Kinsta vs WP Engine Comparison

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Kinsta and WP Engine are highly respected managed WordPress hosting providers. WP Engine is a dedicated WordPress hosting service, while Kinsta is a little broader since it also provides hosting for apps and databases. Here’s how Kinsta vs WP Engine stack up against each other regarding performance, security, support, pricing, + more.


WP Engine

Kinsta
PricingFrom $20 per monthFrom $35 per month
SLA99.9% uptime99.9% uptime
Hosting types offeredManaged WordPress and WooCommerce hostingManaged WordPress, and WooCommerce hosting
Hosting for apps, and databases
Speed and performanceDual Apache and Nginx
SSD
HTTP/3
PHP 8.0 and 8.1
Varnish & Memcached
EverCache®
Cloudflare Enterprise CDN
SSD storage
HTTP/3
LXD containers
PHP 8.0 and 8.1
MariaDB
Edge caching
Enterprise Cloudflare CDN
Early Hints
WordPressAuto-installed
Auto-updates
1-click staging
Auto-installed
Auto-updates
1-click staging
ServersGoogle Cloud Platform
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Google Cloud Platform
SecurityFree SSL and SSH
DDoS and WAF detection
Hardware firewalls 
Global Edge Security 
Daily and on-demand backups
DDoS protection
Free CDN
Automatic SSL certificates
Automatic daily backups and 14-day retention
HTTP/3 support
Control PanelWP Engine Portal (proprietary)MyKinsta (proprietary)
ExtrasSmart plugin manager
10 premium themes
Free migration
24/7 support
Free site migrations
24/7 support
Money-back guarantee60 days30 days
Current deal🔥 Limited special offer - Get $120 off annual plans🔥 Pay yearly & get 2 months of FREE hosting

Key Takeaways:

WP Engine offers affordable plans, premium themes, and a 60-day money-back guarantee, but has some plugin/theme restrictions.

Kinsta provides fast performance, free daily backups, and Cloudflare enterprise-grade protection, but is more expensive than WP Engine.

Both platforms offer fully-managed and premium WordPress hosting with 24/7 expert support, automated maintenance, and staging environments.

When choosing a hosting provider for your WordPress website, one must focus on the speed, service, and security of the platform. Otherwise, you’re leaving yourself wide open to problems that nobody needs in their life.

If it was a popularity contest regarding which company people search for the most on Google, then WP Engine would come out as the clear winner.

wp engine vs kinsta
Google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=wp%20engine,kinsta

While this Google trends data shows that WP Engine‘s brand demand is higher than Kinta’s, this is not a very good indicator at all revealing who’s the better-managed WordPress hosting service.

Both Kinsta and WP Engine certainly offer an excellent array of key features in these areas, and on the surface, the two platforms appear very similar. Well, that is, except for the pricing. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find the subtle differences that will sway your choice.

I’ve scoured each platform to understand what both Kinsta and WP Engine managed hosting solutions bring to the table. 

So let’s see which one has the edge.

If you like to delve even further into the detail and want the full nitty-gritty of both platforms, I have a comprehensive review of Kinsta and a review of WP Engine available if you want to find out more.

Plans & Pricing

First, let’s pitch the two managed WordPress hosting giants against each other for pricing.

Note that although both platforms have numerous different plans, here, we’re just comparing the managed WordPress hosting services.

Kinsta Pricing Plans

kinsta prices

There are a LOT of price plans available for Kinsta’s managed WordPress service. They range from $35/month for the Starter plan right up to $1,650/month for the Enterprise 4 plan.

If you pay on an annual basis, you get the equivalent of two months’ worth for free.

There are ten plans in total which you can look at in detail here, and each has a 30-day money-back guarantee in case you change your mind.

WP Engine Pricing Plans

wp engine prices

When it comes to pricing, WP Engine is a lot more straightforward. It has four different pricing tiers for managed WordPress plans, which range from $20/month to $232/month, plus an extra option for custom pricing. Learn more about its entry-level StartUp plan in this blog post.

Paying annually nets you a whopping four months’ worth for free, and you get a generous 60-day money-back guarantee.

