Cloudways vs. WP Engine: A Complete Comparison Guide

Choosing the right hosting platform for your WordPress®^[1] site will impact your site’s speed and security as well as your team’s daily productivity. If you’re comparing WP Engine and Cloudways, it all comes down to a philosophical choice: do you want a powerful, fully managed experience or a powerful DIY solution?

WP Engine specializes in managing WordPress sites only, configuring all server infrastructure and specialized features to best serve WordPress users. Cloudways is also a managed hosting platform that supports a few types of site frameworks, including WordPress, Magento, and Laravel. Their flexible hosting gives users the keys to a server, but requires them to take greater control (and responsibility) over ongoing maintenance and optimization.

This guide provides a comprehensive comparison of WP Engine and Cloudways to help you choose the partner that best fits your business goals.

WP Engine vs. Cloudways: Which is better for hosting WordPress sites?

WP Engine is the right choice for enterprises, brands, and agencies that want to focus energy on their business growth, not their websites and server maintenance. If you value predictable performance and pricing, built-in security, and 24/7 access to experts who can help you troubleshoot all your issues, choose WP Engine.

Cloudways is a strong option for technical users and developers who prioritize infrastructure flexibility, want a pay-as-you-go pricing model, and are comfortable managing low-level server configurations themselves.

Performance and reliability

Speed is more than just a metric; it’s a conversion factor. While both WP Engine and Cloudways can provide the speed you need, they differ in how they deliver it and how they maintain reliability during traffic surges.

WP Engine: Optimized resilience

WP Engine’s managed platform is engineered for WordPress from the ground up. It uses EverCache, a proprietary caching technology designed specifically to handle the “un-cacheable” parts of WordPress sites. Because WP Engine manages the entire stack, it can push optimizations that aren’t possible on a general-purpose cloud server.

• Uptime SLA: WP Engine’s Service Level Agreement guarantees a minimum 99.95% uptime, which scales up to 99.99% for Core and Enterprise plans.
• Managed updates: WP Engine handles WordPress core and PHP updates for you, so your environment is always running the most recent versions without manual intervention. 
• Insights and reporting features: WP Engine provides robust performance and usage analytics that provide visibility into critical metrics to drive optimizations. All accounts include a dedicated insights section at the install and account level and site reports feature for scheduled, white-labeled reporting in the User Portal at no extra cost.

Cloudways: DIY scalability

Cloudways provides great raw performance, but it is often “unoptimized” out of the box. Users are responsible for choosing their server size (RAM/CPU) and caching layers. While this offers flexibility, it places the burden of performance tuning on the user.

• Uptime SLA: While certain pages of Cloudways’ website mention customer reports of 99.99% uptime, no specific uptime guarantee is reflected in the company’s Service Level Agreement. Specific uptime guarantees are based on the server provider a customer chooses and vary between choices.
• Managed updates: Cloudways offers managed updates to WordPress core as a paid add-on.
• Insights and reporting features: Cloudways also offers some basic performance insights in its customer dashboard, but reporting features cost extra if reporting to more than one client.

Cloudways vs WP Engine: Speed comparison

While both providers offer excellent site speed and performance, WP Engine may provide slightly better out-of-the-box performance than Cloudways. Different configurations may offer faster or slower load times for different Cloudways customers, while WP Engine’s platform is optimized for consistent performance across all sites and plan types.

Cloudways vs WP Engine: Performance features and reliability at a glance

Feature	WP Engine	Cloudways
Caching	Proprietary EverCache® (fully integrated and automated)  plus caching optimizations available through the NitroPack add-on	Memcache (default) and options for Varnish, Redis, Relay, or Breeze plugin
PHP and WordPress core updates	Fully managed	Manual / User-initiated
Uptime SLA	99.95% – 99.99%	Dependent on server provider
Server optimization	Automatic out-of-the-box	Requires manual configuration
Performance insights & reporting	Robust account level and site level usage and performance reporting Included for all customers	Some dashboard insights included; reporting may require additional costs

Security: Proactive protection vs. configurable toolkit

Both WP Engine and Cloudways offer solid baseline security for WordPress sites, but each takes a different approach. WP Engine offers a “walled garden” experience where security is highly automated and managed for you, while Cloudways uses a “security toolkit” approach that gives users more granular control over and responsibility for their server-level defenses.

