Kinsta vs SiteGround
A WordPress-only specialist on a ten-step USD ladder against a shared host in GBP that bundles the domain, the mailboxes and the builder into every plan. What genuinely differs, what each audit leaves unstated, and why the two price lists cannot be ranked against each other.
Kinsta sells managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting and nothing else, from a $35 USD starter tier that puts staging, free migrations and unlimited panel users on every rung. SiteGround sells shared hosting graded by approximate monthly visits, priced in GBP ex VAT on its UK site, bundling a domain, email accounts and daily backups into every plan while holding staging back to its second tier. The two price lists sit in different currencies on different term structures, so no ranking between them is honest; fit decides.
By Sam Moreton
Researched
Which one for your use case
| Use case | Pick |
|---|---|
| One site, owner wants email accounts and a domain in the package | SiteGround |
| Many small sites on one bill without per-install pricing | SiteGround |
| Staging required on the entry plan, not from the mid tier up | Kinsta |
| Team that escalates support by phone | SiteGround |
| Multilingual team whose working channel is chat | Kinsta |
| WordPress-only builds that want platform data in the panel | Kinsta |
Testing overlap: Each host is described from its own captured plan, pricing and support pages, Kinsta checked November 2026 and SiteGround October 2026; no shared test environment was run for this pair, and no performance figure here was measured by this site.
What the captured pages state, side by side
From the per-host feature audit, checked through 2026-11-04. Cells carry the date their source page was captured; gaps render as not stated rather than guessed.
| Dimension | Kinsta | SiteGround |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price (cheapest published plan, trials excluded) | $35 per month (Starter) Checked 2026-11-04. | £13.99 per month (StartUp; £1.99 per month first-invoice price) Checked 2026-10-11. |
| Trial | Not stated on the captured Kinsta pages. | Not stated on the captured SiteGround pages. |
| Apps | Managed WordPress hosting for WordPress and WooCommerce sites; the platform is also sold as separate Application Hosting (NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, Scala, Go) and Database Hosting (MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis) lines, which are not part of this audit. Checked 2026-11-04. | Free installation of WordPress or other CMS through the setup wizard; free shopping-cart install for ecommerce, or the all-inclusive SiteGround Ecommerce option. Checked 2026-10-11. |
| Staging | Every account includes a staging environment; MyKinsta adds staging creation, change preview and push live, and the DevKinsta local app supports local development with selective push from staging. Premium staging environments (12 CPUs, 8 GB memory, same number of PHP threads as the live plan) are a paid add-on at $20/month per environment. Checked 2026-11-04. | Staging is listed as a GrowBig exclusive feature; GoGeek lists staging with Git. Not listed for StartUp. Checked 2026-10-11. |
| Backups | Automatic backups included on the platform (the add-ons page states automatic daily backups remain in place when the hourly add-on is enabled); on-demand backups are listed for publishers. External backups to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage (weekly or monthly) and hourly or 6-hour restore points are paid add-ons. Retention is not stated. Checked 2026-11-04. | Automated daily backups free on every plan; on-demand backups on GrowBig and GoGeek. Retention is not stated. Checked 2026-10-11. |
| Migrations | Free unlimited migrations handled by Kinsta's migration team, stated with no downtime; the hosting page cites 1,100 average monthly migrations and 96% customer satisfaction (vendor claims). Checked 2026-11-04. | Free site migrations: an automatic migrator for WordPress sites or transfer by SiteGround experts, with the site stated to stay live throughout; a free email migrator is also included. Checked 2026-10-11. |
