Kinsta vs WPEngine – Which Offers the Best WordPress Hosting? [2023]
WordPress can help you gain a lot of visitors to your website, which in turn can definitely help you generate sales. And for this purpose, managed WordPress hosting from a reputable provider would be best for your growth.
Having a good hosting service will not only help you to handle the technical details but also keep your site up and running fast all the time. Your site will also rank better in search engines if the hosting company has lightning-fast servers. In this way, you can focus on creating great content for your audience instead of struggling with your website’s performance.
Also read:
– SiteGround vs DreamHost
– Bluehost vs GoDaddy
Choosing the right hosting for your business can be tricky. In this article, we will compare the best WordPress hosting provider – Kinsta vs WPEngine. It can be difficult to decide which of the two managed WordPress hosts is the best fit for you because they are both high-quality managed WordPress hosts with similar price points.
Kinsta vs WPEngine
Let us first introduce each of the hosts briefly. WpEngine vs Kinsta comparison.
Explore Kinsta | Explore WPEngine
Overview of the two web hosting providers
Two of the most highly rated hosts among the WordPress community are Kinsta and WP Engine.
Kinsta
Known for its WordPress-specific managed hosting, Kinsta is one of the premier companies on the market founded in 2013. Kinsta was also the first host to use the Google Cloud Platform a year later in 2016. Since then, they have seen phenomenal growth. In addition to its headquarters in Los Angeles, the company also has offices in Budapest and London.
In the managed WordPress hosting space, Kinsta has grown tremendously over the past six years as a service focusing on speed, stability, and security.
All of Kinsta’s plans include the following features:
- A variety of security features such as uptime monitoring, firewalls, and SSL support are available.
- Using the dashboard, you can review and adjust your websites.
- Analytical tracking for key metrics, such as the number of visitors and bandwidth consumption.
- An easy-to-use staging option will help you to develop or modify your website smoothly.
- Offer free website migrations.
- A customizable multi-user feature, allows you to grant specific levels of access to your team members.
- The backup option is provided on a daily basis. More frequent backups can also be purchased at an additional charge.
- They provide access to the most popular developer tools such as SSH, WP-CLI, and Git.
WP Engine has been considered the best WordPress hosting provider since 2011. As a managed hosting service, WP Engine also provides maintenance, migration, and optimization services for WordPress sites. The company headquarters are located in Austin, Texas, from where it continues to serve users globally.
It’s safe to say that they are currently the most preferred WordPress hosting company after they acquired their biggest rival FlyWheel. They’ve also been very popular among the WordPress community for several years.
The company has over 70,000 customers across more than 130 countries – including government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and international corporations.
All of WP Engine’s plans include the following features:
- Automated updates for WordPress.
- Protection for accounts through two-factor authentication and managed threat mitigation.
- Page performance tool allows you to monitor your site’s speed and other relevant metrics.
- Get free access to the Genesis Framework, along with 35+ themes built on it.
- Offsite backups every day.
- Multiple options for SSL certificates.
- Staging and development sites.
- Free migrations of your existing website.
Kinsta vs WPEngine: Feature Comparison
Website Speed
CDN
An important feature that Kinsta and WP Engine both offer is premium content delivery networks. WP Engine and Kinsta’s CDN allow them to deliver fast service from every corner of the globe, including Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Asia. Both hosting companies use third-party CDN tools for their client’s websites.
Kinsta uses Key CDN and WP Engine uses MAX CDN for providing CDN. With over 34 POPS around the world, both of these CDN services are among the best available.
PHP 7.3
PHP is a server-side language that can be used to develop a wide range of apps and WordPress websites. WP Engine and Kinsta both offer excellent performance for websites hosted on their platforms. A few months ago, several companies began using PHP 7.3 for hosting, including Kinsta and WP Engine.
As reported by W3Techs 79% of websites employ server-side programming languages. In comparison to the previous version, a higher PHP version ensures greater speed and security.
Caching
Despite both companies including website caching, they employ different caching technologies to secure their users’ websites.
While Kinsta offers an in-house caching plug-in, WP Engine offers object caching as part of standard website caching.
Uptime
In order to avoid losing sales, your website must be available at all times. This is the reason both Kinsta and Wpengine strive to deliver excellent uptime. The uptime commitment of Wpengine is 99.95%, while Kinsta offers 99.9%.