Both platforms provide certain security features as standard, including:

• Free SSL certificates: Both offer easy, free SSL installations.
• Automated backups: Both provide daily automated backups with one-click restore functionality and off-site storage.
• Staging environments: Both allow you to test updates and code in secure staging environments before pushing changes to a live site.
• IP & country allow/block: Both offer allow users to block malicious IPs or countries where attacks are originating.
• Layers 3 & 4 DDoS mitigation: Both protect network infrastructure from attacks designed to overwhelm resources.
• Two-factor authentication (2FA): Both providers offer and enforce 2FA to protect customer data.

There are a few key differences in the security offerings of these two providers.

Additional WP Engine standard protections Edge and server-level managed firewall  Automated security patching and plugin risk scans  Edge threat detection and bot mitigation   Automated malware detection	Additional Cloudways standard protections Server-level managed firewall
WP Engine security add-ons Global Edge Security: A set-it-and-forget-it solution that expands security to include layer 7 DDoS mitigation, a fully managed web application firewall (WAF), end-to-end encryption, and performance enhancements like image optimization and smart traffic routing.	Cloudways security add-ons Malware scanning & cleanup: Paid add-on. Edge-level managed firewall: Paid add-on via Cloudflare.

WP Engine provides stronger out-of-the-box security because features are largely integrated and automatic, which is ideal for customers who want a hands-off security posture.

Cloudways also delivers a good security baseline, but a more comprehensive security stack often requires additional user configuration or optional add-ons.

Support: The award-winning difference

When your WordPress site goes down, you don’t want a generalist; you want a specialist.

Because WP Engine only hosts sites built on WordPress, its scope of support includes knowledge specific to WordPress environments. The award-winning support team can help with site-specific issues, plugin conflicts, and performance bottlenecks, offering 24/7/365 live chat and phone support on almost every plan (excluding phone support for entry-level Startup plans).

Cloudways offers 24/7 chat support, but the primary focus of that support is the hosting platform and server infrastructure. Phone support on Cloudways is only available as a premium add-on, costing $500 per month or 10% of the customer’s monthly invoice, whichever is higher.

Developer workflows and automation

Both platforms offer staging environments, high-quality API and playground experiences, and Git integration, but WP Engine goes further, providing an entire suite of tools built for developers.

AI readiness

While both providers are focusing on AI innovations, Cloudways is investing in tools that improve server optimizations, while WP Engine is focusing on tools that help improve developer workflows and visitor experiences.

WP Engine	Feature
Smart Search AI	Uses semantic, natural language processing to understand a user’s on-site search intent rather than basic keyword matching
AI-Powered Recommendations	Determines posts or products that are trending in user searches or that are related to a currently viewed post
Managed Vector Database	Automatically indexes and vectorizes your WordPress content. This allows developers to launch advanced AI features like RAG-powered chatbots or personalized recommendation engines without managing complex data pipelines or external vector hosting

Cloudways	Feature
Cloudways Co-pilot	Manages servers, providing 24/7 monitoring and SmartFix: a feature that diagnoses server bottlenecks, disk space issues, or webstack failures.

Additional developer tools

The most significant differentiator in the developer experience is WP Engine’s role as a steward of the WordPress ecosystem. While Cloudways provides a clean slate of infrastructure, WP Engine owns and maintains the very tools that modern developers use to build sites.

WP Engine is the team behind Local, one of the world’s most popular local WordPress development tools. The integration between Local and WP Engine makes local development seamless, allowing developers to push and pull sites with a single click. While Cloudways is developer-friendly, it lacks a native, vertically integrated local development tool that matches the ease of use found in the Local-to-WP Engine workflow.

Building off the success of bringing Local into the fold, WP Engine acquired Delicious Brains to bring Advanced Custom Fields, WP Migrate, WP Offload Media, and WP Offload SES under its roof. Now, these industry-standard tools are directly tested against WP Engine’s hosting environment before release. While you can certainly install these plugins on Cloudways-hosted sites or any other WordPress environment, WP Engine users benefit from specialized support and deeper integration with the platform.

For developers moving toward decoupled architectures, WP Engine also owns Faust.js, an open-source framework built on Next.js specifically for headless WordPress environments.

Faust.js solves many of the common frustrations associated with headless development, like post previews and authentication, which are notoriously difficult to configure on standard cloud servers. Using Faust.js, developers get a purpose-built Node.js environment. Cloudways users can build and host headless sites, but the experience doesn’t compare to WP Engine’s out-of-the-box readiness.

ECommerce readiness

While both WP Engine and Cloudways offer high-performance tech stacks for eCommerce, WP Engine differentiates itself with a suite of tools engineered specifically for the demands of WooCommerce^®[1] stores. 

