Render vs WP Engine

Render is strongest for developers. WP Engine is strongest for WordPress-only sites. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Render	WP Engine
Starting price	$0.25/mo	$30/mo
Best for	Developers Startups Full-stack web apps APIs Small teams replacing Heroku	WordPress-only sites Agencies managing multiple WP sites Enterprise WordPress High-traffic WordPress blogs/publishers
Stated uptime SLA	99.95%	99.99%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	4	1
Managed Kubernetes	No	No
Support channels	Ticket, Docs, Community forum, Priority support on Pro/Scale/Enterprise	Chat, Phone (Professional plan and above), Docs, Dedicated support team (Enterprise)
Compliance	SOC 2	GDPR
Hidden costs to watch for	Persistent disk storage billed separately at $0.25/GB/month Bandwidth overage billed per-GB beyond workspace plan allowance (best-available figure ~$0.15/GB, exact current rate not printed on fetched docs page) Additional custom domains beyond plan allowance billed at $0.25/month each Postgres storage overage billed at roughly $0.30/GB/month beyond included storage Instances billed by the second while running, so scale-to-zero / suspended services still show partial-month charges for the time they were up	Visit overages billed at $2 per 1,000 visits beyond plan allowance Extra sites beyond plan limit billed around $20/mo per additional site on Startup Annual-billed prices shown on the marketing site often include a first-year-only promotional discount; renewal/steady-state annual rate can be higher than the advertised starting price Month-to-month billing (no annual commitment) costs roughly 17-20% more per month than annual billing Email hosting is NOT included; third-party estimates put it around $6-7 per mailbox per month Smart Plugin Manager and NitroPack optimization add-ons priced/bundled separately on Essential plans (included standard on Core) Numeric 99.99% uptime SLA is marketed prominently for Core/Enterprise tiers; not clearly guaranteed with a published SLA credit policy on Essential (Startup/Professional/Growth/Scale) plans
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18