WP Engine alternative: benefits of choosing Kinsta

Kinsta is developer-friendly

Many of us at Kinsta are developers ourselves, that’s why from day one we’ve built our tools and dashboard with WordPress developers in mind. We provide the following features and accessibility to make your workflow more efficient, not all of which are available at WP Engine:

• SSH access, Git, and WP-CLI on all plans from Starter to Enterprise.
• We allow you to use custom setups like Bedrock and Trellis, as well as starter themes such as Sage.
• We have one-click staging environments which allow you to easily push changes from staging to production as well as a site cloning feature. WP Engine currently has two different staging environments: legacy and their new version. Besides being confusing for users, the legacy staging environment also has setbacks; such as not copying across your entire uploads folder, wp-config.php issues, and the lack of SSH.
• We allow you to run a different version of PHP for each live site and staging site and switching between PHP engines takes just one-click.
• You can restore automatic backups to production as well as staging.
• We leave post and page revisions enabled by default. While we recommend limiting or disabling these, we believe this should be your choice.
• Loading your site over a reverse proxy is possible, and we have many clients who do so.
• Faster search with the Elasticsearch add-on and faster database performance with the Redis add-on.
• You can add your own New Relic Application Performance Monitoring (APM) API key in our MyKinsta dashboard. Our support team can also enable this for you temporarily to help troubleshoot performance related issues on your WordPress site. At WP Engine this is not supported, and is only available as an add-on on custom Enterprise plans.

Feature comparison overview

Here is a quick overview of some of the key differences between Kinsta and WP Engine.

As of March 1, 2018 WP Engine’s re-structured plans fall into five primary tiers: Personal at $35/month for one site, Growth at $115/month for 5 sites, Scale at $290/month for 15 sites, and then higher premium and enterprise plans. They no longer offer lower-tier plans in-between.

Kinsta offers 10 different tiers at $30/month, $60/month, $100/month, and more all the way up into our Enterprise plans. We also offer additional custom solutions for those that demand even more.

WP Engine has both a total visits and bandwidth limit in place across all of their plans. If you exceed either of these you are charged an overage fee or are required to upgrade to a higher plan. Kinsta’s plans are only limited by total visits. Of course, like any host, we do have acceptable use policies in place, but there is no hard bandwidth limit.

It’s also important to note that overage charges at Kinsta are billed at $1 for every 1,000 visits over your plan’s limit, while overage charges at WP Engine are $2 for every additional 1,000 visits. We also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee with no strings attached, whereas WP Engine will only prorate refunds on annual plans that have given at least a 30-day notice.

Free migrations

For a limited time Kinsta is excited to offer unlimited free migrations to all WP Engine customers wanting to make the move to Kinsta. This offer is valid through April 30, 2019. WP Engine doesn’t offer free migrations but instead consists of a do-it-yourself plugin. The issue with this method is that it doesn’t bring over data or images stored outside of the /wp-content/ directory. Redirects also don’t get moved, which are critical to prevent SEO disasters. For larger and more complex sites this quickly results in data loss or could even fail entirely if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Unless you’re a developer with time to burn, it’s much safer to let our expert migration team take care of everything for you. Moving your site to Kinsta usually won’t incur any downtime and we’ll help you inspect your migrated site prior to going live.

Expert Support

We don’t have level 1 or level 2 support reps. Our entire support team is made up of WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers many of whom have managed their own servers, created themes and plugins, and contributed back to core. This ensures you’ll receive expert advice from someone who actively uses and develops with WordPress. Every Kinsta client gets to chat with the same team members that support our large enterprise and Fortune 500 companies. In fact, we hire less than 1% of applicants who apply. You won’t find better support anywhere else!

With WP Engine, basic issues are usually taken care of easily. However, for any issues which are complex, a resolution will take some time and there will be a lot of back and forth. This is a problem when you are running a high-end WordPress site and there is a pressing issue that needs to be handled quickly. If you are asking for my single recommendation between the two, in my opinion, Kinsta is better. They offer much more than they promise. You never have to worry about site slowness, downtime, getting quality support, or any other hosting-related issues.

