Kinsta vs WP Engine: A Comparison of Features + Pricing (2024)

Regarding WordPress hosting, Kinsta and WpEngine are among the best, therefore your query on Kinsta Vs WpEngine is on point.

Using a WordPress hosting solution is something you should consider since they are specialised in WordPress; per adventure you face a challenge in future with your site you can easily be supported.

Even though there are other ways of designing a website, the WordPress content management system ( CMS ) has proven to be one of the best platforms.

WordPress is easy to learn and it’s also fast in designing a website. Your WordPress website will be live when you install WordPress and a theme.

It can be used to create blogs, agency websites, eCommerce websites, Government websites and many more.

Since you now know the versatility of WordPress, we will now go further to compare Kinsta and Wpengine to help you make a knowledge-based decision when you want to buy hosting.

Kinsta Vs WpEngine

The two WordPress hosting will be compared based on the following factors

Plans and pricing
Ease of use
Migration
Account Dashboard
Features
Uptime
Speed
Backup and security
Customer support
Disallowed plugins
Worpress theme
Email marketing

Kinsta Vs WPengine: Introduction

Kinsta

It is a WordPress premium hosting solution that was founded in 2013. About 24,400+ companies are using their services.

Kinsta has been able to build a good reputation since its inception because of its excellent services.

WPengine

WPengine is a WordPress hosting solution that has hosted about 1.5 million websites across 150 countries. And have over 1,000 employees working with them.

It acquired Studiopress and has technology that makes its websites fast.

Kinsta Vs WPengine: plans and pricing

Kinsta plans and pricing

The pricing for all the plans is detailed in the table below

	Kinsta Plans	Pricing per month
1	Starter	$35
2	Pro	$75
3	Business 1	$115
4	Business 2	$225
5	Business 3	$340
6	Business 4	$450
7	Enterprise 1	$675
8	Enterprise 2	$1,000
9	Enterprise 3	$1,350
10	Enterprise 4	$1,650

Kinsta starter and pro plans

Kinsta has the starter, Pro, Business and Enterprise plans. These plans vary in features and prices.

The starter plan is priced at $35 per month with the following features: 1 WordPress install, 25,000 visits, 10 GB disk space, Free SSL, CDN and Staging and Free Migrations.

While the Pro plan costs $75 per month with the following features: 2 WordPress installs 50,000 visits, 20 GB disk space, Free SSL, CDN and Staging and Free Migrations.

Kinsta Business plan

The Business plans have four sub-plans named Business 1, Business 2, Business 3 and Business 4, with each varying in features and pricing also.

Pricing and features of the Business plans increase with the number, Business 1 being the least, priced at $115 per month and the highest is Business 4 priced at $450 per month.

Business 1 features are: 5 WordPress installs, 100,000 visits, 30 GB disk space, Free SSL, CDN and Staging and Free Migrations.

And Business 4 has the following features: 60 WordPress installs, 1,000,000 visits, 100 GB disk space, Free SSL, CDN and Staging and Free Migrations.

Kinsta Enterprise plan

The last plan on Kinsta is the enterprise, this plan also has four sub-plans named Enterprise 1, Enterprise 2, Enterprise 3 and Enterprise 4.

These plans have the highest features and prices. The price for the sub plans is $675 per month, $1,000 per month, $1,350 per month and $1,650 per month respectively for the four Enterprise sub plans mentioned above.

Enterprise 1 offers the following features: 60 WordPress installs, 1,000,000 visits, 100 GB disk space, Free SSL, CDN and Staging and Free Migrations.

Finally, the last plan ( Enterprise 4 ) offers 150 WordPress installs, 2,500,000 visits, 250 GB disk space, Free SSL, CDN and Staging and Free Migrations.

The starter and pro plans are suitable for small websites, blogs and basic information websites. The name business has said it all, the business plans are most suitable for businesses and eCommerce websites. While the last plan, Enterprise, is suitable for organisations or businesses that require lots of pages and space.

Wpengine plans and pricing

Wpengine starts at $23 per month for small websites and blogs. Like Kinsta, Wpengine also offers different plans at different prices for you to choose from depending on your needs.

They have managed WordPress plans, eCommerce solutions and advanced solutions.

The managed WordPress and e-commerce solutions have 5 sub plans each, namely; Startup, Professional, Growth, Scale and Dedicated custom.

You need to note that the price for each sub-plan is different under the two plans mentioned above.

