WP Engine Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

Introduction

Kinsta has been in business for 10 years and is known for top website performance, world-class support, and the powerful MyKinsta dashboard that makes website management a breeze. More than 120,000+ clients all across the world, including some of the biggest companies in the world, rely on Kinsta’s hosting services.

We know that everyday WordPress and website users are looking for an alternative hosting solution to WP Engine that combines better infrastructure and performance, along with faster and better support. Kinsta provides all these and much more!

How Kinsta Compares to WP Engine in a Nutshell

Kinsta’s infrastructure is fully containerized and powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform on Google’s Premium Tier network, enabling us to provide you with a large selection of the fastest data servers, incredible performance, server-level caching, dedicated resources, and enhanced security. Gone are the days of worrying about sharing resources with other sites, including your own! 

All sites on Kinsta are protected by our enterprise-level premium Cloudflare integration, free for all customers. It includes a secure firewall, HTTP/3 support, DDoS protection, free CDN, and other benefits. You also experience transparent resource consumption, costs, and pricing. 

While WP Engine also uses Google Cloud Platform, they don’t make top-tier products like C2 and C3D virtual machines and Premium Tier network available for all plans. You get access to C2 machines only if you have Premium or Dedicated custom plans.

WP Engine counts all staging into their disc space allowance, while Kinsta does not. We do, however, allow you to easily purchase a cost-effective disk space add-on while keeping your current plan.

We are also proud to be the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2, the world’s leading software review and comparison site.

Feature Comparison Overview

At this point, we want to take a moment to look at some of the biggest differences between Kinsta and WP Engine:

Enjoy a 20% Faster Website Simply by Moving From WP Engine to Kinsta

We measured 3,200+ migrations over the course of a three-month span. On average, client sites experienced 20% faster load times just by moving to Kinsta.

How is this possible? Our customers enjoy:

• The latest generation of virtual machines from Google’s Compute Engine general-purpose machine family C3D VMs and The fastest Compute-Optimized C2 VMs, available across all plans in supported regions.
• A stack that’s been fine-tuned for WordPress over the past 10+ years.
• Google’s Premium Tier Network to deliver website data faster
• Free CDN powered by Cloudflare’s global network of 260+ locations.
• Built-in Edge Caching that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
• Containerized sites, meaning no more shared hosting/resources at any plan level.
• Early Hints feature, a modern web standard that can help immediately improve how quickly your pages load by providing additional information on what resources to preload, resulting in faster page rendering speed.

Migrate from WP Engine to Kinsta hassle free with our free expert migration service. With our 30-day money-back guarantee, you can test out the service and improved speeds completely risk-free. You only lose if you don’t give this a try!

Kinsta vs WP Engine

Let’s take a look at some of the major differences between Kinsta and WP Engine:

