Kinsta VS WP Engine: what's best web host for your web agency?

The overhead of managing multiple sites for clients can be reduced considerably simply by selecting one of the best web hosting providers. Not maintaining your own servers and having a host that deals with the management while also providing additional features for agencies is key to the development of client sites, and your business.

WP Engine and Kinsta, both popular web hosts, are among the best hosting providers for agencies, but how do they compare? Which is the best value and for who?

Pricing

If you're deliberating between WP Engine and Kinsta for agency hosting the choice might be dictated by your budget. This is because Kinsta's agency hosting plans start at $280/mo for 20 sites. WP Engine has more budget friendly options starting at $56/mo for 5 sites.

If you're managing any ecommerce stores, the ecommerce features don't start at WP Engine until you start spending $83/mo, and for the highest level of support, you'll need to be spending at least $414/mo for 25 sites (and then pay extra for it).

So, while WP Engine offers more entry level pricing, to receive a similar level of features, you need to be spending more each month with WP Engine, which kind of negates the lower price entry point.

Price and infrastructure wise, WP Engine is more suitable for smaller agencies that don't need too much power, as the scaling up at WP Engine can be expensive. Kinsta, meanwhile, is targeted at established agencies with a regular take-up of clients and a higher budget, but want more power-per-buck value.

Infrastructure

Perhaps the biggest difference between Kinsta and WP Engine’s Agency plans is the infrastructure. WP Engine told us that all sites on agency plans are on shared infrastructure unless one of the more expensive custom plans is purchased. With Kinsta, all sites on a hosting plan use containers. This solution is superior to shared hosting, but less expensive than a VPS, and easier to manage. Containers afford a better way to allocate (or re-allocate) resources, allowing web hosts to better handle spikes in demand and isolate environments.

Features

Both hosts offer a variety of features specifically for agencies. These included features that help you bulk manage your sites and manage fine-grained access controls. Both also offer local developer tools (DevKinsta & Local) and white label branding options.

Kinsta offers an Agency Launch Pad program that can give you up to $10,000 in hosting credits, and both have an agency directory and ways to bring more business to you.

WP Engine seems to have more ecommerce tools and a smoother integration with Stripe.

You do get 24/7 support with Kinsta, but WP Engine has the option to pay more for a dedicated technical account manager (only with some plans over $400/mo)

Meanwhile, all WordPress, PHP, and MySQL updates are automated, which means more time can be spent on developing sites and client businesses. If earlier PHP versions are required, these can be selected.

Both hosts support setting up staging environments for testing before going live, and support developers with dedicated tools.

Support

Access to a support team that understands both the hosting, the needs of your business, and how to accommodate migrations, scaling, and new sites is fundamental, and I had good experiences with both hosting providers.

Kinsta was able to quickly handle a migration based on a ZIP file site backup. Meanwhile, WP Engine only offers migrations on its 50+ site custom plan, which means a manual upload and restore of a backup, or using a migration tool, is required.

WP-Engine also has a strong support provision. It has its own knowledge base, and an AI-powered chat tool, which nevertheless makes it simple for you to speak to a human. However, while I’ve previously had a good experience with WP-Engine’s live chat, the support agent I chatted with about agency hosting didn’t seem to be fully familiar with the plans.

Performance comparison

In this comparison, we’ve used results from our test on the basic WP Engine plan and the Kinsta Agency 20 plan. On the face of it, that might not seem like a fair comparison ,but actually, it is. Under $400 at WP Engine each hosting plan is on shared infrastructure. Moving up from the $20/mo plan to the $270/mo plan scales resources linearly. Assuming you have multiple sites, the baseline performance of a single website on the base level plan should be similar to the performance of a single website on a plan that supports more sites. If we were to stress test the site, it would not be fair, but for a single site baseline comparison, the results are comparable.

For the Kinsta plans, each site is in a container. Doing the same test with the same site at Kinsta should give us a good indication of what performance to expect per site and if the infrastructure is better than WP Engine's. So while these are different plans at a very different price point, assuming you’re spending less than $300/mo and you’re hosting multiple sites, these metrics give you an indication of the performance.

This is a summary of the results. For the full results see our host review
Kinsta
WP Engine

The results show an interesting difference between Kinsta and WP Engine. Kinsta’s raw WordPress metrics are better than WP Engine’s, but when we test the site with visitors, WP Engine comes out better (up to 30%). It shows that for sites that require high-performance computational tasks, Kinsta would be the better option, but for high-traffic sites WP Engine would be the better choice. This is likely down WP Engine’s shared infrastructure being more optimized for high-traffic sites than Kinsta’s containers.

Verdict

These two hosts both excel at different things. For sites that require more computational power, Kinsta is a good option. For high traffic sites, WP Engine does seem to provide better performance in our tests.

Kinsta’s plan includes free hosting for your agency’s site, where WP Engine doesn’t. Advanced features, for site management and development, are limited to the custom plans on WP Engine, whereas all of Kinsta’s agency plans support developers (with some bolt-ons for specialist tools).

Both hosts make it easy to scale up, but WP Engine accommodates smaller scale agencies (and budgets) than Kinsta. However, Kinsta’s plans for agencies with 20, 40, and 60 sites seems a more mature collection of features, and just edges it in my view.