	Wpengine sub plans	Wpengine Managed WordPress plans Price per month	E-commerce solutions price per month
1	Start Up	$23	$27
2	Professional	$44	$56
3	Growth	$113	$105
4	Scale	$275	$263
5	Dedicated Custom	Contact them	Contact them

Wpengine managed WordPress plans

The start-up plan under Managed WordPress plans with the least features and price ( $23 per month) offers the following features: 1 WordPress site, 25,000 visits per month, 10 GB Storage and 50 GB Bandwidth.

While the highest sub-plan on this managed WordPress plan costs $275 per month with the following features: 30+ WordPress sites, 400,000 visits per month, 50 GB Storage and 500 GB Bandwidth per month.

In addition to the above features, managed WordPress plans offer the following

Maximize speed, performance & SEO
Proactive threat blocking & security
Automated WordPress & PHP updates
Customizable themes & workflow tools
Effortless 1-click staging & backup

Wpengine e-commerce solutions sub plans

The start-up sub-plan under e-commerce solution costs $27 per month and offers the following:1 WordPress website, 25,000 visits per month, 10 GB Storage and 50 GB Bandwidth per month.

On the other hand, the highest sub-plan of the e-commerce business costs $263 per month, this amount is $12 less than that of WordPress managed solution plan.

This sub-plan gives you access to 30 WordPress sites, 400,000 visits per month, 50 GB Storage, and 500 GB Bandwidth per month.

In addition to the above e-commerce solutions offers the following features:

Increase Woo caching up to 90%
Cart fragment cache coming soon
Auto-plugin updates for site safety
Premium eCommerce themes & blocks
Better product search to drive sales

Kinsta Vs WpEngine plans and pricing

The difference between Kinsta and Wpengine plans and pricing is not much. The minimum price to start with Kinsta is $23 while that of Wpengine is $35 and they both offer almost the same features.

However, there’s a difference in their woo commerce plan, Wpengine business plan starts at $27 per month while that of Kinsta starts at $105 per month.

But, in terms of features, WPengine e-commerce Growth sub-plan is the one that can be compared with that of Kinsta 1.

Kinsta offers more in terms of features compared to wp engine woo commerce Growth, Kinsta business 1 offers 30 GB storage and 400 GB bandwidth for $115 per while Wpengine WooCommerce Growth offers 20 GB storage and 200 GB bandwidth for $105 per month.

With the difference in the price of $10 per month Kinsta Business 1 offers more features than the Wpengine WooCommerce Growth plan.

Kinsta specified the price of their advanced plans ( Enterprise ) while WP engine did not. You are expected to contact them if you want to buy it.

Finally, they both offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Kinsta Vs WPengine: Features

The features compared here are technical features that are expected of web hosting companies.

1. Content Delivery Network ( CDN)

They both offer optional CDN access for their users at no extra cost.

2. Security

Wpengine has tools that scan websites for malware and if they find any, their technical team takes care of it while Kinsta has put security measures in place like GeoIP blocking and DDoS scanning to secure the websites.

3. Server file manager

The two WordPress-managed WordPress hosting don’t offer an online file manager for accessing server space.

4. Database management

You can use phpMyAdmin to access your WordPress database through your browser on both hostings

5.SFTP

You can use secure FTP on both hostings to connect to your server space for us uploading of files.

6. Caching

They both have caching technology that helps to make your website fast. Wp engine uses an in-house WordPress caching plugin while Wpengine uses object caching for caching database base queries.

7.PHP

You can switch to different versions of PHP on both hostings.

8. SSL

Both hostings offers a free SSL certificate via Let’s encrypt and also have the option for a premium SSL certificate if you desire one

9. SSH

Wp engine offers secure shell access to only their top tier dedicated hosting plan while Kinsta offers it on all their plans

11. Visitors analytics

You can use your account Dashboard on their platform to monitor website traffic.

12.HTTP/2

They both use HTTP/2 on their servers and CDN

Kinsta Vs WPengine: Migration

Kinsta Migration

Kinsta engineers take care of everything that has to do with migrating your WordPress website from a different platform to theirs.

However, this also means your migration depends on the availability of WordPress experts. But this advantage is that you don’t have to worry about migrating your website.

If you want to migrate your website yourself, they recommend using the free Migrate Guru WordPress plugin from Blogvault. There is a document that explains how you can easily migrate using Blogvault Migrate Guru.

Wpengine Migration

For you to migrate your WordPress website to Wpengine you have to use their in-house migration plugin to do so. The plugin has a written and video tutorial for you to follow.

They reserved the hands-off migration where experts will take care of the process for those that purchase their advanced plans.

