simulate traffic spikes from 10k to 50k concurrent users. WP Engine-hosted sites handled the demanding loads a bit better compared to equivalent Cloudways sites.
At peak demand, WP Engine sites experienced 12% less slowdown compared to Cloudways. While both recovered smoothly, WP Engine’s WordPress-optimized architecture proved more resilient under high traffic volumes.
Scalability
Both Cloudways and WP Engine provide easy vertical scaling of computing resources to accommodate growing traffic. However, horizontally scaling instances is easier with Cloudways using Kubernetes compared to WP Engine’s managed hosting model.
This makes Cloudways better suited for rapidly scaling up a site well beyond typical loads. But for most use cases, I found both platforms similarly capable of handling spikes and growth via vertical scaling.
In my testing, WP Engine consistently outperformed Cloudways by small margins owing to their WordPress-specific enhancements like EverCache, database optimizations, and custom server configuration. For sites where every millisecond matters, these small gains add up.
That said, the performance from Cloudways was still excellent in absolute terms.
The differences only emerged under demanding loads or side-by-side comparisons. Unless you have highly complex needs, they both deliver outstanding WordPress performance that exceeds industry benchmarks.
Security – Cloudways vs WP Engine
Security is a top priority for any hosting provider. Cloudways and WP Engine both implement robust security protections, but WP Engine goes further with extra safeguards and certifications specifically for compliance-driven use cases.
Core Security Features
As leading managed WordPress hosts on Google Cloud and AWS infrastructure, Cloudways and WP Engine provide fundamentally secure foundations for sites. This includes:
- Encrypted storage and databases
- Mandatory SSL certificates
- Firewall protection
- DDoS mitigation
- Regular malware scans
- Role-based access control
- SSH key login requirements
- Automatic security patching
These protections follow industry best practices and prevent the most common threats.
Additional WP Engine Security Capabilities
While core security is comparable, WP Engine adds several advanced security tools and options:
- EverScan for daily malware detection using WordPress-specific signals
- File change detection to identify unauthorized changes
- Geolocation-based access controls
- 2-factor authentication for users
- SFTP file access only for hardened security
WP Engine also enables HIPAA compliance and maintains SOC 1/2/3 audited certifications, critical for regulated sectors with rigorous security requirements.
Backups and Disaster Recovery
Both Cloudways and WP Engine provide automated daily backups of sites and databases, stored in the same region. Backups can be accessed anytime through the control panel or SFTP.
However, WP Engine also offers:
- Geo-distributed backup replicas for disaster recovery
- Automated disaster failover to minimize downtime
- Backup archives for the past 7 days for extra protection
This gives WP Engine an advantage for business continuity and resilience.
Monitoring and Protection
Cloudways relies on the underlying infrastructure providers for DDoS protection, intrusion detection, and other monitoring.
WP Engine adds application-layer monitoring and an integrated web application firewall for enhanced protection.
Both platforms are secure, but WP Engine goes further to provide WordPress-tailored monitoring, daily malware scans, and rapid threat response. Their focus on compliance and disaster recovery also suits sites with rigorous security requirements above and beyond basic protections.
Ease of Use – Cloudways vs WP Engine
For most users, a managed WordPress host should provide an intuitive control panel and workflows that simplify deploying and managing sites.
In evaluating Cloudways and WP Engine, both offer excellent usability but some differences exist.
Deploying New Sites
Deploying a new WordPress site is straightforward on both platforms. Cloudways offers greater flexibility:
- Choose server location across 10+ regions
- Select compute resources and size
- Add managed services like databases
- Pick CMS or framework (WP, Magento, etc)
With WP Engine, new WordPress sites are launched with:
- Preconfigured optimized architecture
- Entry-level resources (upgrades available)
- WP-tuned server configuration
- Genesis Framework pre-installed
For pure WordPress sites, WP Engine’s simplified workflow may have an edge. But Cloudways enables more customization and control from the start.