Although the difference between these two percentages may appear small, it can add up to a few hours of downtime a year. In other words, choosing the company with the highest percentage can prevent your site from ever going offline.
User Experience
WP Engine and Kinsta now offer Google Cloud Platform cloud hosting in partnership with Google to provide you with state-of-the-art infrastructure. Therefore, no matter if you use WP Engine or Kinsta, your website will be hosted on Google Cloud Platform.
Instead of traditional solutions such as cPanel, Both Kinsta and WP Engine have created custom easy to use account management dashboards for their users. Through their custom panels, you can build your WordPress sites, create and restore your backups, and do a lot more.
As each host gives you a set amount of bandwidth, disk space, and visitors that your site can consume each month. This is great to see that both Kinsta and WP Engine give you easy access to your statistics. It’s especially important to keep these limits in mind in order to avoid incurring overage fees.
With both hosts, you can easily connect to your WordPress databases using phpMyAdmin software, but you can also use a tool of your choice to connect to your site’s databases.
As both hosting providers offer very user-friendly interfaces for managing your account. There isn’t much difference between WP Engine and Kinsta in this regard. Although, the Kinsta dashboard will allow you to update the plugins installed on your site.
Security
WordPress has been targeted the most by hackers around the world. That is why both companies have successfully implemented systems such as SSL and two-factor authentication to prevent hackers from accessing your site.
Additionally, their plans include strong password requirements for websites. Furthermore, they can block any spam login attempts that can harm your site. As a partner of Cloudflare, WP Engine offers high-security standards and provides DDoS protection services to ensure the safety of your website.
Using WP Engine, websites are scanned for malware and security issues on a regular basis. Additionally, the company promises to provide website security on multiple levels as well.
Apart from DDoS scanning and GeoIP blocking, Kinsta offers a variety of security measures. The service also protects your system from malicious code.
The company claims to fix hacked websites for a fee if they are compromised. In contrast, Wpengine pays Sucuri to deal with hacking issues without charging its customers.
WordPress Website Migration
If you want to migrate your website from other servers. Then the good news is that both Kinsta and WP Engine make it very easy to migrate your existing WordPress website to their platform.
Among their plans, Kinsta offers a free migration service for WordPress sites. The company offers unlimited migrations from hosts like DreamHost, WP Engine, GoDaddy, and Flywheel, even if you want to move several WordPress websites. Besides Kinsta’s free migration service, these hosts also allow users to transfer WordPress websites manually.
WP Engine does not offer migration services. However, you can manually transfer your WordPress site to the Company’s platform using their own in-house DIY plug-in. Using this automated migration plug-in, you can easily migrate your site to its platform in just a few clicks. It also comes with detailed instructions, ensuring that the process goes as smoothly as possible.
WordPress Themes
After the acquisition of StudioPress, WP Engine offers access to its 37 premium WordPress themes for their users’ websites. To boost the quality and looks of your website you need to search for the right WordPress themes. This is perhaps the most notable difference between WP Engine and Kinsta.
The hosting plans offered by Kinsta do not include themes. Nevertheless, there are many free themes available out there.
Manual and Automated WordPress Site Backups
An automated backup option will safely store your backup on the hosting server storage so that your site can be restored anytime to your preferred restore point if required. An easy-to-use website backup tool is another important feature of WordPress-optimized hosting.
Both Kinsta and WP Engine offer daily backups in all their plans, so you don’t need to worry about forgetting to back up your site. Their panels also allow you to manually create backups when necessary. However, both hosting providers offer this feature in a slightly different way.
The backups are maintained on WP Engine and Kinsta servers, with options to download them for offline storage. You can view the backups or restore points from your account dashboard.
WP Engine, on the other hand, allows you to download any backup in your dashboard, while Kinsta requires you to create a second downloadable backup. Additionally, these downloadable backups are only generated once a week by Kinsta.
WP Engine stores the last 40 daily automated backups, while Kinsta stores its backups for 14 days. It is not possible to exclude the database from the backup restoration with Kinsta, you can only restore the entire backup.
In contrast, WP Engine provides you with the option to include or exclude the database from the backup to restore. Both hosts offer the option to restore a backup in just a few clicks to your live site or staging environment.
Additionally, you can create partial backups on WP Engine. Having a partial backup will be useful for large websites since you can exclude themes and plugins from your backup. Kinsta doesn’t offer this feature, but when you create a downloadable backup, your entire site is available for download, so you can remove files from the archive you don’t need.