🏆 Winner is WP Engine

If we’re talking purely about price, then it’s hard to beat WP Engine. Not only is its cheapest plan over $10 less than Kinsta, but you also get double the discount for paying annually.

Performance, Speed & Reliability

Performance is paramount because what’s the point of having your website out there if your hosting provider constantly has downtime or speed issues?

Both platforms take their speed and performance seriously and have a number of features to help them stand out.

In this section, you will find out…

  • Why site speed matters… a lot!
  • How fast a site hosted on Kinsta and WP Engine loads. We will test their speed and server response time against Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics.
  • How a site hosted on WP Engine and Kinsta performs with traffic spikes. We will test how they perform when faced with increased site traffic.

The most important performance metric that you should look for in a web host is speed. Visitors to your site expect it to load fast instant. Site speed not only affects user experience on your site, but it also affects your SEO, Google rankings, and conversion rates.

But, testing site speed against Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics isn’t enough on its own, as our testing site does not have substantial traffic volume. To evaluate the efficiency (or inefficiency) of the web host’s servers when faced with increased site traffic, we use a testing tool called K6 (formerly called LoadImpact) to send virtual users (VU) to our test site.

Why Site Speed Matters

Did you know that:

  • Pages that loaded in 2.4 seconds had a 1.9% conversion rate.
  • At 3.3 seconds, the conversion rate was 1.5%.
  • At 4.2 seconds, the conversion rate was less than 1%.
  • At 5.7+ seconds, the conversion rate was 0.6%.
Why Site Speed Matters
Source: Cloudflare

When people leave your website, you lose not only potential revenue but also all the money and time you spent generating traffic to your website.

And if you want to get to the first page of Google and stay there, you need a website that loads up fast.

Google’s algorithms prefer displaying websites that offer a great user experience (and site speed is a huge factor). In Google’s eyes, a website that offers a good user experience generally has a lower bounce rate and loads up fast.

If your website is slow, most visitors will bounce back, resulting in a loss in search engine rankings. Also, your website needs to load up fast if you want to convert more visitors into paying customers.

page speed revenue increase calculator

If you want your website to load up fast and secure the first spot in search engine results, you will need a fast web hosting provider with server infrastructure, CDN and caching technologies that are fully configured and optimized for speed.

The web host you choose to go with will significantly impact how fast your website loads.

How We Perform the Testing

We follow a systematic and identical process for all the web hosts we test.

  • Buy hosting: First, we sign up and pay for the web host’s entry-level plan.
  • Install WordPress: Then, we set up a new, blank WordPress site using the Astra WordPress theme. This is a lightweight multipurpose theme and serves as a good starting point for the speed test.
  • Install plugins: Next, we install the following plugins: Akismet (for spam protection), Jetpack (security and backup plugin), Hello Dolly (for a sample widget), Contact Form 7 (a contact form), Yoast SEO (for SEO), and FakerPress (for generating test content).
  • Generate content: Using the FakerPress plugin, we create ten random WordPress posts and ten random pages, each containing 1,000 words of lorem ipsum “dummy” content. This simulates a typical website with various content types.
  • Add images: With the FakerPress plugin, we upload one unoptimized image from Pexels, a stock photo website, to each post and page. This helps evaluate the website’s performance with image-heavy content.
  • Run the speed test: we run the last published post in Google’s PageSpeed Insights Testing tool.
  • Run the load impact test: we run the last published post in K6’s Cloud Testing tool.

How We Measure Speed & Performance

The first four metrics are Google’s Core Web Vitals, and these are a set of web performance signals that are critical to a user’s web experience on both desktop and mobile devices. The last fifth metric is a load impact stress test.