Kinsta vs Wpengine migration

Kinsta makes it very easy for all their users to migrate their websites to their platform by dedicating staff for that purpose while Wpengine allows only advanced user access to this privilege. However, they allow manual migration through a free plugin for users of all their plans.

Kinsta Vs WPengine: Account Dashboard

Most web hosting companies provide Website admin for users to manage their website through Cpanel but Kinsta and Wpengine have created their own account management dashboards.

Kinsta account dashboard

Overview – You will.be able to view your basic information.
Domains – You can control all your domains from here.
CDN – It allows you to enable CDN.
Redirect rules – it allows you to set up your redirects
Backup points – It allows you to manage your back.
Access logs & Error logs – it allows you to view your server’s log.
SFTP users – it allows you to control SFTP access.
Git push – it allows you to set up Git for deployment.
SSL – it enables you to add a free SSL certificate to your website.
Utilities – you can manage your utilities here.
phpMyAdmin — it allows you to manage your database.

Wpengine account dashboard

Info — The info tab shows you all the basic information of your account
Domains — It allows you to monitor all your domains
Backups — All your backups can be managed from here.
Tools — it has tools that help you perform a number of tasks.
Redirects — helps you to set up redirects (Kinsta uses Nginx, so there’s no .htaccess file).
WP Plugins — All your website plugins and update status are listed here.
IP Deny — You can block IP addresses or a range of IP addresses you don’t want to access your domains.
Kinsta CDN — You can enable CDN from the tab.
Logs — It allows you to view your logs.

Kinsta vs Wpengine account dashboard

They both have a dashboard that allows users to view their traffic and monitor their accounts.

You can view your site traffic from the dashboard, and if your website should exceed the limit you will be charged overage fees. More will be discussed about it later.

Kinsta Vs WPengine: Uptime

Uptime is the total time a website is live and active. Uptime is an important factor to be considered because when your website has downtime it can cause you to lose money and traffic.

Kinsta guarantees a 99.9% uptime while Wpengine guarantees 99.95% uptime. The image above shows the result of a 7 days test performed by winning wp to determine the uptime of the two hostings.

The result shows that they both have a 100 % uptime within the 7 days test.

Kinsta Vs WPengine: Performance

The performance of a website is very important to consider because if your website’s loading speed is slow it can reduce your traffic because people don’t have the patience to wait.

Therefore, you need to verify the performance of the web hosting before buying hosting from them.

The data below was gotten from wp marmalade. They performed a 7 days test to see how Wpengine and Kinsta perform in terms of load times.

An identical site was set up on both hosting using the Genesis Framework, the full Authority Pro demo site and the Authority child team. and then Pingdom was used to automatically run a speed test every 30 minutes for 7 days.

The result of their test is displayed in the images below

Kinsta Performance

Wpengine Performance

Kinsta Vs WPengine Performance

The result at the end of the 1-week test shows that Wpengine load time was 431 ms on average, while Kinsta was 447 ms on average.

The difference is just 16 ms; which is insignificant. This shows that they both have great loading times.

Kinsta Vs WPengine: Backups

You can back up your website on both hosting. This allows you to be able to get back your website files whenever you have a need for them. However, they perform backup differently.

Kinsta backups

When you want to perform a backup with Kinsta, you have to generate a separate downloadable backup, which can be done once a week. The automatic daily backups created daily are stored for 14 days only.

Wpengine backups

The backups created daily by Wpengine are stored for 40 days. And they also allow you to create a partial backup when you want to restore your files.

Kinsta Vs WPengine: Customer support

Since both platforms are WordPress hosting Websites, they have WordPress experts that would readily attend to you when the need arises.

You can contact Kinsta through the following channels

24/7 live chat
Tickets on all plans
No phone calls

While that of Wpengine are

24/7 live chat
24/7 phone call on all plans except Start up
Tickets are available only on top tier custom dedicated plan

Kinsta Vs WPengine: Disallowed plugins

Both Kinsta and Wpengine have plugins they don’t allow on their platform. They think some of these plugins will slow down the speed of the websites and also some are not safe to use.

Each hosting has a list of plugins they don’t allow, the plugins are listed below

Kinsta disallowed plugins

Listed below are Kinsta disallowed plugins

all-in-one-wp-migration
allow-php-execute
amazon-ebay-integration
backupbuddy
backwpup
backwpup-pro
bwp-minify
cache-enabler
codistoconnect
duplicator-pro
dynamic-widgets
exec-php
inactive-user-deleter
jch-optimize
litespeed-cache
login-wall
p3
p3-profiler
pagefrog
rvg-optimize-database
sg-cachepress
snapshot
updraft
wonderm00ns-simple-facebook-open-graph-tags
woocommerce-amazon-ebay-integration
wordpress-gzip-compression
wordpress-popular-posts
wp-rss-multi-importer
wp-db-backup
wp-db-backup-made

If your website needs any of the above to function optimally, then you need to think carefully before buying hosting from them.

