Pantheon vs. WP Engine

Pantheon

Pantheon

109 Reviews and Ratings

WP Engine

WP Engine

55 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Pantheon	Score 8.6 out of 10	N/A	Pantheon is a WebOps platform where marketers and developers collaborate to drive results. The vendor states that with Pantheon, site owners maximize their capacity to update website design and functionality, responding to market trends, catering to consumer behavior, and adding real value to the business's bottom line. Today, companies compete on the basis of digital experiences, and the best results emerge from an agile build-test-learn process. Whether it's publishing content,…	$29 per month
WP Engine	Score 8.9 out of 10	N/A	WP Engine is a website hosting service built to host WordPress for companies of any size, with features such as daily backups, firewall,SSL, and proprietary caching technology.	$25 *Per Month

Pricing

Pantheon

WP Engine

Editions & Modules

Basic: $29
per month
Performance: $114
per month
Elite: Contact for quote

Startup: $25.00
*Per Month
Growth: $95.00
*Per Month
Scale: $241.00
*Per Month

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Pantheon	WP Engine
Free Trial
Yes	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

Optional

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

*Pricing for annual contract.

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Pantheon	WP Engine
Considered Both Products	Pantheon Tyler Brown Cifu Shuster Chief Engineer Chose Pantheon Acquia was terrible. We use DigitalOcean for some all-purpose computing needs and Platform.sh for an application that does more computing and high-throughput processing where we do not want page views (API calls) to count against our usage. Incentivized Helpful? Lankit Patel AWS Developer \| Laravel Developer Chose Pantheon Although it may seem a good fit for a company that needs extra control over the deployment process and development process, for a firm that is mainly concentrating on SEO, it would be an overkill. Pantheon provides that sweet automation that allows us to shed some weight on … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pantheon We use several hosting solutions depending on the client needs or what they were already setup on. Pantheon is very similar to them and offers similar services however one of the main features we use is the Multidev service which allows us to test pieces of work separately and … Incentivized Helpful? Naz Haque Google Consultant Chose Pantheon I found Cloudways to be a better solution for our needs in comparison to Pantheon. With their integration of multiple hosting providers we had a wider selection of locations to choose from and finally a server nearer to our core audience. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pantheon Pantheon dashboard is leaner and faster. Pantheon cost is lower comparatively. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pantheon Linode is good if you want to keep control of the infrastructure, webservers, etc. However, if you want to forget about it and focus in your website content; Pantheon will make your life much easier. acquia support system is terrible, it is slow and they send outdated … Incentivized Helpful? Tyler Shingleton Senior Web Developer Chose Pantheon The differentiating advantage that Pantheon has is the incredibly intuitive workflow UI, with seamless GIT integrations between each environment: Dev, Test, and Live. Incentivized Helpful? Sachin Vinay Network Administrator Chose Pantheon Much more comfortable with Pantheon, more user-friendly and completely moved to the next generation development tools. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pantheon Pantheon stacks up fairly equally, and we chose Pantheon originally because, at the time of making our decision, they were the best partner for our business size, and who could help us through challenges that VIP could not. Today, we are with VIP as that was a faster and more … Incentivized Helpful? Simon Johnson DevOps Engineer Chose Pantheon Pantheon unlike the above platforms is very easy to use the features and even on initial features configuration and also the deployment on Cloud is excellent. Pantheon has great data and other marketing content management capabilities through Cloud services and the … Incentivized Helpful? Quratulain Habib, PMP Partner / Director / Head of Projects Chose Pantheon A lot of the other providers on this list are different from each other with very different target audiences. The only thing Pantheon can compare with is managed WordPress hosting, WordPress-related support, and hosting on Google Compute Engine. Pantheon wins hands down in … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pantheon Weebly, Bluehost and SiteGround Incentivized Helpful? Todd Underwood Interactive Director Chose Pantheon GoDaddy can't compete with Pantheon's speed, support, and backed tools. We built a WordPress site for a client in Pantheon, they insisted on us moving it to their existing GoDaddy account, and within three months, they paid us to move it back to Pantheon because of the site's … Incentivized Helpful? CW Caleb Wiedel Web Developer Chose Pantheon Pantheon is great because I can do everything and anything needed as a developer to get my clients satisfied. Drupal is the main CMS we use on Pantheon, and my experience has been pretty positive so far. I manage WordPress sites on my own, and that's easier to maintain for most … Incentivized Helpful? Ali shabaz Assistant Project Manager Chose Pantheon Microsoft Azure and GoDaddy Incentivized Helpful? BP Blake Pritchett Director of Technology Chose Pantheon Pantheon is leaps and bounds ahead of its competition in platform reliability, support, and platform features. The most important factor for us is uptime and support response times. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pantheon Pantheon provides stellar premium hosting for Drupal and WordPress. The platform is highly performant. Support is responsive and knowledgeable. System-enforced best practices improve site stability alongside rock-solid platform reliability. However, Pantheon absolutely charges … Incentivized Helpful? Larry Downes Director Marketing and Communications Chose Pantheon Pantheon compares well with uptime but far exceeds RackSpace when it comes to ease of use. Incentivized Helpful? Jennifer Blair Creative Director and Owner Chose Pantheon Pantheon offers an advantage over WP Engine and Flywheel by offering hosting support for both Drupal and WordPress websites. Pantheon's pricing model could be much more competitive, however. Pantheon ended up winning out over Media Temple in World Literature Today's hosting … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pantheon Our former hosting company was Dreamhost. While we loved Dreamhost, especially since it was free for nonprofits, we were always flying by the seat of our pants developing and updating plugins on the live website. Pantheon's multi-dev platform allows us to work on several … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pantheon Pantheon's use of Git is much better than WP Engine, and Pantheon's interface is better. However, Pantheon costs more and would likely suit medium to larger organizations. GoDaddy's dedicated WordPress offering is much more restrictive compared with Pantheons and suits … Incentivized Helpful? Gabrielle Conley Web Designer Chose Pantheon Pantheon has been only the product I have had experience within my entire working career. It performs effectively with great ROI on the overall production of our company. The deployment process was easy, and all our team members had less time learning how it operates. I have … Incentivized Helpful? Sienna Miller Software Engineer Chose Pantheon I have no experience with similar products though Pantheon has proven to be the best WebOps. It has all tools that we require in website infrastructure from development to launching. Our teamwork has enabled us to create websites that have boosted the growth of our organization … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pantheon Bluehost, GoDaddy and Microsoft Azure Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pantheon Bluehost, GoDaddy and Microsoft Azure Incentivized Helpful?	WP Engine Jesse Haraldson Principal Software Architect Chose WP Engine For Acquia and AEM the major differentiator was the cost for WPEngine was significantly lower and we could use the more common WordPress CMS. AEM is better for large marketing sites that integrate with the Abobe Marketing Cloud and we didn't feel we could support Drupal on … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine WP Engine provides premium WordPress hosting. I haven't dealt with other dedicated WordPress hosts, except for wordpress.com by Automattic, which is good, but WP Engine is professional-grade, dedicated WP hosting. I have found that generally, non-dedicated WordPress hosting … Incentivized Helpful? Kelly Michael Skelton Internet Marketing Manager Chose WP Engine WP Engine and Go Daddy both had great support offerings and were both very competent when it comes to hosting websites. We chose WP Engine because their platform was just much easier to use and our marketing personnel could perform the majority of the essential daily tasks that … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine DreamHost is good as well, but overall I really enjoy the experience I have had working with WP Engine with all of our clients. The support is pretty good with all three that I mentioned, but WP Engine is superb. WP Engine is really great and the interface is super easy to … Incentivized Helpful? ML Matt Levy Manager Digital and Social Media Chose WP Engine If DIY hosting is your thing, you are 100% better off on Linode or Google Cloud. Pantheon ultimately won our business and respect with 100% uptime. Incentivized Helpful? Thomas Petty Owner Chose WP Engine There's absolutely no comparison between the other companies and WP Engine. WP Engine is far superior in all ways. Every time I do a security audit on a potential client's website, I can tell right away that it's on an overloaded server at one of the competitors. The first … Incentivized Helpful? MH Michael Herchenroder Senior Software Engineer Chose WP Engine We were originally on GoDaddy until we got a malware attack on their shared server. Cleaning up an infected server is almost impossible, so we decided to jump ship and set up our sites on Site Ground. We needed faster hosting anyway. Site Ground was decent, but their customer … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine While we still use GoDaddy for some services, WP Engine definitely has been a major upgrade for our WordPress hosting. In addition to faster load speeds, WP Engine has been more adept at allowing us to manage a high number of websites without straining the system. We have never … Incentivized Helpful? Josh Peichoto Digital Strategy Manager Chose WP Engine Other hosting companies are garbage by comparison. Budget, shared environment hosts are clunky, slow, and not as secure. Larger hosts generally require someone with a decent amount of knowledge with configuring and maintaining the hosting environment. WPEngine fills the void in … Incentivized Helpful? Quentin Aisbett Digital Strategist Chose WP Engine We've evaluated many hosting providers over the years and in fairness, we've now been with WP Engine for 5 years so I'd imagine each of them has improved over that time also. However, WP Engine's support team, product development, and user experience is better than any other … Incentivized Helpful? Gordon Seirup Owner Chose WP Engine I selected Kinsta to replace WP Engine because their performance statistics, security configuration, and technical support prowess reminded me of WP Engine circa 2012 - top-notch. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine I used a solution from Rackspace years ago which was just their dedicated server product (not available for selection above so had to choose managed hosting). They pretty much give you shell access to a box and then it's up to you to manage everything yourself. This is … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine I used to work for GoDaddy when they released their own WordPress hosting. It's not bad, but not nearly as well developed. They have too many irons in the fire if you ask me, and WP Engine is so laser-focused on WP hosting. A2 hosting is a great budget solution that is also … Incentivized Helpful? Jeremy Estes Chief Media Buyer Chose WP Engine WP Engine blows all these hosting companies out of the water when it comes to WordPress hosting. I ultimately moved to WP Engine when my to WordPress sites continued to go down, performed slowly, or got to the point where they were impossible to manage. Now, if I see someone … Incentivized Helpful? Alec Dibble Founder Chose WP Engine I have used WP Engine for several years and love the service. Their technology, security, speed & support are unparralleled. I've had to file several support tickets & the experience was really good every time. Being a consultant & tech integrator, I often have to deal with B2B … Incentivized Helpful? Collin Berg Freelance Web Developer Chose WP Engine WP Engine has a no worry solution for automatic backups and free SSL is great for $30/month. They scale to our needs as well so we never have to worry about being throttled if we get a lot of press. and at $1 for every 1000 visitors over your quote, hits one of the cheapest … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine I have worked with other top web hosting companies and none offer the simplicity of WP Engine. WP Engine is more expensive, however we deem the cost justifiable for the features that are included. Other web hosts are simple boxes that give you more control, however do not offer … Incentivized Helpful? Peter Filias CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Chose WP Engine We tried to run this site on Wordpress-optimized versions of hosting offered at MediaTemple and GoDaddy... neither sufficed. Incentivized Helpful? Ben Whitaker President Chose WP Engine WP Engine blows these guys out of the water in regards to reliability, security and customer support Incentivized Helpful? Will Paccione Owner Chose WP Engine We used to use HostGator in the past. We feel they've gone downhill in the past few years. When other hosting companies offer free SSL certificates through the trusted "Lets Encrypt", HostGator still down't offer it (last I checked). Support takes a long time. Ability to use a … Incentivized Helpful? Rachel Maner Content Marketing Specialist Chose WP Engine Prior to WP Engine, we had an off-site consultant hosting our site. It was terribly inconvenient and counterproductive. We selected WP Engine because the platform is intuitive and the price is very reasonable. I've never used another hosting service, so I can't speak to how … Incentivized Helpful? Eric Mann Tekton Chose WP Engine WP Engine was cheaper than the alternatives, and our site was already present on their servers. It wasn't so much a choice of WP Engine over another hosting company as it was a choice to stay with WP Engine rather than invest the time required to switch to another provider. All … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine I don't know if I can repeat myself another time, but I suppose I will. WP Engine is a WordPress first hosting solution. If you are looking to build a simple or complex WordPress website, you should use this solution. Whether you're a company that builds WordPress websites or … Incentivized Helpful? Tim Colling President Chose WP Engine There's no comparision in terms of reliability, uptime, convenience, flexibility, pricing, and especially, tech support. WPEngine support is just simply superb. GoDaddy support cannot come close, nor can the others. InMotion Hosting has been very unreliable of late. So was A2 … Incentivized Helpful? FA Fareed Abolhassani Information Technology Manager Chose WP Engine WP engine is good if you don't want to do all of the IT work such as back up, website scaling, website performance, etc. Of course you will have complete control over customization. Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	Pantheon	WP Engine
Small Businesses	ManageWP Score 10.0 out of 10	SiteGround Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization Score 8.5 out of 10	Pantheon Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises	Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization Score 8.5 out of 10	Pantheon Score 8.6 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Pantheon	WP Engine
Likelihood to Recommend	8.0 (0 ratings)	9.9 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	10.0 (0 ratings)	3.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	9.8 (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	10.0 (0 ratings)	7.7 (0 ratings)
Implementation Rating	10.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Pantheon	WP Engine