| CDN | CDN included free on every plan (plans page card line: 'Free SSL, CDN and Staging'), HTTP/3-enabled. Edge coverage figures differ across pages: 300+ edge locations (hosting page), 275+ PoPs listed as coming soon (features page), 200+ cities or PoPs in the features page audience sections. Checked 2026-11-04. | Free CDN with every site on all plans; the web hosting page states the built-in CDN serves content from the nearest location. Checked 2026-10-11. |
| Vertical scaling | No self-serve resize of a running plan is stated on the captured pages. Stated growth paths are higher tiers, the disk space add-on (20 GB increments at $20/month per hosting plan), the WordPress sites add-on ($30/month per site), PHP performance ($10/month per 500 MB), and dedicated servers from $300/month. Checked 2026-11-04. | Not stated on the captured SiteGround pages. |
| Horizontal scaling | No multi-server, load-balanced or autoscaling arrangement is stated on the captured pages. The nearest stated options are dedicated servers (custom setups starting at $300/month) and enterprise custom plans with dedicated virtual machines, additional PHP workers and reverse proxy; the features page claims 1 billion combined visitors and 7 billion page views a day handled with stability (vendor claim). Checked 2026-11-04. | Not stated on the captured SiteGround pages. |
| Control panel | MyKinsta, a proprietary dashboard the features page contrasts with cPanel and Plesk: cache, redirects, PHP versions, backups, CDN and debugging tools; traffic, resource and CDN analytics with cache HIT and MISS ratio; Kinsta APM; bulk site management; unlimited users; WP-CLI, SSH, Git, ionCube loader and one-click cloning; DevKinsta local development app. Checked 2026-11-04. | Site Tools: each site gets its own panel to manage, share access to and switch between sites independently; domain, email, website and backups are managed from one dashboard. Free SSH and SFTP access; WP-CLI is listed under the WordPress services. Checked 2026-10-11. |
| Team features | Unlimited MyKinsta users with assignable permissions for agencies, clients and internal teams (hosting page); the features page states unlimited users with no per-user charge, contrasting hosts that charge per user, and adds multi-user management and multisite domain mapping. Checked 2026-11-04. | Collaborators included on every plan (web hosting page feature lists); white-label access and a free private DNS are GoGeek exclusives; the full feature list adds 'Ship Site to Client' under agency and designer features. Checked 2026-10-11. |
| Support channels | 24/7/365 live chat with real-human WordPress engineers (5 languages), knowledge base and help center (10 languages). Checked 2026-11-04. | phone, chat, tickets. Checked 2026-10-11. |
| Benchmarks | Not tested by Kite: no benchmark runs exist yet (see the methodology). | Not tested by Kite: no benchmark runs exist yet (see the methodology). |
What the published data says
- Entry prices are published in different currencies (Kinsta USD, SiteGround GBP), so no cheaper-side claim is made: converting between them would need an exchange rate this audit does not hold. Kinsta: $35 per month (Starter); SiteGround: £13.99 per month (StartUp; £1.99 per month first-invoice price) (checked 2026-11-04 / 2026-10-11).
- Kinsta publishes ~25,000 visits/month/~50,000 visits/month/~100,000 visits/month/~250,000 visits/month/~400,000 visits/month/~600,000 visits/month/~1,000,000 visits/month/~1,500,000 visits/month/~2,000,000 visits/month/~2,500,000 visits/month visits (as of 2026-11-04); the captured pages state no overage billing policy.
- SiteGround publishes ~10,000 visits/month/~100,000 visits/month/~400,000 visits/month visits (as of 2026-10-11); the captured pages state no overage billing policy.
Kinsta: what the captured pages do not state, and the sources
- No server resources (RAM, CPU, PHP workers) are stated for any tier: plans are graded by WordPress installs, monthly visits and disk space only, so no like-for-like RAM anchor exists against RAM-graded hosts.
- No bandwidth or data transfer allowance is stated per tier, and no overage or throttling policy for visits or bandwidth is stated; the only stated overage mechanism is the disk space add-on's 20 GB increments at $20/month.
- Backup retention is not stated: automatic backups are included (daily per the add-ons page's hourly-add-on wording) but how long restore points are kept is not stated.
- Storage medium per tier is not stated beyond 'disk space': the custom-plan questionnaire lists 'SSD storage', but the plan cards do not name SSD or NVMe.
