The main difference between Kinsta and Cloudways lies in their hosting solutions. Kinsta offers managed WordPress hosting, providing a high-performance, user-friendly environment optimized specifically for WordPress websites. On the other hand, Cloudways offers versatile cloud hosting solutions, allowing users to host various types of applications on popular cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and DigitalOcean.
In this versus, we compare Kinsta vs Cloudways in-depth to help you choose one of them. If you want to know more details, we recommend you to read our Kinsta review and Cloudways review.
However, you can also directly find the Best Wordpres Hosting Page, we list them by ranking (based on our review rating), you can find all the comparisons we made and we explain how you should choose the proper one.
Here is what we will talk about in the rest of this article:
Quick overview
Kinsta vs Cloudways at a Glance
To make your choice quick and efficient, here is a short summary about our comparison of Kinsta vs Cloudways. Find out their ratings, features, prices and then discover the winner of the versus.
Pros and Cons comparison
Kinsta Review – Premium WordPress Hosting
Cloudways Review – Managed Web Hosting Editor choice
Get 20% off on your 2 first months with 20CIROAPP.
By using our link you will avoid passing the Cloudways security check when you register.
Specifications comparison
Details | Kinsta | Cloudways |
---|---|---|
Features | Wordpress Hosting | Backup / SSH access / Staging system / VPS hosting / WordPress optimized |
Best suited for | Individuals, Freelancers, Small businesses, Mid size businesses | Freelancers, Small businesses, Mid size businesses |
Website languages | Chinese / Deutsch / English / French / Italian / Portuguese | English |
Website URL | Visit official website | Visit official website |
Support link | Support page | Support page |
Support email | contact@kinsta.com | support@cloudways.com |
Live chat | Yes | Yes |
Company address | 8605 Santa Monica Blvd, Ste 92581, West Hollywood, California, 90069, United States | 140-H Allama Iqbal Rd P.E.C.H.S Block 2 Karachi, Karachi City Sindh, Pakistan |
Year founded | 2013 | 2011 |
Pricing comparison
Compare the price between Kinsta vs Cloudways
Find out which software has the best valuable pricing, which one offers a free trial and money back guarantee.
Pricing comparison | Kinsta | Cloudways |
---|---|---|
Pricing range | From $30 to $1500 per month | From $10 to $274 per month |
Pricing types | Annual subscription / Monthly subscription | Monthly subscription |
Free plan | No | No |
Free trial | No | Yes, 3 days |
Money back guarantee | Yes, 30 days | No |
Pricing page link | See plans | See plans |
Kinsta Pricing details
Kinsta Starter plan costs you $30 per month. You can save up to 10% of your money if you subscribe the yearly plan. Be very careful! If you want to host multiple WordPress sites, Kinsta can become expensive quickly! However, if you only want to host a few sites and want to get quality hosting Kinsta will more than do the trick.

There are several things in their price table that are difficult to understand. For example, the starter plan does not allow you to host a WordPress multisite, so be careful. Secondly, this plan does not allow you to host 2 WordPress sites. Besides, if you already have more than 1000 visitors on your site per day or your site has more than 10GB of storage, you will have to take the Pro plan twice as expensive. Also, if you want to host an Ecommerce or marketplace site, Kinsta does not recommend you to take their starter or pro plan but to directly take their Business plan at 100$/month. This can be very expensive for the launch of your ecommerce site.

All of the plans come with the following:
- Free Kinsta CDN, free Let’s Encrypt SSL, staging environments, automatic daily backups and the option to create manual backup points anytime.
- Full page caching at the server-level to deliver content almost instantaneously to visitors. They also pair that with the Kinsta MU plugin, developed in-house, to provide even more granular control over caching.
- PHP 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4.
- Free hack fixes. If a client’s WordPress website is hacked they’ll fix it with immediate priority.
- Server-level rules and optimizations for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Download sites to ensure a smoother checkout experience for customers.
- A custom-designed dashboard with lots of data that helps you improve further your site.
- MyKinsta analytics reports for data analysis and performance insights.
- Multi-user access with fine-grained permissions. Add any number of users to your team. Give them access to all your sites, just billing or add them as developers or administrators to a subset of your sites.
- SSH access, Git, and WP-CLI.
- All of the plans include one or more free premium migrations, completed by their expert support team. The number of migrations included depends on the plan you choose.
- They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee with no long-term contracts.

