GridPane is pleased to announce that we’ve accepted a strategic investment from Automattic: Read all about it
Why Choose GridPane Over Kinsta?
Both Kinsta and ourselves here at GridPane are 100% focused on WordPress hosting services, but we each have fundamentally different business and pricing models. We occasionally get asked by prospective clients how we compare with each other and so we’ll seek to explain the key differences here, as fairly and accurately as possible.
If you’re looking to understand the differences between GridPane and Kinsta to decide who is the better choice for your business, you’re in the right place.
Business
Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting provider that charges a premium for their hosting services. Prices start at $30/month for 1 regular site, and they have a transparent and easy-to-understand pricing tier system for upgrading your plan to meet your needs. They have an excellent reputation in the space and are one of the more popular WordPress hosts. We think very highly of Kinsta.
GridPane gives you the power to create your own managed WordPress hosting service. Instead of renting strictly limited resources directly from a host, you can provision and manage your own enterprise-capable WordPress servers through our SaaS platform. We primarily serve WordPress agencies and developers.
Service
Kinsta uses Google Cloud Compute servers, which they themselves rent and install their own LEMP stack on. Their plans are designed around unique visits, disk space, and PHP workers. Overage fees can occur, however, they proactively send out notifications regarding usage to help their clients avoid going over their plan’s limits. They can also make temporary modifications to plans in order to protect from overage fees as well. Their platform comes with a nice UI with many one-click options for managing your websites.
GridPane allows you to provision servers from providers such as DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, UpCloud, and essentially any quality VPS provider that you wish through our Custom VPS option (including Google Cloud Compute, Hetzner, and OVH). You choose and control your infrastructure, and you can use our software and control panel to manage your websites and servers.
Pricing Model
Kinsta, like most managed hosts, base their pricing on metrics such as PHP workers and monthly website visits (measured by the total monthly unique IP addresses visiting the site/s on the server, rather than the number of page views like some other hosts). This kind of pricing can be great for individual businesses, but it doesn’t scale well and often results in the need to upgrade to much higher plans to get a relatively small number of additional PHP workers. This is one of the main reasons many WordPress agencies are switching from Kinsta to GridPane.
GridPane’s pricing model is straightforward. We have 4 set plans (one of which is 100% free) that are designed to help WordPress professionals and agencies at different levels of their hosting venture’s journey. As you add more sites and servers to your account, the more you’ll benefit from the higher-tier plans. There are no preset server limitations on any plans, and there are no restrictions or arbitrary limits on traffic. Your servers can handle what they can handle.
Pricing Comparison
Kinsta’s pricing starts at $35/month for 1 regular site, and then they have numerous plans available that allow you to add more and more sites. They also offer some features with their plans that we at GridPane don’t. These include:
- Free malware clean up should any of your sites become hacked (which will be due to a plugin or theme vulnerability and not Kinsta)
- A CDN
- Cloudflare Enterprise features
- Their custom APM tool and assistance reading that data if needed
GridPane includes many features that Kinsta doesn’t include, such as:
- OpenLiteSpeed
- Server customization options
- Hourly backups (additional $100/month per site on Kinsta)
- Hourly remote backup options (Kinsta offers weekly or monthly remote backup options)
- Redis object caching (additional $100/month per site on Kinsta)
- An Elasticsearch integration
- DNS integrations
- Multiple Web Application Firewalls
- Server-level security configuration options
- One-click WP Ultimo integration
Our Core plan is free, our Panel plan is $100, Developer Plus is $500, and we have custom Agency and Enterprise options available.
Also, with the money you’ll save using GridPane, you’ll easily be able to afford a service such as BunnyCDN or Cloudfare APO, both of which are excellent and offer incredible value for money if you need a CDN. Cloudflare is, of course, free but not as performant.
The easiest & fastest way to recover from getting hacked is to restore from a clean backup. With the backup options available to you, recovering from Malware should be quick and painless.
Support
We both have 24/7 support, and as we’re both dedicated to WordPress, we can each offer a much higher level of WordPress-specific support than companies that are generalized and serve many different markets.