Website Staging
With both hosts, you can set up a staging site. You can test out new plugins, customize a theme, or do other tasks on a staging site. If you performed these steps on your live site, they could negatively affect your visitors. The staging site can be transferred to your live or production website when you’re ready.
There is no difficulty in moving content between your staging and live sites on either host. Again, there are differences in the way both companies deliver this feature, so we’ll examine them now.
Kinsta
With just two environments: Live and staging, Kinsta keeps things simple. You can restore one of your existing backups into a staging site to create an exact replica of your live site, which gives you the ability to work on a clone of your live site. The staging site can then be transferred to the live site when you’re ready.
Instead of just copying the website files and databases, Kinsta copies the entire site including its database from the staging environment to the live site. Because of this, if you wish to have greater control over what’s copied from one environment to another, you may prefer a staging site from WP Engine.
WP Engine
The WP Engine plugin gives you access to three different environments, namely the development environment, the staging environment, and the production environment. In the development environment, you can work on a site before moving it to staging, where clients and team members can access it.
The staging site can then be transferred to the production environment so that everyone can access it.
The content in the WordPress database is not copied when your staging site is copied to your production environment with WP Engine. If you wish, it is possible to copy your choice of tables from the staging site database. More information about how WP Engine’s staging feature works can be found on their website.
Transferable Websites
In addition to three different environments, including development, staging, and production, Another great feature with WP Engine is the ability to build transferrable sites. Transferrable sites have the same three environments as regular sites, but passwords are required to access the sites. Only people with the right credentials will be able to access the production site.
Essentially, the transferable sites feature allows developers to create sites for their clients, so when they’re ready to go live, they can transfer them to the client’s WP Engine account. Developers can also purchase a credit to host an additional website – $20 per month on the Startup plan – so the site will be publicly accessible.
It is not available with Kinsta, so if you want a hosting service that allows your site to be transferred easily from one account to another, then Kinsta would not be a good fit for you.
WordPress Website Creation
WP Engine and Kinsta are both great options for easily creating WordPress websites. Once you have created an account, you can set up your WordPress website simply by entering a few details.
In addition to selecting where your website will be hosted, Kinsta also allows you to copy one of your existing online portfolios into the new site. You can choose your data centre location when you create an account and select a plan at WP Engine, but you cannot choose it each time you create a new site. You can contact their support if you wish to migrate your account to another location.
You can also copy one of your existing websites into a new account with WP Engine, just like Kinsta. This is useful if you want to use the custom WordPress configuration for new projects or if you have created a site in the staging environment and are ready to publish it.
WP Engine and Kinsta WordPress websites are very similar to the default WordPress installation. Neither host adds any additional functionality to the WordPress Dashboard, but WP Engine adds some additional functionality to the Dashboard, such as the ability to enable or disable the CDN, and a button to copy the site to your staging area. On the WordPress Dashboard, WP Engine also provides handy links to their documentation and support pages.
In terms of WordPress hosting, a major difference between Kinsta and WP Engine is that when you’re about to update a plugin, theme or WordPress software, WP Engine will prompt you to create a restore point. On the other hand, Kinsta does not have this feature.
Customer Support
Expert support is another key element of a managed WordPress host. Due to the fact that WordPress websites are exclusively hosted by companies like Kinsta and WP Engine, their support staff have extensive experience with this type of site.
In contrast to generic hosting, both companies have employed the best WordPress experts who know very well about this CMS troubleshooting. As a result, the level of support will always be useful and higher than other hosting services.
If you want to contact the Kinsta or WP Engine support staff, there are some differences that may matter to you:
On all plans, Kinsta offers 24/7 live chat support and tickets, but no phone support.
WP Engine also offers 24/7 live chat support for every plan. Additionally, other than the entry-level Startup plan, they also provide 24/7 phone support on all their plans. They do not offer tickets for the entry-level plans, but they do offer them for the custom dedicated plans at the top tier.
In spite of the differences described above, both hosts offered a high level of customer support during testing for this comparison.