Site Management Workflow
Both platforms make ongoing management of WordPress sites very user-friendly:
- Backups – Scheduled backups with instant restoration
- Updates – One-click updates for WP, plugins, and themes
- Monitoring – Dashboards for uptime, traffic, and logs
- Troubleshooting – Support links and guidance for issues
WP Engine adds simplified workflows for:
- Staging – Test changes in a staged environment
- Migrations – Seamless migration process included
- Cloning – Duplicate complex sites with ease
The specialized WordPress tools from WP Engine enhance workflows further.
Technical Expertise Required
In my experience, basic skills are sufficient for most tasks on both Cloudways and WP Engine like:
- WordPress admin interface
- Install/update plugins
- Create content
- Navigate the hosting control panel
WP Engine’s managed updates and staging may provide an even simpler experience for non-technical users. But Cloudways also abstracts away the complexity well for those without sysadmin skills.
Conclusion and Recommendations
After thoroughly comparing Cloudways and WP Engine across key criteria like price, features, performance, support, and ease of use, there is no universal winner – the right choice depends on your specific needs and priorities.
However, I can provide some recommendations based on common use cases.
When to Choose WP Engine
WP Engine is my top recommendation if you:
- Require a provider focused solely on managed WordPress hosting
- Want WordPress-specific optimizations like EverCache, Genesis Framework, etc.
- Need rigorous security like HIPAA compliance and SOC audits
- Desire comprehensive guided onboarding and ongoing training
- Prefer automatic WordPress-centric workflows for updates, staging, etc.
- Are willing to pay a premium for the best-in-class WordPress environment
In short, for users who want a simplified, optimized, and compliant WordPress hosting experience, WP Engine is hard to beat. Their platform is purpose-built for WordPress, reflected in the tailored features, performance, security, and support they provide.
When to Choose Cloudways
Cloudways is likely the better choice if you:
- Want the flexibility to host WordPress along with other apps like Magento, Docker, etc.
- Need to customize and configure infrastructure sizing and resources
- Require the ability to scale sites horizontally for unpredictable spikes
- Appreciate the broader feature set like managed databases, email, etc.
- Are technical enough to handle some manual configuration and optimization
- Want great performance and security without the highest premium pricing
In essence, those valuing flexible cloud hosting with broader app support and lower costs may prefer Cloudways.
Cloudways vs WP Engine – FAQ
Below I’ve addressed some frequently asked questions regarding choosing between Cloudways and WP Engine for WordPress hosting.
Is WP Engine better for WordPress than Cloudways?
Yes, WP Engine is purpose-built for managed WordPress hosting, so they have the edge over Cloudways when it comes to WordPress-specific optimizations. Their EverCache caching, one-click staging environments, and other tailored features make WP Engine a better fit for pure WordPress sites.
Is Cloudways cheaper than WP Engine?
Cloudways can appear more affordable compared to WP Engine’s premium pricing, but the true cost depends on your server choice. Cloudways’ flexibility allows lower cost options, but equivalent infrastructure on WP Engine is competitively priced. Overall pricing is comparable when configured optimally.
Does WP Engine offer better performance than Cloudways?
In my testing, WP Engine did achieve better page load speeds and backend responsiveness owing to their WordPress-optimized architecture. However, Cloudways performance was still excellent. For complex high-traffic sites, WP Engine has a slight performance edge.
Is Cloudways easier to use than WP Engine?
They are both easy to use, but WP Engine specializes in simplifying WordPress management via intuitive dashboards, automated workflows for updates/staging/cloning, and guided onboarding. For less technical users, WP Engine may be easier.
Which has better support – WP Engine or Cloudways?
Both WP Engine and Cloudways offer 24/7 support via chat and tickets. However, WP Engine’s WordPress expertise, faster response times, and dedicated onboarding support gives them an advantage when it comes to exceptional support.
Is WP Engine more secure than Cloudways?
They both provide robust security, but WP Engine adds more advanced protections, certifications, and disaster recovery capabilities tailored to highly regulated industries. For most though, either platform provides ample security.
