Pantheon vs SiteGround

Pantheon and SiteGround both host WordPress sites, and past that sentence they diverge quickly. Pantheon sells a platform built around how a development team works: sites in application containers, three environments per site from the first minute, changes travelling by Git, everything scriptable from a command line. SiteGround sells shared hosting with the sharp edges filed away: three tiers, one friendly panel per site, and the things a small business forgets to budget for, email, a domain, the move itself, inside the plan. Most buyers are never choosing between them. The ones who are should decide by workflow rather than price, because the price comparison is not available in any honest form.

A platform and a product line

Pantheon's bill has two axes. A workspace plan covers the team and the tooling: the Silver workspace is free and carries basic chat support, while the Gold workspace, at $500 per month checked November 2026, adds on-demand Multidev environments, automated updates, visual regression testing and 24/7 support. A site plan then attaches to each site, from a free sandbox through a Basic tier at $55 per month up a Performance ladder to custom-quoted Elite plans, and every one of them brings dev, test and live environments, Git-based version control, the Terminus CLI and a global CDN regardless of price. Two sandbox sites come free with Silver, and the boundary is drawn plainly: a paid site plan is required before any site goes live or connects a domain.

SiteGround's bill has one axis. Three shared tiers, StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek, are sized by an approximate monthly visit figure at roughly 10,000, 100,000 and 400,000, with unmetered data transfer throughout and unlimited websites from GrowBig upward. Site Tools gives every site its own panel to manage or hand over, staging arrives at GrowBig, Git joins it at GoGeek, and the included list runs to daily backups, a CDN, email accounts and a domain. The entry tier renews at £13.99 per month excluding VAT, checked October 2026, with £1.99 buying the first invoice of a prepaid 12-month term.

Dollars, pounds and the comparison this page will not make

The two price lists do not meet. Pantheon publishes in US dollars, checked November 2026; SiteGround's captured pages are its UK site's, in pounds excluding VAT, checked October 2026. A month sits between the check dates, and the billing models differ underneath the currencies: Pantheon's allowances step up 40% on annual terms, while SiteGround's headline numbers are introductory prices for a first prepaid invoice. Converting one into the other would manufacture precision these sources do not support, so no sentence here claims either host is cheaper. The audit table carries every figure with its currency and check date attached, which is where numbers between these two belong.

Two meters against one approximation

Pantheon counts traffic twice. Site Visits tracks unique visitors by IP address and user agent when they receive a 200-level or certain 300-level response, and Pages Served counts the requests the CMS itself generates; every plan states an allowance for both. Annual Performance and Elite plans include one month of overage protection, so an externally driven spike is absorbed once. What gets charged past that protection, and what happens on monthly billing, are not stated on the captured pages.

SiteGround's ceiling is a single approximate figure per tier, and the approximation is the whole policy: no overage rate, throttle or forced upgrade appears anywhere on its pages. Both hosts therefore leave the same half of the question unanswered while defining the metered half quite differently. Pantheon's metering is precise enough to model against analytics; SiteGround's is simple enough to ignore until it matters.

The Drupal lane

Drupal is the sharpest dividing line in this pair. Pantheon supports it as a first-class platform alongside WordPress, the full extension ecosystem included, running on the same environments and pipeline. For a Drupal build the decision makes itself, because the shortlist of hosts that treat the platform seriously is short enough that Pantheon lands on it by default.

SiteGround's captured pages name WordPress and offer a generic CMS installer through the setup wizard, with nothing Drupal-specific stated: no tooling, no workflow, no support claim. That absence is not the same as a refusal, but it is the whole of the evidence, and this site reports the evidence.

Support, migrations and the safety nets

Support runs in the opposite direction to tooling. SiteGround answers phone, chat and tickets around the clock on every plan, the cheapest included. Pantheon gives the free Silver workspace basic chat, and 24/7 chat, ticketing and phone arrive with the Gold workspace at $500 per month, with priority on-call reserved for the custom-quoted workspaces above. A team that escalates by voice gets that free on one side of this comparison and pays a workspace fee for it on the other.

The safety nets differ too. The move in to SiteGround is free, whether an automatic WordPress migrator does it or their staff do, and every plan carries a 30-day money-back guarantee. Pantheon states no free migration path at all; migrations sit under paid professional services, and no refund terms appear on its captured pages. Daily backups run on both, and both publish retention badly: Pantheon states one month or six without saying what decides which, and SiteGround states no period at all.

Where each one wins

Pantheon for teams whose week runs through Git and code review: environments per site from the free sandbox upward, Multidev for parallel branches at Gold, a CLI that scripts the platform, and unlimited team members on a workspace. It is the only side here with a stated home for Drupal, and the only one where a full build can be rehearsed before any money moves.

SiteGround for the buyer who wants a finished product rather than a platform to learn: 24/7 phone support from the entry tier, the move in handled free, email and a domain inside the plan, staging from GrowBig, and unlimited websites from that same tier for a growing portfolio of modest sites.

If the platform-versus-product question is still open, Cloudways vs Pantheon sets the managed cloud alternative against Pantheon's workflow, and Cloudways vs SiteGround does the same against SiteGround's tiers. The hosting comparison tool puts this pair side by side with every figure sourced, dated and left in its own currency.