Harsh Agrawal

Award-winning Blogger, ShoutMeLoud

Kinsta also monitors your sites' uptime every minute which means that our slowest response time is 5 minutes to any downtime that may occur. Our staff is alerted instantly and quite often we start resolving the issue before you even contact us.

I've tried many different hosts - LiquidWeb, SoftLayer, WP Engine, Web Synthesis, Rackspace, etc. Out of all of them, Kinsta has been the best in terms of support, speed, and pricing. I’m very impressed with the knowledge and skill of the support team, as well as response times and not having to deal with your typical 'level 1' support. Expert support fast, what more can you ask for? WordPress site runs really fast with Kinsta and it was very hard to find the necessary expertise with these other companies. Additionally, I love the fact that I can up-scale a server for a week during peak traffic times to handle the load. Amazing.

Richard Li

Blogger, 4k.com

Kinsta has a global presence

Kinsta is exclusively powered by the Google Cloud Platform and offers 19 data centers around the globe, extending across five continents. At Kinsta all data centers are available across all plans (with no extra or hidden charges), starting from as low as $30/mo! You can also choose a different data center of each of your sites. Current locations:

WP Engine offers three data centers by default and three additional international locations available for a monthly fee. For example, if you choose WP Engine’s Scale plan, the base cost is $290/month (As of March 1, 2018). If you wanted to host your site outside of their standard 3 locations, say in Germany or the UK, it would be an additional $70/month. Their Australia data center is an additional $100/month. Depending on which plan you choose this can add up to a 40% increase in your monthly price. Providers also vary based on what plan you choose.

Everything at Kinsta is interconnected over the highly reliable Google Cloud Platform premium tier network. This is designed to minimize distance and hops, resulting in faster and more secure global transport of your data. Beware, some hosting providers might opt for Google’s “standard tier” network service without telling you to cut costs, but we believe in only utilizing the best here at Kinsta.

Choosing a location near you and your visitors will result in faster SFTP download and upload speeds, making file transfers quick and painless. You're back-end WordPress dashboard will also feel more snappy and responsive, especially when uploading files to the media library.

Turbocharging your content delivery

Kinsta cares about the performance of your site, not just from our data center, but at every point around the globe. That’s why we partnered up with KeyCDN, an HTTP/2 and IPv6-enabled content delivery network (CDN), and include free bandwidth across all of our plans.

KeyCDN’s content delivery architecture was built from the ground up with a focus on high-performance and designed for high throughput and low latency. When enabled, your content will be delivered and cached from their 35 POPs around the globe, this includes all regions: America, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia!

WP Engine currently uses MaxCDN as their CDN provider and it only has 19 locations. Some regions aren’t included.

Our CDN also automatically helps protect against bad bots as well as checks all the boxes when it comes to industry standards such as GZIP and HPACK compression.

Best affiliate program in the industry

Kinsta has become one of the fastest growing managed WordPress hosts thanks in part to the many happy customers helping to spread the word. Whether you're an agency, freelancer, or blogger, Kinsta is proud to offer true profit sharing with one of the highest paying affiliate programs in the hosting industry.

You earn $50 to $500 after every signup based on the type of plan you refer. On top of that, you get a 10% monthly recurring commission for the lifetime of the customer you referred, enabling you to build passive income.

We never settle for anything less than perfection at Kinsta. That's why we built our WordPress hosting affiliate dashboard from the ground up, meaning you don't have to mess with another confusing and cluttered 3rd-party platform. This allows our developers to easily build in new features as needed to help you earn even more.

WP Engine offers $200 per new customer or 100% of the customer's first monthly payment (whichever is higher). They don't offer any way to build passive income and utilize the third-party and cumbersome ShareASale affiliate dashboard.