Elasticsearch
RESTful search and analytics engine capable of solving a growing number of use cases. $100 / month / site
Redis
Open source, in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. $100 / month / site
Nginx reverse proxy
Support to load WordPress from a subdirectory while a separate website (WordPress or otherwise) loads at the root domain. $50 / month / site
External Backup
Automatically back up your WordPress site once per week or per month to either Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. $2 / month / site + $1 / GB bandwidth
Extra backups
For increased security and to recover even more stages of your website. Hourly backups are stored for 24 hours. Every 6 hours Every hour $50 / month / site $100 / month / site
Disk space add-on
For large sites with a lot of files or images, increase your plan’s disk space with our monthly add-on. +20 GB $20 / month / company
Overage Prices
Visits overage
If you reach your plan’s visits limit, we’ll keep your sites running but charge you a fee after a specific number of additional visits. $1 / 1,000 visits
Disk space overage
If you reach your disk space limit, we’ll keep your sites running but charge you a fee after each additional GB. $2 / GB
CDN overage
If you reach your CDN limit, we’ll keep your sites running but we’ll charge you a fee after each additional GB. $0.10 / GB
Cloudways Pricing details
Cloudways starts at $10 per month minimum and you can scale your server to add more resources any time you want. We recommend you to choose the Vultr server with High Frequency which starts at $13/month, it’s the best value for your money. Cloudways free trial allows you to decide on the plan which is best for your needs. Once the free trial is finished, you can use your credit card or PayPal to pay for any plan. You also get hourly billing plans and customized plans.

Cloudways offers you hosting plans depending on the size, type, and budget of your website. First, you will have to choose a cloud infrastructure provider from among the five, each of which comes with a different pricing plan. Many people consider its flexible pricing as an attractive aspect. The company has a pay-as-you-go structure which makes Cloudways an outstanding choice for businesses that are small-to-medium-sized. It is also an excellent choice for users who are low on budget. This Cloudways review will surely help you obtain more knowledge about this hosting provider.
Digital Ocean

This provider has plans that range from $12 to $80 per month. Depending on various plans that you choose, you’ll get 25GB to 160GB storage processors, 1 to 4 core processors, 1GB to 8GB RAM, and 1TB to 5TB bandwidth. With Digital Ocean, you’ll get 4GB RAM, 2 core processors, 4TB bandwidth, and 80GB storage for $42 per month.
Linode

Linode offers you 4GB RAM, 2 core processors, 4TB Bandwidth, and 80GB storage for $50 per month. With other plans, this provider offers 1GB to 8GB RAM, 1 to 4 core processors, 1TB to 4TB bandwidth, and 20GB to 96GB storage for $12 to $90 per month.
Vultr

Vultr offers you 4GB RAM, 2 core processors, 3TB bandwidth, and 80GB storage for $44 per month. Its other plans include 1GB to 8GB RAM, 1 to 4 core processors, 25GB to 100GB storage, and 1TB to 4TB bandwidth for $11 to $84 per month.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)

With the popular AWS monthly plan, you’ll get 3.75GB RAM, 1vCPU, 20GB storage, and 2GB bandwidth for just $86.77 per month. With other plans, you’ll get 3.75GB to 15GB RAM, and 1 to 3 vCPU for $85.17 to $272.73 per month. Furthermore, you’ll get 4GB storage and 2GB bandwidth with all plans.
Google Computing Engine (GCE)