Where Cloudways provides a flexible infrastructure, WP Engine’s turnkey eCommerce solution eliminates the plugin sprawl that often slows down experiences built with WooCommerce, the most-used plugin for converting WordPress sites into eCommerce stores. 

Some of the core eCommerce tools offered by WP Engine include:

• Quick Store Setup: This guided, automated wizard handles the technical heavy lifting of launching a store, from theme selection to essential plugin configurations.
• NitroPack: This tool packages more than 30 individual optimizations to optimize images, minify and compress code, and deliver pages up to 30% faster.
• Stripe Connect & Stripe Checkout: These tools streamline the most critical part of your site: the payment. They offer a branded, mobile-optimized checkout experience that offloads PCI compliance to Stripe’s servers to reduce friction and increase conversions.
• LiveCart for WooCommerce: Traditionally, WooCommerce carts use AJAX calls that can lag or break during high traffic. LiveCart ensures your cart remains stable and fast, even during massive sales spikes, by optimizing how it handles cart data.
• EverCache for WooCommerce: An extension of WP Engine’s proprietary caching system, this version of EverCache is cart-aware. It intelligently caches static pages while ensuring dynamic elements (like a user’s individual cart or account) remain fast and accurate.
• Slow Query Monitor: This developer-grade tool identifies specific database bottlenecks. It tells you exactly which plugin or theme is dragging down your speed.
• Dynamic Plugin Loading: This prevents bloat by only loading the code required for a specific page. It can reduce page sizes by over 30%, significantly improving mobile load times.

Baking these tools into eCommerce experiences on WP Engine gives developers access to a tried-and-true feature suite that ensures fast, performant experiences from the moment a customer lands on the site all the way through checkout.

Plan differentiation and pricing

WP Engine’s pricing is built on predictability, whereas Cloudways uses a pay-as-you-go model.

WP Engine’s tiered plans include a set number of visits, storage, and bandwidth. This makes it easy for finance teams to budget for the year. Should a site exceed its plan limit, an overage cost of $2 per 1,000 extra monthly visits will be charged to the next invoice. Specialized plan types for eCommerce stores, publishing and media outlets, agencies, and headless WordPress configurations come pre-equipped with tools, support, and infrastructure specifically tuned for those use cases. This can help lower customers’ total cost of ownership by including everything required for site success in a single, predictable invoice.

Cloudways charges based on the server resources used, and overage calculations are dependent on both bandwidth usage and server type. While this can be cheaper for low-traffic sites, it can lead to higher, more unpredictable bills if your resource usage skyrockets. Cloudways also lacks some of the specialized, use-case-specific tools that WP Engine provides for headless architectures.

Final verdict: Which should you choose?

When you compare Cloudways vs WP Engine, you are choosing between a fully managed service partner and a managed platform.

Choose WP Engine if:

• You want a partner that takes ownership of your site’s uptime and security.
• You need 24/7 access to WordPress experts via phone and chat.
• You want built-in, specialized tools to reduce your maintenance hours.
• You want to standardize your workflow and build a scalable experience.

Choose Cloudways if:

• You are a technical developer who enjoys configuring server stacks (Nginx vs. Apache, PHP-FPM, etc.).
• You need to host non-WordPress applications (like Magento or Laravel) on the same server.
• You prefer a resource-based, pay-as-you-go pricing model.

While Cloudways provides a powerful set of tools for those willing to do the work, WP Engine provides the peace of mind that comes with an experience that’s fully managed, monitored, and maintained by the best in the business.

Talk to the WP Engine sales team today to see how a true partnership can help you scale without the stress of server management.

FAQs

Is WP Engine more expensive than Cloudways?

Initially, yes. WP Engine’s entry-level plans start around $25-$30/mo, while Cloudways starts around $11-$14/mo. However, when you factor in the cost of developer time for server maintenance, the price of security add-ons, and the value of expert support, WP Engine often provides a lower total cost of ownership.

Does Cloudways offer phone support?

Standard Cloudways plans include 24/7 live chat. Phone support is typically only available as part of their paid Premium support add-ons, whereas WP Engine includes phone support on all Professional, Growth, and Scale plans.

Can I migrate from Cloudways to WP Engine for free? Yes. WP Engine offers a free automated migration plugin that handles the move in minutes. For larger enterprise sites and agencies, WP Engine’s onboarding team can assist with the transition.