1. Time to First Byte

TTFB measures the time between the request for a resource and when the first byte of a response begins to arrive. It’s a metric for determining the responsiveness of a web server and helps identify when a web server is too slow to respond to requests. Server speed is basically entirely determined by the web hosting service you use. (source: https://web.dev/ttfb/)

2. First Input Delay

FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with your site (when they click a link, tap a button, or use a custom, JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction. (source: https://web.dev/fid/)

3. Largest Contentful Paint

LCP measures the time from when the page starts loading to when the largest text block or image element is rendered on the screen. (source: https://web.dev/lcp/)

4. Cumulative Layout Shift

CLS measures unexpected shifts in the display of content in the loading of a web page due to image resizing, ad displays, animation, browser rendering, or other script elements. Shifting layouts lower the quality of the user experience. This can make visitors confused or require them to wait till the webpage loading is completed, which takes more time. (source: https://web.dev/cls/)

5. Load Impact

Load impact stress testing determines how the web host would handle 50 visitors simultaneously visiting the test site. Speed testing alone isn’t enough to test performance, as this test site doesn’t have any traffic to it.

To be able to evaluate the efficiency (or inefficiency) of a web host’s servers when faced with increased site traffic, we used a testing tool called K6 (formerly called LoadImpact) to send virtual users (VU) to our test site and stress test it.

These are the three load impact metrics we measure:

Average response time

This measures the average duration it takes for a server to process and respond to client requests during a specific test or monitoring period.

The average response time is a useful indicator of the overall performance and efficiency of a website. Lower average response times generally indicate better performance and a more positive user experience, as users receive quicker responses to their requests.

Maximum response time

This refers to the longest duration it takes for a server to respond to a client’s request during a specific test or monitoring period.This metric is crucial for evaluating the performance of a website under heavy traffic or usage.

When multiple users access a website simultaneously, the server must handle and process each request. Under high load, the server may become overwhelmed, leading to an increase in response times. The maximum response time represents the worst-case scenario during the test, where the server took the longest time to respond to a request.

Average request rate

This is a performance metric that measures the average number of requests per unit of time (usually per second) that a server processes.

The average request rate provides insights into how well a server can manage incoming requests under various load conditions. A higher average request rate indicates that the server can handle more requests in a given period, which is generally a positive sign of performance and scalability.

⚡Speed & Performance Test Results

The table below compares web hosting companies’ performance based on four key performance indicators: average Time to First Byte, First Input Delay, Largest Contentful Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. Lower values are better.

CompanyTTFBAvg TTFBFIDLCPCLS
SiteGroundFrankfurt: 35.37 ms
Amsterdam: 29.89 ms
London: 37.36 ms
New York: 114.43 ms
Dallas: 149.43 ms
San Francisco: 165.32 ms
Singapore: 320.74 ms
Sydney: 293.26 ms
Tokyo: 242.35 ms
Bangalore: 408.99 ms
179.71 ms3 ms1.9 s0.02
KinstaFrankfurt: 355.87 ms
Amsterdam: 341.14 ms
London: 360.02 ms
New York: 165.1 ms
Dallas: 161.1 ms
San Francisco: 68.69 ms
Singapore: 652.65 ms
Sydney: 574.76 ms
Tokyo: 544.06 ms
Bangalore: 765.07 ms
358.85 ms3 ms1.8 s0.01
CloudwaysFrankfurt: 318.88 ms
Amsterdam: 311.41 ms
London: 284.65 ms
New York: 65.05 ms
Dallas: 152.07 ms
San Francisco: 254.82 ms
Singapore: 295.66 ms
Sydney: 275.36 ms
Tokyo: 566.18 ms
Bangalore: 327.4 ms
285.15 ms4 ms2.1 s0.16
A2 HostingFrankfurt: 786.16 ms
Amsterdam: 803.76 ms
London: 38.47 ms
New York: 41.45 ms
Dallas: 436.61 ms
San Francisco: 800.62 ms
Singapore: 720.68 ms
Sydney: 27.32 ms
Tokyo: 57.39 ms
Bangalore: 118 ms
373.05 ms2 ms2 s0.03
WP EngineFrankfurt: 49.67 ms
Amsterdam: 1.16 s
London: 1.82 s
New York: 45.21 ms
Dallas: 832.16 ms
San Francisco: 45.25 ms
Singapore: 1.7 s
Sydney: 62.72 ms
Tokyo: 1.81 s
Bangalore: 118 ms
765.20 ms6 ms2.3 s0.04
Rocket.netFrankfurt: 29.15 ms
Amsterdam: 159.11 ms
London: 35.97 ms
New York: 46.61 ms
Dallas: 34.66 ms
San Francisco: 111.4 ms
Singapore: 292.6 ms
Sydney: 318.68 ms
Tokyo: 27.46 ms
Bangalore: 47.87 ms
110.35 ms3 ms1 s0.2
WPX HostingFrankfurt: 11.98 ms
Amsterdam: 15.6 ms
London: 21.09 ms
New York: 584.19 ms
Dallas: 86.78 ms
San Francisco: 767.05 ms
Singapore: 23.17 ms
Sydney: 16.34 ms
Tokyo: 8.95 ms
Bangalore: 66.01 ms
161.12 ms2 ms2.8 s0.2