- Email hosting is not mentioned on any captured page.
- Support channels beyond chat and documentation are not stated: no phone or ticket channel appears, and no paid support tier is stated; the under-2-minute and 30-second response figures are vendor claims, not guaranteed response SLAs.
- The 99.9% uptime SLA carries no compensation or credit terms on the captured pages.
- Data center and CDN presence counts are unreconciled across pages: 25 data centers (features page map) versus 30 global data centers (hosting page) versus 35 (features page Managed WordPress section); CDN 300+ edge locations (hosting page) versus 275+ PoPs listed as coming soon (features page) versus 200+ cities or PoPs (features page audience sections).
- Entry price is unreconciled: the hosting page FAQ says WordPress hosting starts at $30/month while the cheapest tier on the plans page is Starter at $35/month; single-site plans are stated at 'up to 25% off the regular plan' with no absolute price.
- The free first month applies to plan names 'Single 35k' and 'WP 2' (hosting page FAQ) that do not appear on the captured plans page; whether a credit card is required is not stated, so no trial object is recorded.
- Agency plans (unlimited free migrations, free agency site hosting on 'a WP 2 plan', Agency Directory listing, reseller and affiliate programs) and single-site plans are described without prices on the captured pages.
- Application Hosting and Database Hosting are separate product lines on kinsta.com and are not audited here; the $20 first-month credit explicitly excludes Managed WordPress Hosting.
- Annual billing is stated per tier (ten monthly payments, two months free), but month-to-month commitment terms, cancellation mechanics and the refund scope of the 30-day money-back guarantee are not stated.
- The number of standard (non-premium) staging environments per site or account is not stated; the add-ons page says only that every account comes with a staging environment.
- The $300+ included-value breakdown (Cloudflare $250+, WP Rocket $4.90, BlogVault $5.83, Pingdom $15, SSL $4, Yoast Premium $8.25) is a vendor-stated marketing valuation, not itemised billing.
- No free trial with a stated day count exists for Managed WordPress; only the first-month-free offer on two named plans and the 30-day money-back guarantee are stated.
- High-performance hosting for WordPress, Kinsta (checked 2026-11-04)
- Flexible Pricing Tailored to Your Needs, Kinsta (checked 2026-11-04)
- Power Your Web Projects With Premium Hosting Features, Kinsta (checked 2026-11-04)
- Kinsta add-ons, Kinsta (checked 2026-11-04)
SiteGround: what the captured pages do not state, and the sources
- No server resources (RAM or CPU) are stated for any shared plan: tiers are graded by approximate monthly visits, storage and feature set, so no like-for-like RAM anchor exists against RAM-graded hosts.
- Backup retention (how long daily backups are kept) is not stated.
- Visit allowances are stated as approximate ('~10,000 visits'); no overage, throttling or upgrade policy for exceeding them is stated.
- All captured prices are from the UK regional site (siteground.co.uk) in GBP, excluding VAT; the captured pages state no monthly (non-prepaid) term prices and no other region's pricing.
- No free trial is stated on the captured pages; the stated risk-free mechanism is a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- No separately priced add-ons are stated on the captured pages, so the add-on list is empty by evidence, not by assumption.
- An uptime SLA or guarantee is not stated.
- SiteGround's navigation lists Cloud Hosting, Reseller Hosting and WordPress/WooCommerce product lines; only the shared Web Hosting line was captured, so this audit covers that line only.
- Node.js application hosting is not documented on the captured pages: a blog headline dated 01 Oct 2026 announces it, but the captured feature lists do not include it.
- Staging is not listed for StartUp: the web hosting page ties staging to GrowBig (staging + Git to GoGeek) as exclusive features, while the full feature list shows staging without a per-plan split.
- Datacentre presence is summarised as 'servers on four continents'; no region choice per plan or customer is stated.
- Support response-time guarantees are not stated.
