Leaving WP Engine in 2026: What Thousands of Users Discovered After the Automattic Drama

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The Interruption

In September 2024, WP Engine customers woke up to a nightmare: Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, blocked access to WordPress.org plugin updates for all WP Engine clients. Not because of a hack. Not because of a security breach. But as part of a dispute where Automattic demanded WP Engine pay an estimated $32 million per year in trademark licensing fees.

Your clients' sites couldn't pull critical security patches. You couldn't install plugin updates. And WP Engine's support forums exploded with migration threads. Court filings later revealed a 14% spike in daily cancellations during the embargo.

Here's what the thousands of users who left discovered.

"I was managing 12 client sites on WP Engine's Agency plan. When the plugin updates got blocked, my clients' security audit flagged it as a critical risk. I had no choice. I migrated everything to Cloudways in two weeks. The pricing is a third of what WP Engine charges. The performance is identical. I'm never going back."

The Gripe: Locked In Mid-Lawsuit

Before the Automattic drama, WP Engine was the "premium" option. Boutique agencies liked the all-in-one dashboard and managed plugin updates. But the WP Engine Agency plan costs $290/month for 15 sites. When your core platform blocks plugin updates mid-lawsuit, you realize something important: you are paying for a platform that claims to manage WordPress, but its own creator is fighting it in court.

That's not a technical problem. That's a trust problem.

And agencies that depend on WP Engine for client sites have no leverage.

The Discovery: What the Migration Community Found

After the plugin update embargo, Reddit's r/Wordpress and r/webdev flooded with migration stories. Agencies were asking a simple question: "What's the alternative?"

The data was shocking. The community consensus: Cloudways at $80/month delivers 95% of what WP Engine provides at 27% of the cost.

The Mechanism: The Ecosystem Lock-In Tax

WP Engine forces you into a proprietary stack:

EverCache: A proprietary caching layer you can't run elsewhere
Disallowed Plugins: WP Engine maintains a list of disallowed plugins for performance and security reasons. While WP Rocket was later approved, many other caching and optimization plugins remain restricted to avoid conflicts with EverCache.
Google Cloud Only: WP Engine runs on Google Cloud exclusively, limiting your geographic redundancy and egress choices
Per-Site Pricing: You pay $290/mo for 15 sites. Want 16? Upgrade the plan.

Cloudways is fundamentally different. It's a management layer on top of your own cloud server. You choose the cloud provider (DigitalOcean, AWS, GCP, Vultr, Linode, Hetzner). Cloudways handles the OS optimization, backups, and SSL. But the server relationship is yours.

If Cloudways disappears tomorrow, your DigitalOcean droplet still exists. You can SSH in and run it yourself.

That's the difference between a platform you can migrate away from and a platform you are locked into.

The Fascinations: What Actually Surprised Migrators

PHP Worker Comparison: Both WP Engine and Cloudways handle PHP workers, but Cloudways lets you control the count directly. The typical $80/mo Cloudways plan handles 15+ concurrent requests without throttling. WP Engine's equivalent tier ($290/mo) has the same worker limitation.
Plugin Freedom: WP Engine restricts many popular caching and optimization plugins to avoid conflicts with EverCache. While WP Rocket was eventually approved (in a limited compatibility mode), other common tools remain blocked. Cloudways imposes no plugin restrictions — you run whatever your stack needs.
Geographic Penalty of "Google Cloud Only": If your clients are in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe, WP Engine's Google Cloud infrastructure means higher latency and egress costs. Cloudways on Vultr or DigitalOcean's Asia-Pacific regions cuts latency in half.
Hidden Overage Charges: WP Engine's storage overages: once you exceed your plan's storage limit, you pay per extra GB. Most agencies didn't discover this until they got a surprise renewal bill that jumped $300.
The Free Migration Plugin Everyone Used: All-in-One WP Migration can export and import a full WordPress site (database + files) in a single zip. Zero downtime. Zero FTP. Most migrators had their entire portfolio moved in 2 weeks.

Don't Stay for Loyalty

The Automattic lawsuit made clear that WP Engine's relationship with WordPress.org is adversarial, not cooperative. The plugin update embargo lasted weeks. Even after it was resolved, the trust was broken.

If you're still on WP Engine because you feel loyalty to the platform or because migration feels scary, here's the honest part: agencies who migrated in September 2024 report that the entire process took 2-3 weeks. The downtime was zero. The performance was identical (or better). And the annual cost savings were $2,500-$3,600 per agency.

That's not a small number.

See the 2026 WP Engine vs Cloudways Breakdown →