Kinsta:

  • TTFB ranges from as low as 68.69 ms (San Francisco) to as high as 765.07 ms (Bangalore), with an average TTFB of 358.85 ms. This shows that Kinsta’s server response time varies significantly based on the location of the user, with best performance in San Francisco and worst in Bangalore.
  • FID is 3 ms, which is quite good, indicating a high level of responsiveness to user interactions.
  • LCP is 1.8 seconds. This suggests the site is quite fast in delivering its largest piece of content to users.
  • CLS is 0.01, which is extremely low, meaning the page is very stable and has minimal layout shift.

WP Engine:

  • TTFB also varies significantly by location, ranging from 45.21 ms (New York) to 1.82 seconds (London), with an average TTFB of 765.20 ms. Despite having some locations with lower TTFB than Kinsta, WP Engine’s average TTFB is more than double that of Kinsta, indicating slower average response times.
  • FID is 6 ms, which is slightly worse than Kinsta’s, but still quite good, indicating a responsive site.
  • LCP is 2.3 seconds, which is slower than Kinsta’s, indicating a slower page load speed for the largest block of content.
  • CLS is 0.04, which is higher than Kinsta’s, indicating a slightly less stable layout.

Kinsta performs much better overall. It has a lower average TTFB, better FID, faster LCP, and lower CLS. However, the specific performance can vary significantly depending on the user’s location, and in some places, WP Engine actually outperforms Kinsta in terms of TTFB.

⚡Load Impact Test Results

The table below compares web hosting companies’ performance based on three key performance indicators: Average Response Time, Highest Load Time, and Average Request Time. Lower values are better for Average Response Time and Highest Load Time, while higher values are better for Average Request Time.

CompanyAvg Response TimeHighest Load TimeAvg Request Time
SiteGround116 ms347 ms50 req/s
Kinsta127 ms620 ms46 req/s
Cloudways29 ms264 ms50 req/s
A2 Hosting23 ms2103 ms50 req/s
WP Engine33 ms1119 ms50 req/s
Rocket.net17 ms236 ms50 req/s
WPX Hosting34 ms124 ms50 req/s

WP Engine:

  • Average Response Time is 33 ms, which is quite fast. This indicates that the server responds quickly to requests on average.
  • Highest Load Time is 1119 ms or roughly 1.12 seconds. While this is much slower than the average response time, it is still relatively quick considering this is under peak load.
  • Average Request Time is 50 requests per second. This indicates that WP Engine’s server can handle a significant amount of traffic.

Kinsta:

  • Average Response Time is 127 ms, which is slower than WP Engine’s. This indicates that, on average, the server responds slower to requests compared to WP Engine.
  • Highest Load Time is 620 ms, which is better than WP Engine’s. This shows that under peak load, Kinsta is able to respond more quickly than WP Engine.
  • Average Request Time is 46 requests per second. While this is lower than WP Engine’s, it still indicates a high capacity to handle traffic.

WP Engine provides a quicker average response time and can handle slightly more requests per second, Kinsta performs better under peak load, indicated by its lower highest load time. This suggests that while WP Engine might be better for handling lots of traffic, Kinsta could be more reliable for maintaining performance during peak loads.

Kinsta Performance Features

First up, let’s take a look at Kinsta’s uptime over the last 90 days. As we can see, it’s excellent, with an almost perfect score. Nothing more to say here.