- Web Hosting Crafted For Top Website Performance & Speed - SiteGround, SiteGround (checked 2026-10-11)
- SiteGround Web Hosting Plans - Full Feature List, SiteGround (checked 2026-10-11)
Open this comparison in the interactive tool to swap either side for any of the other audited hosts.
Kinsta and SiteGround both host WordPress well, and there the resemblance mostly ends. Kinsta is a specialist, selling managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting on Google Cloud C2 machines through a ten-step USD ladder. SiteGround is a polished generalist, selling shared hosting in GBP that bundles the domain, the mailboxes, the CDN and the daily backups onto one invoice. Every fact below traces to the two captured audits, Kinsta checked November 2026 and SiteGround October 2026; the numbers sit in the audit table beneath this article.
One specialism, one shelf
SiteGround's audit covers its shared Web Hosting line: StartUp for personal projects, GrowBig for a growing business, GoGeek for bigger builds, each tier carrying an approximate monthly visits figure and a storage quota. Cloud, Reseller and dedicated WordPress lines appear in its navigation, uncaptured. Kinsta's audit covers managed WordPress, the WooCommerce-capable core; its Application and Database Hosting lines stay out of scope. Both run on Google Cloud, where the transparency splits: Kinsta names C2 machines on the Premium Tier network, gives each site an isolated container, and publishes a 99.9% uptime SLA with no compensation terms stated, while SiteGround sums up its footprint as servers across four continents and publishes no uptime number at all.
Dollars against pounds
Kinsta's entry tier costs $35 per month for a single install, 25,000 visits and 10 GB of disk, checked November 2026, and the ladder climbs through ten named tiers to Enterprise 4 at $1,650 for 150 installs and 2.5 million visits, with custom plans beyond that quoted by sales. Annual terms cost ten monthly payments, so two months land free. SiteGround's captured prices come from siteground.co.uk, in pounds, excluding VAT, checked October 2026: StartUp opens at £1.99 for the first invoice of a 12-month prepaid term and settles at £13.99 per renewal, GrowBig runs £3.99 then £23.99 with unlimited sites on the tier, and GoGeek £5.99 then £34.99. No monthly-term price appears in the capture, and no other region's pricing. These two lists cannot be ranked, because the exchange rate moves, the VAT treatment differs and the term structures were never alike to begin with. What can be compared is shape. SiteGround's first invoice is an acquisition price and its renewal is the real cost of the product; Kinsta's sticker is flat whichever month you read it. One unreconciled detail from Kinsta's own pages: the hosting FAQ says WordPress hosting starts at $30 per month, while the cheapest plan card reads $35.
The staging boundary
Staging is the sharpest divergence at the cheap end of both ranges. Kinsta puts a staging environment on every account, whatever the tier: MyKinsta handles creation, change preview and push live, with the DevKinsta desktop app for local work. A premium staging environment, 12 CPUs and 8 GB of memory, is a $20 per month per environment add-on. SiteGround gates staging by tier: StartUp lists none, GrowBig carries it as an exclusive feature, and GoGeek pairs staging with Git. SiteGround's own pages disagree slightly here: the full feature list shows staging with no per-plan split, while the web hosting page ties it to tiers. The cheapest SiteGround tier with staging is therefore GrowBig at a £23.99 renewal; Kinsta's $35 Starter ships with it.
Who answers, and through which channel
SiteGround answers around the clock by phone, chat and tickets, with priority support reserved as a GoGeek exclusive. Kinsta answers in chat every hour of the year, staffed by WordPress engineers across five languages and backed by a knowledge base in ten; neither a phone line nor a ticket queue shows up on any captured Kinsta page. The sub-two-minute average and 98% satisfaction Kinsta quotes, and the 98% SiteGround says it has held for over ten years, are vendor claims with no guaranteed response time behind them. So a team that escalates by voice needs SiteGround's channel list, while a multilingual team living in chat finds its shape on Kinsta.
