Cloudways vs. Pantheon

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cloudways
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Cloudways, by DigitalOcean, offers a range of managed hosting solutions, including managed Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and others, with a choice of infrastructure providers and media delivery via CloudwaysVPN, and CloudwaysBot notification system.
$10
per month
Pantheon
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Pantheon is a WebOps platform where marketers and developers collaborate to drive results. The vendor states that with Pantheon, site owners maximize their capacity to update website design and functionality, responding to market trends, catering to consumer behavior, and adding real value to the business's bottom line. Today, companies compete on the basis of digital experiences, and the best results emerge from an agile build-test-learn process. Whether it's publishing content,…
$29
per month
Pricing
CloudwaysPantheon
Editions & Modules
Starting Price
$10.00
per month
Maximum Price
$274.33
per month
Basic
$29
per month
Performance
$114
per month
Elite
Contact for quote
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CloudwaysPantheon
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup Fee$25 per applicationOptional
Additional DetailsCloudways offers 1 free migration to all customers. For any further migration needs the customer can use our free WordPress migration plugin and do it themselves. Or they can request paid migration services for any PHP based application, which start at $25 per application.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CloudwaysPantheon
Best Alternatives
CloudwaysPantheon
Small Businesses
Flywheel
Flywheel
Score 9.9 out of 10
ManageWP
ManageWP
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.6 out of 10
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CloudwaysPantheon
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.8
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CloudwaysPantheon
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudways has been a great fit for our organization and has allowed us to host as many sites as we need and scale those websites. We have a paid service plan and their team of support agents is the best that I have ever worked with. They have helped us through numerous scenarios over the years and are always there 24/7/365. From simple questions to the most complex hat we could come up with they are always willing to roll up their sleeves and see issues through to completion.
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Great Cloud-based coordination platform which offers the team excellent capabilities on easy workflow management, multiple project activity tracking and easy to monitor all the project assets from one desk. Pantheon offers the best content management tools, strategic on development project life cycle management is excellent and the reporting features with Pantheon are effective and useful real-time data analytical capability.
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Pros
  • Automatic Daily One Click Restore Backups
  • Integrated CDN
  • Easy & Intuitive Alternate Interface to cPanel and WHM
  • Very Affordable for High Specs
  • 24/7 Customer Support is Extremely Helpful
  • Serve & Application Management is a Breeze
  • Choose from Multiple Server Locations
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  • Effective use of our codebase deployment and implementation.
  • The dashboard functionality and general stability and security are excellent.
  • The server is quite consistent, and if you need assistance from the support team, they are very quick to respond.
  • Automatic updates let me ensure that my customers have safe websites without increasing my own expense.
  • The team offers excellent assistance and help for chat.
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Cons
  • Their free alternative to WP Rocket could be made more user-friendly and easier to understand
  • Create a function to automatically report heavy usage to specific email IDs
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  • Pricing structure has too large of a jump between Basic and Performance plans
  • Have run into issues with prescribed WP updates not working through dashboard and having to do manually.
  • Pantheon site dashboard occasionally is unavailable (the site is never affected though)
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
The environment is stable and we have not had any issues/downtime. The annual cost is reasonable.
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Usability
They are constantly improving their dashboards and interface to make it easier to use and find the things that we use the most. It's a lot of features to pack in to one UI and they have done a great job of making it user friendly. Their layout is intuitive and easy to learn and is extremely granular. We are able to control every aspect of our websites and applications from an individual level from scaling, to cache, to DNS, security, WAF, and everything in between.
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Monitoring of project development is very easy using a dashboard with its integration capability, showing all processes in a single screen which is easy to use and also easy to navigate through. A powerful tool that allows testing to be carried on without the user noticing any changes to the system and a highly interactive tool for groups and project members.
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Support Rating
Technical support is just 2-3 clicks away and the Cloudways homepage and the operators are available almost 24/7. They also are able to answer any kind of question related to their services, whether economical or technical. I sometimes made mistakes while using their services and they have been keen to help me, and fixed my problems really fast.
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Even tier 1 Pantheon chat and ticket support are knowledgeable, competent, and useful. They routinely understand and promptly resolve urgent, complex, and/or unusual issues that other hosts need to escalate to tier 2 or tier 3 support personnel. I honestly can't think of a truly negative or disappointing support experience in the years I've used Pantheon hosting for client websites.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Once the environments were up and running, the implementation was easy to synchronize with latest data prior to switchover.
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Alternatives Considered
VPS and dedicated hosting are costly, Therefore cloud hosting provides a cheaper way to own a powerful server, and IP is dedicated as well. Cloudways was the decision because:
1) Easy to set up without any linux commands we can set up the server
2) Live chat for technical help. (Excellent agents, they helped out of the scope issues too)
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Acquia was terrible. We use DigitalOcean for some all-purpose computing needs and Platform.sh for an application that does more computing and high-throughput processing where we do not want page views (API calls) to count against our usage.
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Return on Investment
  • It simplified our systems, it's Cloudways + mainwp for maintenance and hosting now.
  • It allowed us to save on server maintenance work costs.
  • The email is easy to spin up around it if someone doesn't want google workspace.
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  • Pantheon allows ordinary sites to excel esp if there is consistent development going on behind the scenes.
  • Website management is super easy and the hosting fee gets paid off as you save on developer hours.
  • Expensive for those who are not consistently developing on the platform, there are other options out there at better price points.
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ScreenShots

Cloudways Screenshots

Screenshot of Managed ServicesScreenshot of Team Management

Pantheon Screenshots

Screenshot of Find out in seconds if your site is ready to launch. Use Launch Check to get recommendations and discover site issues fast with our report based on over 50 automated checks.Screenshot of Our Developer Dashboard has everything you need to build, launch, and run Drupal and WordPress sites. Interface via SFTP or Git, deploy and scale your sites, and access tools like backups and one-click core updates. Easily add team members and control access.