Getting into the nitty-gritty of how Kinsta achieves stellar performance, we can see that the platform hosts your WordPress sites on Google’s highest-performing CPU servers and Premium Tier network.

kinsta user google cloud platform

What this means is that all Google Cloud traffic in this tier runs through a well-provisioned, reliable, and low-latency private fiber network. This results in a 30% – 300% improvement in a WordPress site’s performance.

Storage is SSD-based and comes complete with built-in redundancy to get that all-important data integrity. However, backups and staging environments are excluded from the total storage calculation.

kinsta data centers

In regards to site speed, Kinsta shines. It has 35+ data centers scattered throughout the USA, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and South America, and you can choose the location that makes the most sense for you.

kinsta load time speed

To allow super-fast page loading speeds, Kinsta serves up a high-performance CDN powered by Cloudflare integration. It’s HTTP/3 enabled and available from over 275 POPs locations worldwide.

So whether your site visitors are trying to view images, Javascript, or CSS, Kinsta will load it up in quicksmart time.

kinsta dns management

All Kinsta hosting plans come equipped with a premium Anycast DNS service, which Amazon Route53 powers. What’s important here is that Route53 is consistently ranked as one of the fastest DNS services available. 

The service supports latency and geolocation-based routing, ensuring extra quick response times and perfect stability.

kinsta edge caching

To pile on even more time-savings, Kinsta comes complete with its own special brand of caching. Edge Caching ensures that cached content can be supplied from multiple data centers without going through the hassle of a complicated setup.

This powerful software promises to deliver a 50% reduction in TTFB, a 55% reduction in time to transfer complete pages, and a time reduction of around 50% to serve cached HTML WordPress.

And what else does Kinsta do to ensure you get a performance smoother than silk? Here’s the rest of the good stuff:

  • Ability to use the latest version of PHP, including 8.0 and 8.1
  • Automatic WordPress and platform updates 
  • One-click site management tools
  • Optimization tools, including CDN enablement and disablement, image optimization controls, CSS and JS minification, and excluding files
  • Cloudflare “Early Hints” web standard (can improve speeds up to 30%)

WP Engine Performance Features

WP Engine performed a little less impressively than Kinsta in terms of uptime. In the past 90 days, the platform suffered an almost 5% downtime. This falls short of its promised 99.9% uptime SLA.

WP Engine has partnered with Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services for its cloud-based hosting technology and has sites hosted in 14 Google data centers around the world. If you include its Amazon servers, then you have access to over 20 locations in total.

wp engine tech partners

The platform uses 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable-based “C2” (compute optimized) instances on Google Cloud, and when this technology is combined with other software optimizations, it enables WP Engine to perform 60% faster.

Adding in the single-click CDN integration, a custom NGINX extension, and SSD storage, you have a service that would put Speedy Gonzalez to shame.

All plans include a FREE Cloudflare CDN allowing pages to be served even faster no matter where you are based on the planet. Some of the features of this impressive service include Cloudflare Polish which provides lossless image compression, automatic SSL installation, and WebP image optimization.

You also get CDN at Edge, so you don’t require a separate URL for CDN assets.

wp engine edge caching

WP Engine uses its own EverCache caching software to bring you the fastest possible user experience. The technology automatically caches static site content, which reduces server strain. It also contains WordPress-specific rules, which are consistently updated and audited.

Plus, the software keeps you safe by evaluating browser requests and blocking the ones that look dodgy.

Overall EverCache managed to get the site loading time to under 200ms for over 31% of sites, and I say that’s pretty impressive.

EverCache

WP Engine does have a little catch that I’m not so enamored with. It promises a 99.99% SLA, but as we discovered above, that’s not actually true. This promise is strictly reserved for high-traffic sites (in other words, people on the higher-price plans), which I think is a little sneaky.

Another disappointment is that Cloudflare CDN does not come as standard. If you want that bad boy, you will have to subscribe to the higher-tier plan or pay for the add-on.

But moving on, here’s the other stuff that makes your WordPress site tick:

  • Latest version of PHP, including 8.0 and 8.1 and PHP version management
  • Automatic WordPress and platform updates 
  • WP Engine API for automatic site admin tasks
  • Genesis framework – a lightweight theme framework for fast loading WordPress themes

🏆 Winner is Kinsta

Both platforms have a solid and similar infrastructure that performs well. And both platforms have their own proprietary caching software to make everything operate to the highest standard.