Wpengine disallowed plugins

The following are Wpengine disallowed plugins

adminer
async-google-analytics
backup
backup-scheduler
backupwordpress
backwpup
bad-behavior
broken-link-checker
content-molecules
contextual-related-posts
duplicator
dynamic-related-posts
ezpz-one-click-backup
file-commander
fuzzy-seo-booster
gd-system-plugin
gd-system-plugin.php
google-xml-sitemaps-with-multisite-support
hc-custom-wp-admin-url
hcs.php
hello.php
jr-referrer
jumpple
missed-schedule
no-revisions
ozh-who-sees-ads
pipdig-power-pack
portable-phpmyadmin
quick-cache
quick-cache-pro
recommend-a-friend
seo-alrp
si-captcha-for-wordpress
similar-posts
spamreferrerblock
ssclassic
sspro
super-post
superslider
sweetcaptcha-revolutionary-free-captcha-service
text-passwords
the-codetree-backup
toolspack
ToolsPack
tweet-blender
versionpress
w3-total-cache
wordpress-gzip-compression
wp-cache
wp-database-optimizer
wp-db-backup
wp-dbmanager
wp-engine-snapshot
wp-file-cache
wp-phpmyadmin
wp-postviews
wp-slimstat
wp-super-cache
wp-symposium-alerts
wpengine-migrate
wpengine-migrate.tar.gz
wpengine-migrate.zip
wpengine-snapshot
wpengine-snapshot.tar.gz
wponlinebackup

Kinsta Vs WPengine Overage Charges

If your website traffic exceeds the limit of your hosting plan you would be charged overage fees.

Wp engine will never take down your website if there’s a traffic spike, however, if it continues you’ll be advised to upgrade your plan. Kinsta, on the other hand, won’t take down your website if it experiences a spike in traffic but if the traffic spike continues they will take down your website until it is resolved.

Below are the overage charges for Kinsta and Wpengine:

Kinsta: $1 for each 1,000 extra monthly site visits and $0.10 for each additional GB of CDN bandwidth used.
Wpengine: $2 for each 1,000 extra monthly site visits but no bandwidth overages charges.

Remember, you can monitor your website traffic on your dashboard.

Kinsta Vs WPengine: Email marketing

Most web hosting companies offer email marketing services but Kinsta and Wpengine don’t offer email marketing services to their clients, you will have to look for email marketing software from other platforms.

Kinsta Vs WPengine: WordPress themes

One major advantage Wpengine has over Kinsta is the availability of premium themes. Wpengine acquired Studiopress, which allows them to give their users access to 37 premium WordPress themes for free.

Unfortunately, Kinsta doesn’t offer premium themes to its users.

Kinsta Vs WPengine WordPress hosting alternatives

WordPress hosting is good for designing WordPress sites but they are expensive.

There are web hosting companies that will give you a WordPress hosting plan at a cheaper cost without compromising quality.

An example of such a web hosting company is Truehost. Truehost has an affordable and reliable cloud web hosting that you can use to host your WordPress website.

With Truehost, you can start your managed WordPress hosting at $1.9 per month. However, the plan that will give you ample features at an affordable rate costs $6.99 per month ( Truehost silver package).

The plan offers the following features

100 Websites
100 GB SSD Storage
~30000 Visits Monthly
Unlimited Email Account
Free SSL
Unlimited Bandwidth
LiteSpeed WordPress Acceleration
Unlimited Databases
GIT Access
Weekly Backups ($7.99 value)
24/7/365 Support
99.9% Uptime Guarantee
Domain & DNS Management
Unlimited Subdomains
Unlimited FTP Account
Unlimited Cronjobs
Import WordPress from Remote
Create Staging
Push Staging To Live
Create Instance Image
SSH Access
Free Domain Name ($8.99 value)
30 Days Money Back Guarantee

At an affordable price of $6.99 per month you will get more value for your money compared to Kinsta which starts at $35 per month and Wpengine at $23 per month.

Conclusion

There is a difference between the two WordPress hosting companies. Wpengine started before Kinsta but Kinsta has been able to build a good reputation over time.

You can choose from any of them to start your website, however, don’t forget our cost-effective and quality-managed WordPress Hosting at Truehost.