With its different monthly plans, you’ll get 3.75GB to 16GB RAM and 1 to 4 vCPU with $73.62 to $226.05 per month. And with its most popular monthly plan, you’ll get 20GB storage, 1vCPU, 3.75GB RAM, and 2GB bandwidth for just $73.62 per month. Lastly, in all plans, you’ll get 20GB storage and 2GB bandwidth.
Standard features that come with every plan
- Access to SSH and SFTP
- 24/7/365 support
- Real-time monitoring (24/7)
- Free migration
- Free SSL
- CDN add-on
- Dedicated firewalls
- Auto-healing
- Regular security patching
- Staging environment
- Backups that are automated
- Servers that are HTTP/2-enabled
Kinsta’s pricing starts at $7 per month for their Starter plan, offering one WordPress install and up to 20,000 visits. There is also a choice for $35 plan with a lot of storage and other options. Cloudways, on the other hand, follows a pay-as-you-go model, providing flexibility in pricing based on the selected cloud provider, server resources, and additional features. Cloudways stands out for its flexible pricing, allowing users to scale resources based on their needs and budget.
While Kinsta offers excellent managed WordPress hosting, Cloudways’ adaptable pricing structure caters to a wider range of users and applications.
🏆 Winner: Cloudways
Learn more in the section below with our comparison of the different features of Kinsta vs Cloudways .
Features comparison
We highlight the main differences between Kinsta vs Cloudways
Here is a quick summary of the differences between the features and services offered by Kinsta vs Cloudways:
Features overview
In this section, we will compare only the big differences between Kinsta and Cloudways, and we will assign a winner for each feature or service.
So we will compare first:
- Hosting
- Ease of Use
- Scalability
- Support
- Security
- Backups
Hosting
When it comes to performance, Kinsta and Cloudways both offer high-quality hosting solutions. Kinsta boasts a WordPress-optimized environment with Google Cloud Platform’s premium tier network, ensuring blazing-fast loading times and impeccable uptime. On the other hand, Cloudways provides exceptional performance with its managed cloud servers, allowing users to host a variety of applications on leading cloud providers. In the realm of performance, both platforms shine, making it a tie.
🏆 Winner: Tie
Ease of Use
In terms of user-friendliness, Kinsta stands out with its intuitive and tailored dashboard specifically designed for WordPress users. The interface is clean, easy to navigate, and provides seamless WordPress management. Cloudways, while user-friendly, might have a steeper learning curve, especially for beginners. Its interface is powerful, offering extensive customization options. For its specialized focus on WordPress and ease of use, Kinsta takes the lead.
🏆 Winner: Kinsta
Scalability
When it comes to scalability, both platforms offer robust options. Kinsta allows users to easily scale resources vertically, ensuring seamless growth for websites. Cloudways, however, goes a step further by offering both vertical and horizontal scaling. Users can not only increase server resources but also add multiple servers horizontally, making it exceptionally scalable for businesses with fluctuating or growing needs.
🏆 Winner: Cloudways
Support
In the realm of support, both Kinsta and Cloudways offer commendable services. Kinsta provides 24/7 support with WordPress experts available via live chat. Their expertise in WordPress-related issues makes their support invaluable. Cloudways also offers 24/7 support through various channels. While their support is generally good, the level of expertise might vary depending on the complexity of the issue. For their specialized WordPress support, Kinsta wins this category.
🏆 Winner: Kinsta
Security
Both Kinsta and Cloudways prioritize security, although their approaches differ. Kinsta provides robust security features including DDoS detection, hardware firewalls, SSL support, and daily backups. They actively monitor and mitigate security threats, ensuring websites are well-protected. Cloudways focuses on server-level security with regular patches and updates, leaving the application-level security to users. For its comprehensive security features and active monitoring, Kinsta emerges as the winner.
🏆 Winner: Kinsta
Backups
In terms of backups, both platforms offer reliable solutions. Kinsta provides automatic daily backups and allows users to create manual backups. Their easy restoration options ensure website data is secure and retrievable. Cloudways offers automated backups on selected cloud providers, allowing users to set backup frequency and retention policies. Users can also create on-demand backups for added security. Due to its seamless backup options and user-friendly restoration process, Kinsta takes the lead in this category.
🏆 Winner: Kinsta
User Reviews
Find out what current users think about Kinsta and Cloudways
If you need some external reviews of Ciroapp, you can read the reviews written by their users. Feel free to add your own on these platforms once you are an experienced user of Kinsta or Cloudways, to help our community to choose.
Kinsta Reviews
Kinsta Review – Premium WordPress Hosting
Cloudways Reviews
Cloudways Review – Managed Web Hosting Editor choice
Get 20% off on your 2 first months with 20CIROAPP.
By using our link you will avoid passing the Cloudways security check when you register.
Now that you have read everything and know all the differences between Kinsta and Cloudways, it’s time to define a winner! Find out in the following whom the winner of this versus is ⚡.
Winner
Kinsta vs Cloudways: Who is the winner?
Kinsta emerges as the overall winner, excelling in user-friendliness, support, security, and backup solutions. Its specialized focus on WordPress users and comprehensive features make it an excellent choice for those seeking managed WordPress hosting. However, Cloudways stands out for its exceptional scalability, catering to a broader audience beyond WordPress.
Its flexible pricing, impressive performance, and versatile application hosting capabilities make it the preferred choice for users looking for diverse hosting options.
Poll
Cloudways vs Kinsta: Which one will you use?
At Ciroapp, we are always striving to provide the best possible experience for our readers. We understand that making a decision between two software can be a difficult task. That’s why we want to hear from you! Your valuable opinion can help us improve our future versus articles and guide our readers in making informed decisions. By casting your vote, you not only help us, but also the community of readers who rely on our content. So, share your thoughts with us and let us know which software you prefer!