Likelihood to Recommend	Great Cloud-based coordination platform which offers the team excellent capabilities on easy workflow management, multiple project activity tracking and easy to monitor all the project assets from one desk. Pantheon offers the best content management tools, strategic on development project life cycle management is excellent and the reporting features with Pantheon are effective and useful real-time data analytical capability. Incentivized Arianna Thomas Project Engineer Read full review	New users to WordPress can rejoice with a very hands-off hosting approach. If 100% uptime is not essential, you can get breakneck speeds with minimal tinkering using their platform. If you need to get up and running quickly and scale as required, the cost-benefit is here, although you need to pay a lot to get the most from it. Incentivized ML Matt Levy Manager Digital and Social Media Read full review
Pros	Effective use of our codebase deployment and implementation. The dashboard functionality and general stability and security are excellent. The server is quite consistent, and if you need assistance from the support team, they are very quick to respond. Automatic updates let me ensure that my customers have safe websites without increasing my own expense. The team offers excellent assistance and help for chat. Incentivized Ali shabaz Assistant Project Manager Read full review	I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back. The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems. They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate. Incentivized Alec Dibble Founder Read full review
Cons	Pricing structure has too large of a jump between Basic and Performance plans Have run into issues with prescribed WP updates not working through dashboard and having to do manually. Pantheon site dashboard occasionally is unavailable (the site is never affected though) Incentivized Todd Underwood Interactive Director Read full review	The user interface is not very intuitive, which means new staff members require more training than I'd like. The way they manage production/development servers and FTP access is somewhere between nebulous and tragically unique. Their premium pricing is surely worthwhile, but it is significantly higher than virtually all of their competitors, without much obvious distinction in feature sets. Some very basic features like spinning up a second instance require a PHONE CALL to their BILLING department to enable. What is this, 1990? Incentivized Robert Allen WordPress Developer Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	The environment is stable and we have not had any issues/downtime. The annual cost is reasonable. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers. Joe Preston E-Commerce manager Read full review
Usability	Monitoring of project development is very easy using a dashboard with its integration capability, showing all processes in a single screen which is easy to use and also easy to navigate through. A powerful tool that allows testing to be carried on without the user noticing any changes to the system and a highly interactive tool for groups and project members. Incentivized Lily Adams Software Engineer Read full review	It took very little time to learn their dashboard for managing WordPress sites. Their built-in tools are really well done, and the addition of security and CDN tools is great. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	Even tier 1 Pantheon chat and ticket support are knowledgeable, competent, and useful. They routinely understand and promptly resolve urgent, complex, and/or unusual issues that other hosts need to escalate to tier 2 or tier 3 support personnel. I honestly can't think of a truly negative or disappointing support experience in the years I've used Pantheon hosting for client websites. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers. Incentivized Josh Peichoto Digital Strategy Manager Read full review
Implementation Rating	Once the environments were up and running, the implementation was easy to synchronize with latest data prior to switchover. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered	Acquia was terrible. We use DigitalOcean for some all-purpose computing needs and Platform.sh for an application that does more computing and high-throughput processing where we do not want page views (API calls) to count against our usage. Incentivized Tyler Brown Cifu Shuster Chief Engineer Read full review	For Acquia and AEM the major differentiator was the cost for WPEngine was significantly lower and we could use the more common WordPress CMS. AEM is better for large marketing sites that integrate with the Abobe Marketing Cloud and we didn't feel we could support Drupal on Acquia. AWS EC2 is a viable option if you are going to self support and maintain your own WordPress experts. We felt that the value from WPEngine was they handled the support and the WordPress security patches and knowledge beyond simple theme usage. Pantheon was the closest in matching but we felt with our large installs that the hosting model for WPEngine was more cost-effective than the Container architecture for Pantheon Incentivized Jesse Haraldson Principal Software Architect Read full review
Return on Investment	Pantheon allows ordinary sites to excel esp if there is consistent development going on behind the scenes. Website management is super easy and the hosting fee gets paid off as you save on developer hours. Expensive for those who are not consistently developing on the platform, there are other options out there at better price points. Incentivized Quratulain Habib, PMP Partner / Director / Head of Projects Read full review	Positive: We've been able to scale up more easily as adding new sites has been easier. Positive: The load speed improvements we saw were immediate and have not let up. Negative: Adding advanced security and other tools to a multiple sites is expensive. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots	Pantheon Screenshots