Moving in, and keeping copies
Migration costs nothing on either side. Kinsta's migrations are unlimited and run by its own migration team, stated with no downtime. SiteGround offers an automatic WordPress migrator or a transfer by its experts with the site kept live throughout, plus a free email migrator. Backups run daily on both, and both audits leave the same hole: neither states how long restore points are kept, so read daily as a schedule, not a history. Past the daily baseline the products part again. SiteGround includes on-demand backups from GrowBig upward at no charge. Kinsta sells restore-point frequency instead, $20 per site per month for backups every six hours and $100 for hourly, plus off-site copies to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage at $2 per site per month.
Bundles against menus
SiteGround's plan reads as one bundle: a free domain, free SSL, a CDN, unlimited email accounts at your domain, daily backups, its builder with AI generation, and collaborators, all on every tier, with white-label client access and private DNS held back for GoGeek. No separately priced extra appears on any captured page, so the add-on list is empty by evidence rather than assumption. Kinsta's included list leans platform: page caching, Cloudflare DDoS protection, monitoring with site checks every two minutes, unlimited MyKinsta users with assignable permissions, and APM-style performance data per site. Email hosting goes unmentioned on every captured Kinsta page, so mailboxes at your domain are a question for its sales chat. What Kinsta does not fold in, it sells: an extra WordPress install at $30 per month per site, disk at $20 per 20 GB, Redis object caching at $100 per site, dedicated servers from $300. Both hosts hang a 30-day money-back guarantee on the door, and neither publishes a free trial with a stated day count.
Where each one wins
Kinsta takes WordPress-only work: staging from the cheapest rung, telemetry in the panel, and a depth menu, workers, caching, dedicated machines, bought as the site outgrows each layer. SiteGround takes the owner who wants one invoice carrying the domain, the mailboxes and the backups, a phone line inside the standard tier, and unlimited sites from the second rung at a £23.99 renewal.
If the shortlist is wider than this pair, Cloudways vs Kinsta sets Kinsta against a generalist that rents you the server directly, and Cloudways vs SiteGround does the same for SiteGround's bundled model. The hosting comparison tool lines either host up against the rest of the field, all captured under the same citation rules.
FAQ
Is Kinsta better than SiteGround?
Neither is better outright, and this page crowns neither. Kinsta fits WordPress-only work that needs staging from the cheapest rung, per-site performance data in the panel, and a paid menu of depth bought as the site grows. SiteGround fits an owner who wants the domain, the mailboxes, the CDN and the backups on one invoice, with a phone line inside standard support. The right pick follows the workload, not the brand.
Why can't their prices be compared directly?
Kinsta bills in USD, flat, with annual terms priced at ten monthly payments. SiteGround's captured prices are GBP ex VAT from its UK site, where the introductory rate covers the first invoice of a 12-month prepaid term and renewals return to the regular rate. Any conversion rides an exchange rate that moves, over a VAT treatment that differs, on term structures that were never alike, so this page compares bill shapes and renewal costs, never converted totals.
Does SiteGround include staging on every plan?
No. StartUp lists no staging at all; it arrives as a GrowBig exclusive feature, and staging with Git comes in at GoGeek. SiteGround's own pages differ slightly here, since its full feature list shows staging without a per-plan split and the web hosting page ties it to tiers. Kinsta includes a staging environment on every account, at every price.
Do both hosts move a WordPress site in for free?
Yes. Kinsta's migrations are unlimited and carried out by its own migration team, stated with no downtime. SiteGround offers an automatic migrator for WordPress sites or a transfer by its experts with the site kept live throughout, and adds a free email migrator for the mail side.
What happens if a site exceeds its monthly visit allowance?
Neither audit records an answer. Kinsta states a visit allowance per tier but no overage, throttling or forced-upgrade policy; SiteGround marks its figures approximate and states none either. Ask both supports before a spike lands, because neither publishes the consequence in advance.