However, Kinsta has the edge because, unlike WP Engine, the service actually sticks to its uptime SLA. And I feel that Kinsta has invested in higher-grade technology overall, and you get Cloudflare CDN included without having to pay extra. This is what you should expect from a premium managed WordPress host.

Security Features

Security is just as important as speed and performance. And with the ever-looming threat of malware, hosting providers need to be on their toes and at the top of their game in terms of the security features they provide.

Kinsta Security Features

Kinsta Security Features

Kinsta takes security seriously and provides a full suite of security measures and protocols to keep your WordPress sites nice and secure:

  • Cloudflare enterprise-level firewall DDoS protection
  • SSL management 
  • Free wildcard SSL support by Cloudflare
  • HTTP/3 support
  • Daily automated backups (with the ability to add on additional backups) and storage of the previous 14 backups to refer to if needed
  • 99.9% uptime guarantee
  • SFTP/SSH protocols 
  • Malware security pledge, including active and passive security and hardware firewalls
  • One staging site environment where you can test out new WordPress plugins and site versions without worry

So you see, Kinsta is a powerhouse for keeping things on lockdown. Especially when you add two-factor authentication and IP banning (after six failed login attempts). 

To provide the final – and ultimate – layer of confidence, Kinsta plays its ace card with a hack-free guarantee that comes with a free fix if something malicious does manage to sneak past the door.

WP Engine Security Features

WP Engine Security Features

WP Engine also packs a punch for security features. Here’s what you get:

  • Threat detection and blocking at the platform level
  • Free SSL certificates
  • Auto updates for WordPress and PHP
  • SOC2 Type II report for viewing activity logs and user permission configurations
  • WordPress optimized WAF
  • One-click staging sites to test things out before you go live
  • Automatic daily backups and on-demand backups

Like Kinsta, WP Engine has two-factor authentication but here’s where the platform becomes unstuck.

If you want the top level of security, you have to pay for it. 

Yup, that’s right. It’s an optional add-on.

And what does this add-on (called Global Edge) get you for an additional $14/month?

  • DDoS mitigation and protection
  • Managed WAF and attack deflection
  • Automatic threat response
  • Cloudflare CDN
  • Argo Smart Routing’s dynamic traffic routing algorithm

Oh, and if you want automated plugin updates? Yeah, you’re going to have to pay extra for that, too ($2/month).

🏆 Winner is Kinsta

This is a no-brainer outcome. Kinsta provides WordPress users with enterprise-level security at no extra cost. Now we start to understand why the platform is priced higher than WP Engine.

While you can get the same level of security from WP Engine, you have to tack the add-ons to your plan. Which, quite frankly, is annoying.

WordPress Support

We all need a bit of support from time to time, and reaching customer service and getting help from WordPress experts should be easy and pain-free.

Kinsta Technical Support

Kinsta Technical Support

If you need some support, you can enjoy live English language chat support 24/7 on all of Kinsta’s plans. French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese chat support is also available but limited to Monday – Friday.

You can also email the support team whenever you like, and if you want to chat with someone, you can send an email requesting a callback.

Wait times to get a response on the live chat support were less than five minutes, and responses to emails took about a day on average.

WP Engine Tech Support

WP Engine Tech Support

WP Engine can boast a support staff of over 200 agents who are on hand to help you 24/7 each and every day. There are eight office locations from Austin, TX, to Krakow, Poland, so no matter where you are placed in the world, there will be someone awake and ready to receive your request.

WP Engine offers both 24/7 live chat and phone support for sales queries while existing WP Engine customers can contact customer support directly via the user portal.

The platform also boasts a dedicated billing support service in case you have any issues there.

WP Engine also has an in-house dedicated security engineering team that creates WordPress-specific security features to scan for malware and detect threats.

When I got in touch with them via live chat, I was pleased to only find myself waiting around 30 seconds before someone replied. Their SLA for response times is less than three minutes, so they exceeded themselves here.

