If you are finding it hard to choose between Kinsta or WP Engine for hosting your WordPress site, as they have a similar price range yet both offer excellent managed WordPress hosting services, it might be quite tricky to decide what would suit you best.

To help you decide between Kinsta and WP Engine, we’ll compare them based on five factors, including our real-world performance testing data and insights from our survey of over 1000 WordPress webmasters. These key metrics are:

Features
Performance
Uptime
Support
Pricing

Let’s dive in!

To start, let’s discuss features. This is especially relevant when you’re considering managed hosting providers, as they come at a higher cost but offer assistance in maintaining your website’s optimal performance.

Kinsta

All Kinsta plans come with the following features:

A dashboard to view and make changes to your website(s) from one central location.
Keeping track of analytics related to important metrics like the number of website visitors and bandwidth.
Security features such as firewalls, SSL support, and uptime monitoring.
WP-CLI, SSH, and Git are supported developer tools.
A multi-user feature that lets you assign different levels of access to team members.
Your website should be backed up on a daily basis (you may opt to pay extra for more frequent backups).
Easy-to-usestagingoptions.
Free site migrations.

WP Engine

WP Engine offers all plans with the following features:

Automatic WordPress updates.
Security concerns are addressed through threat mitigation measures and ‘two-factor’ account protection.
A page performance tool that allows you to check your website’s speed and other essential statistics.
Genesis Framework usage and 35+ themes are free of charge.
Daily offsite backups.
Multiple SSL certificate options.
Development and staging sites.

The winner: Kinsta

Both of these service providers have many helpful features and will do a great job of optimizing, maintaining, and protecting your website. Moreover, they both got close to the same rating from users who were asked about their options for WordPress and help in our hosting survey.

Despite this, Kinsta boasts extra features such as analytics, developer tools, and security solutions giving it a competitive edge.

WP Engine showed better performance in our tests.

While offering lots of features is important, it’s useless if your website has poor performance. Luckily, both hosting providers offer an array of optimization and scaling services such as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to make sure that your site can handle an influx of traffic.

The question remains, do the improvements achieve what they were designed to do? We can observe the speed results from CodeinWP hosting performance survey on Kinsta and WP Engine’s entry-level plans. This data represents the exact speeds measured using test sites hosted with each provider.

Average load time over six months – here’s the comparison:

*Kinsta operates out of Virginia, U.S., whereas WP Engine is located in Michigan, U.S.

The winner: WP Engine

In terms of loading speed, both providers are doing quite well overall, except for Kinsta’s performance in Melbourne which is slower than usual. Still, WP Engine is clearly the winner here as it consistently had load times lower than 1.5 seconds.

Both have excellent uptime.

As part of our mission to help people get the best WordPress hosting, we track uptime data on reputable providers, such as Kinsta and WP Engine.

In the past three months, here’s how they’ve compared:

To see the latest uptime information, visit our page that monitors it in real time.

The result is a draw.

As you can see, the uptime for both hosts is extremely high – above 99.9%. Both are great options when it comes to uptime.

Both of them scored highly in terms of customer support in our hosting survey.

Let’s move on to support. Your WordPress hosting provider will mostly observe your site, but you may have some inquiries that need answers and aid. Thus, you require dependable access to service professionals that have extensive knowledge in this area.

Kinsta and WP Engine both provide 24-hour support through various channels, including a live chat feature. Additionally, they state they possess teams of knowledgeable WordPress professionals that can help with anything from hosting questions to specific platform dilemmas.

In order to gauge how Kinsta and WP Engine fare in terms of actually providing useful, timely assistance, we’ll look at the results of a hosting survey conducted with real users of both platforms.

Here’s what they said:

Kinsta’s customer service rating is 4.9 out of 5.
Kinsta’s rating for WordPress-specific support: 4.9
WP Engine’s support score is 4.7 out of 5.
WP Engine’s customer satisfaction rating for WordPress-specific support: 4.7

Technically, Kinsta is slightly ahead in both categories. Nonetheless, we are declaring Kinsta and WP Engine the winners for general and platform-specific support since they have received amazing feedback in our hosting survey. Whichever of these two providers you choose, you can be sure that your supported will be top-notch.

Pricing – Kinsta is more affordable

If money weren’t an issue, pricing wouldn’t matter; however, cost is unfortunately an important factor when choosing a web hosting provider. Keeping that in mind, let’s take a look at how Kinsta and WP Engine measure up in terms of pricing.

Kinsta has diverse plans from a single website with 20,000 visits monthly for $29.17, up to 150 websites together getting 2.5 million visits per month for an expensive $1500.

Although there are additional features with the higher-level plans, you will still receive the same service overall regardless of which plan you choose.

WP Engine has three main plans, with the possibility to create a plan specifically for your business. The starter plan costs $20 a month and offers more monthly visits and storage than Kinsta at the same price.

The features in each tier are pretty similar, but if you opt for a custom plan, you can get some additional add-on options.

This one is close, but WP Engine offers lower-priced starter plans with the same features.

Which is the better option between Kinsta and WP Engine?

In the end, both of these providers have done a great job and either one would be an excellent choice for your WordPress site.

Kinsta is the top choice in managed WordPress hosting. Here’s a summary of it’s features:

Extensive range of features, like intricate tools for monitoring your website metrics and engaging in development activities.
Superior customer service, with mastery of the WordPress platform.
Low-cost starter plans, plus the option to upgrade to more expensive plans as needs change.

What a fantastic resume!

If you’re unsure and would like to go more in-depth on each host, read our detailed reviews of WP Engine and Kinsta.

Conclusion

When selecting a web host, it’s always essential to make the best choice, but it becomes critical when opting for a managed hosting plan. Since you’ll be giving much of your site’s maintenance and optimization tasks to an external party, it’s essential to make sure they can deliver good results.

Comparing Kinsta and WP Engine- two of the best-managed WordPress hosting options, Kinsta prevails with its excellent features, support, and scalability.

Do you have any other questions about the contrast between Kinsta and WP Engine?

Tell us what you think in the comments!