• Kinsta supports 37 data centers across Google’s global network, whereas WP Engine only supports 14 Google Cloud Server locations. Unlike Kinsta, WP Engine charges extra for hosting your site in certain locations.
• Kinsta uses C3D and C2 VMs (GCP’s fastest servers) for all plans in supported locations. In our tests, we found that C2 VMs are up to 200% faster than GCP’s lower-tier machines, while C3D machines increased response times by a further 20% to 50%. While WP Engine offers C2 VMs on their expensive advanced plans, lower-tier plans are provided with less robust servers.
• Kinsta customers enjoy a free Cloudflare integration powered with enterprise-level firewall and DDoS protection on all plans. WP Engine plans don’t include firewall protection unless you purchase their Global Edge Security add-on at an additional cost of $30 a month for each site.
• Containerized Solution. Kinsta offers a unique infrastructure that containerizes site resources so they don’t have to share. This increases and levels your performance on a per-site basis. No more worrying about sites you don’t manage potentially stealing your resources. It also helps minimize your time spent troubleshooting performance issues as you no longer have to account for potential resource stealing.
• Because of Kinsta’s unique containerized hosting, you can also host multiple sites on multiple data centers all within the same plan! No more having to pay for multiple servers just to host sites in different locations. Help your clients get an instant performance boost by simply hosting their site on a server that’s more appropriately located for their customer base.
• Transparent resources and pricing. Kinsta lets you know exactly what resources your sites have available. Gone are the days of blind upgrade requests and upsell attempts.
• Kinsta CDN takes advantage of our Cloudflare integration and its worldwide network that spans 300 cities in more than 100 countries. We don’t need to know where you are to know there will be a Cloudflare server near you. That means lightning-fast server requests to your website. And it’s available at no extra cost in any Kinsta plan.
• All Kinsta plans include free access to our custom application performance monitoring tool (Kinsta APM) for debugging WordPress performance issues. WP Engine does not have a built-in free APM tool. They have a Website Monitoring Tool with variable pricing that starts at $5.
• Kinsta performs weekly automatic MySQL optimization on all your sites to optimize database performance. We didn’t find any evidence that WP Engine provides the same service so far.
• Kinsta is well-known for its world-class support, composed of WordPress experts and Linux engineers, available 24/7 for all our customers via live chat, with an average response time of under 2 minutes. We offer multilingual support across all of our plans, and our engineers are experienced and capable of solving any hosting issue on your WP site. While WP Engine also offers 24/7 support, they use a tiered support system and don’t have multilingual assistance.
• Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. WP Engine is also SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
• Kinsta offers free migrations from WP Engine handled by an expert engineer. You can rest assured that your site will be migrated safely, securely, and following best practices. WP Engine handles migrations with a DIY plugin, which means you have to do the migrations on your own, so you won’t receive a white-glove migration experience specifically tailored to your site.
• Kinsta has a simple billing model that’s only based on visits. WP Engine has both total visits and bandwidth limits in place across all of their plans, which makes it difficult to estimate your monthly cost.
• Sites on Kinsta are equipped with a self-healing PHP feature. We monitor all sites on our infrastructure 480 times per day and offer an uptime guarantee. On WP Engine, site monitoring is only available on Premium and Enterprise plans, and you might not get notified promptly when your site goes down unless you pay for a third-party monitoring service
• Kinsta always supports the most recent version of PHP and supports different versions for staging environments. Switching between PHP versions takes just a few clicks in the MyKinsta dashboard. WP Engine also has a PHP version switcher, but at the time of the latest update of this page, they don’t support the most recent version of PHP.
• MyKinsta dashboard includes a variety of useful site management tools that are not available on WP Engine: database search and replace, free and built-in APM tool, free IP Geolocation manager, ionCube loader, PHP restart, and more.
• Kinsta offers six types of backups: free automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system-generated, downloadable, and external backups sent automatically to your Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. We also store two weeks of backups at all times, with the possibility to increase data retention.WP Engine only includes automatic, system-generated, manual, and downloadable backups without built-in support for hourly or external backups.
• For developers and agencies, Kinsta offers a powerful local development tool called DevKinsta. With DevKinsta, you can clone and develop your projects locally and push updates to Kinsta when ready. WordPress multisite is also supported. WP Engine is compatible with Local, but their Local Connect feature, which is required to move sites between Local and WP Engine (or other remote hostings), doesn’t have built-in multi-site support at this time. This means importing and/or deploying multi-sites in and from Local will require a more manual and time-consuming process.
• WP Engine disables WordPress revisions and does not allow revisions to be enabled in the wp-config.php or php.ini. Since we use the fastest C3D and C2 machines available from Google, we do not need to disable core WordPress features such as Post Revisions, a fantastic feature for publishers and bloggers alike!
• Built-in Edge Caching that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!

Try it out for yourself with our risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee.

Kinsta Is Safe and Secure

At Kinsta, we know that the security of your data is of the utmost importance, which is why we’re dedicated to providing the most secure hosting service by taking a variety of active and passive measures to safeguard your site.

All sites on Kinsta are protected by our free Cloudflare integration, which includes an enterprise-level firewall with a custom ruleset and DDoS protection. With our Cloudflare integration, you’ll get the benefits of enhanced security and performance without having to manage your own Cloudflare account.

Some of Kinsta’s key security measures include:

• Monitoring sites every three minutes for uptime, 480 times a day.
• Rigid software-based restrictions to stop malicious code from entering your website.
• Real-time DDoS attack detection and mitigation.
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) support and automatic bans for IPs that have more than six failed login attempts in a minute.
• A dedicated Security Team to address malicious attackers, hacks, and exploits.
• Free Cloudflare integration with a secure firewall and built-in DDoS protection.
• Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP).
• Completely isolated containers (LXC), using LXD to orchestrate them so there’s no chance of cross-infection from other clients.
• Free Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard domain support.
• 100% Malware Security Pledge if your site is infected with malware while hosted on Kinsta.
• Automatic security checks for every plugin installed to discover vulnerabilities and/or security issues.