🏆 Winner is WP Engine

While Kinsta gets bonus points for the number of languages they provide help in, WP Engine takes the edge thanks to the multitude of ways to get in touch. Having both live chat and phone available is widely appreciated, and the platform’s response time cannot be faulted. Choose WP Engine if support is a key priority for you.

Questions & Answers

What is Kinsta?

Kinsta is a cloud-based platform designed specifically for WordPress and app hosting. It’s built on Google Cloud Platform’s Premium Tier Network and C2 Machines to give you a stable and reliable platform to create and manage your WordPress sites and other applications.

What is WP Engine?

WP Engine is a dedicated hosting provider for WordPress and offers fully managed WordPress services and an optimized platform for this purpose. As well as managed WordPress, WP Engine also has hosting solutions for WooCommerce and enterprise-grade businesses.

What is the main difference between Kinsta and WP Engine?

WP Engine is a platform dedicated to WordPress and WooCommerce hosting. Kinsta, on the other hand, offers hosting solutions for databases and applications as well as WordPress sites. Both offers managed WordPress hosting solutions with different features and pricing structures.

Which one is better, Kinsta or WP Engine?

Although Kinsta initially appears more expensive, the platform offers better performance, premium-grade security, and great customer service, making it the overall better choice. 

Which one is cheaper, Kinsta or WP Engine?

WP Engine is cheaper than Kinsta. WP Engine plans cost significantly less on a monthly basis, and this is made cheaper still by paying annually since this gives you the equivalent of four months of free access (compared to just two free months with Kinsta).

Our Verdict ⭐

WP Engine and Kinsta are two of the best managed WordPress hosts.

At a quick glance, WP Engine does seem to be the better and more affordable option. But if you want the same level of performance and particularly security, you need to purchase the add-ons. 

BUT by the time you’ve paid for all the extra bits and pieces, the price will be higher than what you’ll pay for Kinsta.

On the other hand, Kinsta provides cutting-edge technology, premium security, and performance features and actually delivers on its uptime promise, all for a single monthly price.

So in my view, that settles it. Kinsta is the overall winner on all accounts except maybe customer service (although this is still extremely good).

Take Your WordPress site to the Next Level with Kinsta

Enjoy managed WordPress hosting, free CDN and SSL, and automatic daily backups with Kinsta. Plus, get free site migration and choose from over 18 global data centers.

If you’re ready to try out the champion, you can sign up for Kinsta using my exclusive link. If you’re more of a WP Engine gal or guy despite the additional costs, you can try it out here.

How We Evaluate Web Hosts: Our Methodology

When we review web hosts, our evaluation is based on these criteria:

  1. Value for Money: What types of web hosting plans are on offer, and are they good value for money?
  2. User Friendliness: How user-friendly is the signup process, the onboarding, the dashboard? and so on.
  3. Customer Support: When we need help, how quickly can we get it, and is the support effective and helpful?
  4. Hosting Features: What unique features does the web host provide, and how do they stack up against competitors?
  5. Security: Are essential security measures like SSL certificates, DDoS protection, backup services, and malware/virus scans included?
  6. Speed and Uptime: Is the hosting service fast and reliable? What types of servers do they use, and how do they perform in tests?

For more details on our review process, click here.

Mathias Ahlgren is the CEO and founder of Website Rating, steering a global team of editors and writers. He holds a master's in information science and management. His career pivoted to SEO after early web development experiences during university. With over 15 years in SEO, digital marketing, and web developmens. His focus also includes website security, evidenced by a certificate in Cyber Security. This diverse expertise underpins his leadership at Website Rating.

The "WSR Team" is the collective group of expert editors and writers specializing in technology, internet security, digital marketing, and web development. Passionate about the digital realm, they produce well-researched, insightful, and accessible content. Their commitment to accuracy and clarity makes Website Rating a trusted resource for staying informed in the dynamic digital world.

Ibad is a writer at Website Rating who specializes in the realm of web hosting and has previously worked at Cloudways and Convesio. His articles focus on educating readers about WordPress hosting and VPS, offering in-depth insights and analysis in these technical areas. His work is aimed at guiding users through the complexities of web hosting solutions.

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