Atlassian Bitbucket vs. Pantheon vs. WP Engine

As a team we need to push code into the repo on daily basis, Bitbucket has proven that is a reliable and secure server to save and get the code available in no time. The administration part is really easy and there's an extra tool for every developer profile either if you want to use the console or a GUI like Sourcetree.

Incentivized

Pantheon is excellent for medium-large websites that require high availability and a managed workflow. It would be inappropriate for small websites because of the cost or for situations where more control of the environment is appropriate. We find it useful because we rarely do anything outside of the Drupal application.

Incentivized

I am an enterprise user of WordPress and host over 7000 sites with WPEngine. Areas that I think they are well suited for include customers that need enterprise-level support and uptime and have more complex needs than a simple blog. They also manage scale well with a variety of isolated install options that you can scale up or down depending on your contract needs. They also provide premier support for enterprises and have highly knowledgable Technical Account Managers that provide a significant value add. If I were to look at where it isn't as appropriate for usage I would focus on the low-end needs and say while they do support small sites, there are options out there for cheaper hosting that lack the support a WPEngine gives you.

Incentivized

• Very easy to integrate with other DevOps tools like Jenkins and with project/workflow management tools like JIRA.
• Very efficient in managing security and compliance standards for code, especially during pull requests, merge requests, branching, etc.
• Very robust in performance, especially the cloud and datacenter versions hardly hit any performance issues and supports more than 2000+ developers in my company.

Incentivized

• Effective use of our codebase deployment and implementation.
• The dashboard functionality and general stability and security are excellent.
• The server is quite consistent, and if you need assistance from the support team, they are very quick to respond.
• Automatic updates let me ensure that my customers have safe websites without increasing my own expense.
• The team offers excellent assistance and help for chat.

Incentivized

• I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back.
• The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems.
• They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate.

Incentivized

• The code management UI is a bit rough around the edges and difficult to work with.
• BitBucket does not have the same simplified PR management tools as other competitors.
• It's not as easy to integrate 3rd party apps as other competitors.

Incentivized

• Pricing structure has too large of a jump between Basic and Performance plans
• Have run into issues with prescribed WP updates not working through dashboard and having to do manually.
• Pantheon site dashboard occasionally is unavailable (the site is never affected though)

Incentivized

• I'd like to see WP Engine offer their own monitoring solution. When I say monitoring, I mean specific use cases that may end up being something you could script. This would keep customers from having to pay for additional services like Pingdom, New Relic, etc.
• I would like to see some proactive analysis done by WP Engine on their customer sites - at least on their home pages, and offer up suggestions. This kind of goes along with the other example.
• Finally, it would be nice to see a "lighter" offering, perhaps a plan that costs $49 for those who want to host only a few sites, or even 1 site.

Incentivized

All products have room for improvement. The system improves over time with better and better integrations and I look forward to even more features without paying extra! The system has increased transparency across my organization and with this transparency comes increased throughput on projects. I don't think I can go back to any other system and we are definitely married to this product.

Incentivized

The environment is stable and we have not had any issues/downtime. The annual cost is reasonable.

Incentivized

I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers.

The architecture of Bitbucket makes it more easily scalable than other source code management repositories. Also, administration and maintaining the instance is very easy. It integrates with JIRA and other CI/CD applications which makes it more useful to reduce the efforts. It supports multiple plugins and those bring a lot of extra functionality. It increases the overall efficiency and usefulness of Bitbucket.

Incentivized

Pantheon is an easy system, especially to the users with previous experience with other similar platform and the interface is clear enough to easily understand how things operates. On the Cloud deployment everything also works effectively and the technical team from Pantheon community are very helpful on providing the necessary assistant to their customers.

Incentivized

From the onboarding and in the days afterward, it was very easy to get into the platform and begin creating important websites and configuring user options. The interface is easy to navigate, and the platform pages load quickly. Since the platform is built for Word plus press, it has features including backup, staging, maintenance mode, and direct WP-Admin login to make configuration and site management faster. We have never had any issues on the billing side of the account.

Incentivized

The customer support provided by Atlassian (Bitbucket's parent company that also makes Jira, Confluence, etc.) is very helpful. They seem to be very concerned about any issues reported with their products and even just questions about functionality. They are constantly improving the products with new features in nearly every release. Plus they have a plethora of online documentation to reference.

Incentivized

Even tier 1 Pantheon chat and ticket support are knowledgeable, competent, and useful. They routinely understand and promptly resolve urgent, complex, and/or unusual issues that other hosts need to escalate to tier 2 or tier 3 support personnel. I honestly can't think of a truly negative or disappointing support experience in the years I've used Pantheon hosting for client websites.

Incentivized

Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers.

Incentivized

Once the environments were up and running, the implementation was easy to synchronize with latest data prior to switchover.

Incentivized

For the features we were looking at, Bitbucket, GitHub and GitLab were all at par and were in a similar price range. We found that GitHub was the most full featured should we need to scale very quickly. GitLab was at par with GitHub for our future needs, but GitHub was a more familiar tool compared to GitLab. Bitbucket won out because of its close integration with Jira and being in the Atlassian family. It was also cheaper than GitHub. As we started with Jira, Bitbucket addition became a natural next step for us. We really liked Bitbucket and stayed with it but we do know we have great options in the form of GitHub and GitLab should we need to scale fast.

Incentivized

Although it may seem a good fit for a company that needs extra control over the deployment process and development process, for a firm that is mainly concentrating on SEO, it would be an overkill. Pantheon provides that sweet automation that allows us to shed some weight on development and focus on our business activities.

Incentivized

While we still use GoDaddy for some services, WP Engine definitely has been a major upgrade for our WordPress hosting. In addition to faster load speeds, WP Engine has been more adept at allowing us to manage a high number of websites without straining the system. We have never used Network Solutions for our own hosting needs, but when we do interact with them on behalf of our clients, their systems always seem to be clunky and hard to use, and they often overcharge customers by selling them products they do not need.

Incentivized

• It's allowed for a lot of automation in terms of development workflows. It lets us pursue CI/CD approaches and get releases out faster
• It has let us get our infrastructure configuration into VCS, which further improves our automation abilities.
• It has aided in keeping track of changes, and allows us to keep workflows organized so we can track the status of development

Incentivized

• Pantheon allows ordinary sites to excel esp if there is consistent development going on behind the scenes.
• Website management is super easy and the hosting fee gets paid off as you save on developer hours.
• Expensive for those who are not consistently developing on the platform, there are other options out there at better price points.

Incentivized

• WP Engine reduces our time investment and upkeep costs which increases our margins.
• WP Engine simplifies site management with a built-in development server, which saves us headaches.
• WP Engine itself is positioned as a premium service, which allows us to use their branding as a tool to close sales.

Incentivized