Cloudways vs Kinsta
Both are WordPress hosts aimed at agencies, freelancers and growing sites. They differ most on support, value for money and performance.
At a glance
| Cloudways | Kinsta | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 78/100 | 88/100 Higher |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Paid from | $14/mo monthly cap; $0.0208/hr | $35/mo monthly; $30/mo billed annually |
| Positioning | managed cloud | premium managed |
| Launched | 2011 | 2013 |
| Best for | Anyone hosting several sites who is comfortable taking on a little more responsibility. | Sites where an hour of downtime costs more than a year of the price difference. |
Where each one leads
| Dimension | Cloudways | Kinsta | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Staging environments | 4/5 | 5/5 | Kinsta |
| Multi-site management | 5/5 | 4/5 | Cloudways |
| Support | 3/5 | 5/5 | Kinsta |
| Performance | 4/5 | 5/5 | Kinsta |
| Value for money | 5/5 | 2/5 | Cloudways |
| Ease of use | 3/5 | 4/5 | Kinsta |
| Scalability | 4/5 | 5/5 | Kinsta |
Scores are 1–5 per dimension. Cloudways leads on 2 dimensions, Kinsta on 5. The overall figure weights these for WordPress hosting generally — see methodology.
Pricing
Plans are listed per tool rather than paired row by row — tiers rarely line up, and putting one vendor's second plan beside another's implies an equivalence that is not there.
| Tool | Plan | Per month | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudways | Micro (1GB) | $14 | monthly cap; $0.0208/hr |
| Small (2GB) | $28 | monthly cap; $0.0417/hr | |
| Medium (4GB) | $54 | monthly cap; $0.0804/hr | |
| Large (8GB) | $99 | monthly cap; $0.1473/hr | |
| Kinsta | Launch | $35 | monthly; $30/mo billed annually |
| Launch Plus | $59 | monthly; $50/mo billed annually | |
| Build | $69 | monthly; $58/mo billed annually | |
| Expand | $99 | monthly; $83/mo billed annually | |
| Scale | $169 | monthly; $141/mo billed annually |
Pricing checked 23 September 2026 against each vendor's own pricing page. Cloudways: Billed in USD by the hour against a monthly cap, excluding tax. Prices shown are DigitalOcean Basic servers. Kinsta: Billed in USD, excluding tax. Annual billing gives two months free; business plans include the first month free.
Verdict
Cloudways
- +Unlimited sites and unlimited visits per server — far cheaper than per-site pricing once you run several sites.
- +Choice of cloud provider: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud.
- +Free staging, free migration, and Object Cache Pro included on 4GB servers and above.
- −You are choosing and sizing a server yourself, even if the panel hides most of the work.
- −Offsite backup storage is billed separately, per gigabyte.
Kinsta
- +Unlimited free migrations, daily automatic backups and free malware removal on every plan.
- +Runs on Google Cloud's premium tier, with a built-in application performance monitoring tool.
- +Round-the-clock human support in eight languages.
- −Expensive at the entry level — $35 a month for a single WordPress site.
- −Plans are capped on server bandwidth, so traffic spikes — including bot traffic — can push a site into a higher tier.
Common questions
Is Cloudways cheaper than Kinsta?
Cloudways starts at $14/mo (monthly cap; $0.0208/hr), and Kinsta starts at $35/mo (monthly; $30/mo billed annually) — so Cloudways is the cheaper entry point. Compare what each includes at that tier, and what it renews at, rather than the headline figure alone.
Which is better, Cloudways or Kinsta?
On our weighted scoring across the use cases in this category, Kinsta comes out ahead overall. The honest answer is that it depends on the use case — the tables above break the score down by dimension so you can weight it to your own priorities.
Other comparisons
Sources & verification
- kinsta.com — checked 23 September 2026No free plan, but the first month of business plans is free and migrations are unlimited and free.
- cloudways.com — checked 23 September 2026No free plan; a 3-day free trial without card details.