The main difference is that we have no incentive to ask you to increase the size of your server resources as that isn’t how we make our money. Often, this is the only way to solve performance-related issues at Kinsta because your site needs additional CPU and PHP workers. That said, their support team will help you use their analytics and APM features to help determine the cause of performance issues so that you can work on fixing them rather than having to upgrade in cases where that’s a possibility.
Kinsta’s support is some of the absolute best in the business, but as with any traditional managed host, it’s also limited by the restrictions of their platform.
GridPane is entirely independent from your infrastructure (IaaS) provider. We allow you to customize your servers to meet your website’s requirements, and we can advise you on how to fine-tune your servers vs. upgrading them. You’ll also get your servers at “cost” (we don’t add any additional markup on them), and the average $10-$20 VPS can easily handle a TON of traffic.
Stack and Performance
Kinsta runs on a well-optimized Nginx stack built specifically for WordPress, and their performance is far superior to that of your average shared hosting account. They run on Google Cloud Computes excellent infrastructure and now include Cloudflare Enterprise features. They also have a strictly regimented service that can quickly require you to scale up your plan if you’re hosting WooCommerce, learning management systems, or multisites, etc. Getting the performance you need on these types of sites may cost $.
GridPane offers multiple stack options (Nginx and OpenLiteSpeed), and our out-of-the-box defaults are ideal for most WordPress websites. However, you can further customize them to meet your specific requirements as needed. Need to tweak your PHP workers for a WooCommerce or LMS website? No problem at all.
As far as performance goes, let’s just say that we will happily put any of our server stack options up against ANY managed hosting company any day of the week, but both ourselves and Kinsta have been awarded “Top Tier” honors in the [highest] enterprise category by Review Signal.
TL;DR
- These are the key differences between our services:
- GridPane can help WordPress agencies and professionals build their own hosting service and save anywhere from hundreds to multiple thousands per month as they scale their business.
- GridPane is built specifically for WordPress agencies/professionals, whereas Kinsta serves the whole spectrum - 1 website accounts through to agencies.
- GridPane gives you the power to create your own enterprise capable servers. Kinsta rent a slice of a server that comes with strict monthly traffic and PHP worker limitations based on the plan you subscribe to.
- Kinsta includes Cloudflare Enterprise features in their plans. GridPane has a Cloudflare DNS integration to connect your own Cloudflare account to our platform, but our plans do not include Cloudflare Enterprise features.
- GridPane includes hourly local and remote backups. Kinsta includes daily backups, but charges an additional $100/month per website for hourly backups.
- GridPane gives you the ability to create remote hourly, daily, weekly, or month backups at Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi. Kinsta includes the ability to backup your websites once per week or per month to your own Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage, or to Kinsta's storage
- GridPane includes Redis object caching. Kinsta charges an additional $100/month per website for this feature.
- GridPane includes an Elasticsearch integration.
- Kinsta include malware clean ups and their own security is built in. GridPane includes a significant number of security integrations and extensive backup options that you can configure as per your needs.
- Kinsta includes their own custom APM tool on all plans. GridPane allows you to install your own preferred APM tool directly on your server/s if needed.
- GridPane includes OpenLiteSpeed, Nginx, Percona, MariaDB, and PHP server customization options with the ability to run our stack on servers that you own and control. Kinsta offer great performance, but they also have a regimented, one-size-fits-all approach.
Which Service Is Right For You?
If you only have one or two websites with relatively low traffic (and you expect it to stay at less than 25,000 total visits per month), Kinsta may be the better option for your business.
If you’re a WordPress agency or developer and you’re looking to grow your monthly revenue from your hosting offering, GridPane is purpose-built to serve your needs. Not only will you save a considerable amount of money each month, but you’ll also have a lot more flexibility and capability for hosting different types of websites, and the backing of our support team and knowledge base.
Are you looking to build a high-end hosting service and add a steady, predictable stream of recurring monthly revenue to your WordPress business? We’d love to assist you on that journey.
Smash Your Hosting Problems Once & For All
WordPress pro’s from all over the world are moving their most important, high-traffic websites to GridPane. Why not take us for a test drive? You can get started today for free!