In the rare event that something were to happen to your site, our Malware Security Pledge means you will get hands-on assistance from our engineers free of charge. We’ll restore your site and make sure it’s free of backdoors that hackers can take advantage of.

Agency Partner Program

Kinsta has an Agency Partner Program specifically designed for agencies looking for a powerful and secure hosting platform with minimal overhead. After joining our Agency Partner Program, your agency will be able to focus on developing client projects and expanding your business while we handle the hosting side of things.

We talk to new agency owners every day and know how frustrating it can be when you are overpaying for dedicated servers, while your sites are still sharing resources with each other. This leads to performance issues. We hear you and we have the solution!

Our container-based hosting stack is a game changer for your agency and for your clients. Each website gets dedicated resources and we deliver better performance and uptime in a cost-efficient way. No upsell, just upgrades: transparent plans for Your Growing Agency. 112,000+ WordPress sites already enjoy the Kinsta difference. Contact us and get your first month free today!

Our Agency Partner Program also comes with a number of perks:

• Free hosting for your agency site on a Kinsta Pro plan (a $70/month value).
• Unlimited free migrations for your client sites.
• White-label our cache-clearing plugin with your agency’s logo and branding.
• One month of free hosting, so you don’t have to worry about paying for two hosting plans while migrating your client sites to Kinsta.

As a member of our Agency Partner Program, all your client sites will receive the same level of support, features, and tooling offered on our normal plan tiers!

Kinsta API

Say goodbye to the limitations of the past and enjoy a revolutionary era where machines can seamlessly interact with our services. Kinsta API (Application Programming Interface) allows you to perform tasks on your Kinsta site without logging in to the MyKinsta dashboard.

What’s possible with Kinsta API?

• Reporting: seamlessly integrate Kinsta Services into your internal tracking systems and retrieve Kinsta analytics data effortlessly.
• Scheduled Tasks: create applications to schedule tasks, ensuring minimal disruption to your visitors. 
• WordPress Site Creation: create a new WordPress site installation automatically and take control of your site’s functionality. You can also create WordPress Multisite installations.

Enjoy more automation than ever before on the Kinsta platform by taking advantage of Kinsta API.

Free Performance Monitoring Tool

All Kinsta plans come with a free custom-built APM tool that can be easily accessed in the MyKinsta dashboard. Kinsta APM provides you with key WordPress performance insights and metrics without the need to pay for third-party subscriptions to other APM services.

With Kinsta APM, you can debug the following and more:

• Slow WordPress plugins and themes.
• Long calls to external APIs and domains.
• Unoptimized MySQL database queries.
• PHP execution time.

On the other hand,  WP Engine plans do not come with a free custom-built APM tool. This means if you’re on a lower-tier WP Engine plan, you won’t be able to collect insights about your site’s performance. WP Engine offers an APM tool powered by New Relic, though only on Premium and Enterprise plans.

Develop Locally With DevKinsta

With DevKinsta, you can launch WordPress sites with a full hosting stack and SSL support on your local computer (macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu) with just a few clicks.

DevKinsta is fully integrated with MyKinsta and Kinsta’s hosting platform, so you can join the 57,000+ community members using DevKinsta to develop locally and push updates directly to a staging environment on Kinsta!

WP Engine is compatible with the Local WordPress development tool. However, WP Engine’s integration with Local doesn’t support WordPress multisite configurations, which are very popular with agencies and developers.

If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features (including multisite support) and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.

Free Migrations From Real People

Whether you want to move one site or 100, Kinsta provides hassle-free migrations that are handled by our skilled WordPress experts. You won’t have to deal with complex technology or risk losing critical data.

If you’re interested in moving your site to managed WordPress hosting, we offer unlimited free migrations from WP Engine! To top it off, unlike WP Engine, where free migrations are performed via a WordPress plugin, our migrations are performed by an expert migrations engineer.

My experience with migrations has been excellent – I didn’t wait days for this to happen – migrations happened within a few hours. When I tried to migrate sites myself and there were errors, I received instant emails from support suggesting the issues I should look at. Extremely helpful!

To get started, simply complete our site migration request form, and our experts will reach out to schedule a time. Then you can track the migration’s status directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.