Kinsta vs WPEngine: Price Comparison
Kinsta
With Kinsta, you can choose from 8 different hosting plans that are small, mid-sized, or large businesses. There’s only one problem – there’s no free trial. It offers a 30-day money-back guarantee period, which is the best you can hope for. There are a variety of packages available, which vary in terms of SSD storage space, traffic size, and the number of WordPress sites. That includes:
Starter Plan– it costs $30 per month or $300 a year, Here you get:
- Free SSL and CDN
- Storage space of 3GB
- 20,000 website traffic
- Host only 1 WordPress website
Pro Plan costs $60 per month or $600 a year. Here you get:
- Free SSL and CDN
- Storage space of 6 GB
- 40,000 website traffic
- Host up to 2 WordPress websites
Business 1 Plan costs $100 per month or $1,000 a year. Here you get:
- Free SSL and CDN
- Storage space of 10 GB
- 100,000 website traffic
- Host up to 3 WordPress websites
Business 2 Plan costs $200 per month or $2,000 a year. Here you get:
- Free SSL and CDN
- Storage space of 20 GB
- 250,000 website traffic
- Host up to 10 WordPress websites
Business 3 Plan costs $300 per month or $3,000 a year. Here you get:
- Free SSL and CDN
- Storage space of 30 GB
- 400,000 website traffic
- Host up to 20 WordPress websites
Business 4 Plan costs $400 per month or $4,000 a year. Here you get:
- Free SSL and CDN
- Storage space of 40 GB
- 600,000 website traffic
- Host up to 40 WordPress websites
Enterprise 1 Plan costs $600 per month or $6,000 a year. Here you get:
- Free SSL and CDN
- Storage space of 80 GB
- 10,00,000 website traffic
- Host up to 60 WordPress websites
Enterprise 2 Plan costs $900 per month or $9,000 a year. Here you get:
- Free SSL and CDN
- Storage space of 120 GB
- 15,00,000 website traffic
- Host up to 80 WordPress websites
WP Engine
In terms of free trials, WP Engine is also not very generous. At least it includes a 60-day money-back guarantee. Unlike Kinsta, WPEngine has a simple pricing structure as it basically includes only four pricing packages based on the storage size, bandwidth, number of sites to host and traffic size.
A closer look, however, reveals that the prices are not quite straightforward. While WP Engine has only listed the starting price of each plan, it does not break down the costs of sub hosting options.
Here are the options available to you:
The startup Plan starts at $30/month (if paid monthly) or $25/month (when paid annually)
- Free SSL and CDN
- Bandwidth of 50 GB
- 25,000 website traffic
- Host only 1 WordPress website
The Professional Plan starts at $59/month (if paid monthly) or $49/month (when paid annually)
- Free SSL and CDN
- Bandwidth of 1250 GB
- 75,000 website traffic
- Host up to 3 WordPress websites
The Growth Plan starts at $115/month (if paid monthly) or $96/month (when paid annually)
- Free SSL and CDN
- The bandwidth of 200 GB
- 100,000 website traffic
- Host up to 10 WordPress websites
Scale Plan starts at $290/month (if paid monthly) or $242/month (when paid annually)
- Free SSL and CDN
- The bandwidth of 500 GB
- 400,000 website traffic
- Host 30+ WordPress websites
Customized Plan – price is negotiable
- Handle millions of website traffic
- The bandwidth of more than 500+ GB
- Host 30+ WordPress websites
- Managed onboarding
- Dedicated hosting
- Best performance
- Best redundancy
- Fastest response time from support
WP Engine vs Kinsta: Main Differences
Between Kinsta and WP Engine, the main differences are as follows:
- Kinsta offers server-side caching, while WP Engine provides site-level caching
- Kinsta offers free WordPress migration, whereas in WP Engine you need to migrate the site on your own using their in-house plug-ins unless you are subscribing to a top-level plan.
- You can choose from 10+ different pricing plans in Kinsta, whereas the pricing plans of WP Engine are less flexible and offer only 3 pricing options.
- In general, Kinsta is somewhat less expensive than WP Engine
Kinsta vs WP Engine: Final Verdict
In our opinion, Kinsta is the best-managed WordPress hosting service. Kinsta outperforms WPEngine in terms of specs and is the best choice for WordPress websites of any size. Below is a summary of what it offers:
- A plethora of features, including the ability to track the performance of your site and participate in hands-on development.
- Top-notch customer support, as well as in-depth expertise in the WordPress platform.
- Entry-level plans are affordable, and the pricing is very flexible.
Kinsta offers a lot more than what it promises. There’s no need to worry about website downtime, slow speed, customer support or any other issues related to hosting.
Explore Kinsta | Explore WPEngine
