The best Cloudways alternatives in 2026, with checked prices

Why people look for Cloudways alternatives

Cloudways made cloud hosting easy: pick a provider, pick a size, and get a server with WordPress, caching, backups and support. The trade-off is price, and it has moved up.

Cloudways raised its rates from April 1, 2023. Its 1 GB DigitalOcean server went from $10 to $11 a month, and the 1 GB Vultr and Linode servers went to $14. Today the Cloudways pricing page lists the smallest Flexible server, Micro, at $14 a month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB of memory, 25 GB of storage and 1 TB of transfer.

DigitalOcean’s own Droplet pricing lists a server of that size at $6 a month. The $8 gap pays for Cloudways’ management layer and support. Whether that is worth it depends on how much of that layer you use.

Other reasons people start looking:

• Cloudways offers five clouds: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and Google Cloud. Hetzner, Contabo and the European clouds are not on the list.
• Backups are mandatory, and offsite backup storage is billed at $0.033 per GB.
• Transfer over the included amount is billed per GB, at $0.12 on AWS and $0.10 to $0.17 on Google Cloud.
• The server sits in Cloudways’ account, not yours, so leaving means migrating every site.

Managed cloud hosting vs a control panel on your own cloud

This is the one difference that matters when you compare Cloudways with anything else.

Cloudways is managed cloud hosting. It rents the server from the cloud provider, sets it up, and sells it back to you with its management and support on top. You get one bill and one support team. You never see the provider’s price.

A control panel runs on your own cloud account. You open an account at Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr or another provider, and the panel creates and manages servers there. The provider bills you for the server at its list price. The panel bills you a separate, usually flat, fee for the software.

With a panel you get two bills instead of one, and you deal with the provider for billing. In return, the server is yours. If you cancel the panel, the server keeps running in your account. If you add servers, the panel fee often stays the same. If you want a cheaper provider, you can pick one.

If you are still deciding between hosting models in general, our guide to VPS vs shared vs managed hosting covers the wider picture.

Cloudways alternatives compared

Panel prices below are for the software only. You pay the server to your cloud provider on top. Prices were checked on each vendor’s pricing page in November 2026; check the linked page before you buy.

For a feature-by-feature view, see the side-by-side pages for Ploi, Laravel Forge, RunCloud, Coolify, xCloud and ServerAvatar.

Best Cloudways alternatives for WordPress

Most Cloudways customers run WordPress, so start here.

RunCloud is a PHP and WordPress panel. Its Essentials plan is $9 a month for one server, and backup storage is included in the plan. Atomic deploys and team seats sit on the $49 Business plan.

xCloud is WordPress-focused and free for your first server with up to 10 sites, then $5 per server per month. It is strong on staging, white-label reselling and alert channels. xCloud also sells managed servers from $5 a month, so it is the closest to Cloudways’ all-in-one model on this list.

ServerAvatar connects any VPS over SSH and runs PHP, WordPress and Node. Newbie is $12 a month after a $10 first month, for up to 5 servers. Its white-label and reseller tools suit agencies that rebrand hosting. Backup storage on its side is billed at $0.07 per GB a month.

Nuvlo creates servers in your own account on Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, UpCloud, Scaleway, Exoscale, AWS, Google Cloud or Contabo, or connects any Ubuntu server over SSH. Each WordPress site runs in its own containers with MariaDB and a Redis object cache, and backups go straight from the server to your own S3-compatible bucket. The Free plan covers one server and one site; Starter is €12 a month for up to 10 servers. It has no white-label option today.

Best Cloudways alternatives for Laravel, Node and Docker apps

If you used Cloudways for custom PHP or JavaScript apps, these fit better than a WordPress-first panel.

Laravel Forge is built by the Laravel team. Hobby is $12 a month with one server at your own provider, and Growth is $19 for unlimited servers. Support grows with the plan: community support on Hobby, a 24-hour response goal on Growth and 8 hours on the $39 Business plan, in business days. Forge also sells its own Laravel VPS, if you would rather not open a cloud account.

Ploi is a mature, PHP-first panel. It is free for one server and one site with 5 deploys a month. Basic is €8 a month for up to 5 servers, but backups and monitoring start on Pro at €13.

Coolify is open source. Self-hosting is free, and Coolify Cloud is $5 a month for two servers plus $3 for each extra one. It runs anything Docker can package and has preview deployments for pull requests. You trade some WordPress comfort for that flexibility.

Nuvlo also deploys Node apps from Git, with atomic releases and an automatic rollback when a release fails its health check.

What you actually save: a worked example

Panel fees are flat, so savings depend on how many servers you run. Here is the arithmetic for 1 GB servers, using the list prices above. Panels billed in euros are converted roughly, so treat the totals as estimates.

Two things stand out. For a single small site, a paid panel can cost the same as Cloudways or more, so only a free tier makes the switch pay off. With five servers, the gap is $20 to $30 a month, and it keeps growing with every server you add.

Backups change the sum too. On Cloudways, offsite backup storage is billed per GB. With a panel you pay your bucket provider directly. Choosing a cheaper cloud, such as Hetzner, can lower the server line further. Our guide to hosting WordPress on Hetzner walks through it.

Cloudways vs RunCloud and Cloudways vs Ploi

These two comparisons come up most, because RunCloud and Ploi are the panels Cloudways users try first.

Cloudways vs RunCloud: both target PHP and WordPress. Cloudways includes the server and 24/7 support in one price. RunCloud charges $9 for one server or $19 for many, and you pay the cloud provider separately. RunCloud wins on cost once you run more than a couple of servers. Cloudways wins if you want one bill and someone to call.

Cloudways vs Ploi: Ploi leans toward Laravel and PHP developers who deploy from Git. Its free plan is enough to test a single site on your own server. For production you will want backups and monitoring, which start on Ploi Pro at €13 a month. Cloudways includes backups on every server, but bills the storage.

Either way, you take on the cloud account. That means adding a payment method at the provider and keeping an eye on its bill. Nuvlo shows what each server costs at its provider apart from the Nuvlo plan; see track what your servers cost.

Who should stay on Cloudways

Moving is not the right call for everyone. Cloudways is still a good fit when:

• You want a human on live chat at any hour. Cloudways says a support engineer is available on every plan, around the clock. Panels tie support to the plan: Laravel Forge’s $12 Hobby plan, for example, gets community support only.
• You run one or two small sites and the price gap is a few dollars a month.
• You do not want a cloud account of your own, or a second bill to watch.
• Your clients expect a single managed host, and you would rather resell than administer servers.

With a panel, more of the server is your responsibility. The panel sets the server up, but you choose the provider, the size and when to upgrade. Our Ubuntu server security checklist shows what that involves.

How to move off Cloudways

The steps are the same whichever panel you pick.

1. Open an account at a cloud provider and create an API token. The panel uses it to create servers in your account.
2. Connect the token to your panel and create a server sized like your Cloudways one.
3. Copy each site. Most panels have a migration plugin or an SSH import; in Nuvlo, move a WordPress site with a plugin or over SSH.
4. Test the copy on a temporary address, then point the domain’s A record to the new server.
5. Keep the Cloudways server running until DNS has spread and the new site works, then delete it.

ImportantIf your site’s email runs through a service set up in your Cloudways account, move it to an email service of your own before you switch, or password and order emails can stop arriving.