For the past 18 months or so, I’ve relied on ManageWP to help me keep up with maintenance for my clients’ websites. (If you manage multiple WordPress sites and haven’t started using a similar service, you are truly missing out!) What used to take an hour or more each day – updating themes and plugins, making backups, running malware scans, etc. – became a matter of a few clicks. Life has been awesome.
Except I realized recently that I’ve paid ManageWP a LOT of money since I started using it. Even with low monthly fees relative to the number of sites I manage, I’ve spent close to $1,000 for the privilege of using ManageWP and that didn’t work well with my attempts at business budgeting. However, I also didn’t want to give up the ease of maintaining multiple sites from one place.
Then I discovered MainWP.
Much like InfiniteWP, which I’d looked at before, MainWP is self-hosted and doesn’t have monthly fees. Unlike InfiniteWP, however, MainWP’s premium add-ons are reasonably priced (InfiniteWP is outrageous if you didn’t get in on the lifetime all-access pass).
I decided to give MainWP a try and, despite being loyal to ManageWP for a long time, I canceled my ManageWP subscription the same day I installed MainWP on my server. A week later, I’ve decided I should review my decision in case it helps someone else (plus I’m a nerd and I love this kind of thing).
Here are the pros and cons of using both ManageWP and MainWP.
ManageWP: The Pros
A full list of features. Depending on the plan you choose, ManageWP offers a ton of features to help you manage multiple WordPress sites. One-click updates, backups, uptime monitoring, site cloning, and even SEO analysis are just some of the features offered. At the time I started using ManageWP, no competing service had the same features available.
No setup – just sign up and use. Since the ManageWP dashboard is hosted (securely) by ManageWP, there’s nothing to install other than the plugin for your client sites. When you add a site to ManageWP, you can install and activate the ManageWP plugin in a few clicks without leaving the ManageWP dashboard (requires entering admin login credentials).
Low pricing per site. The basic ManageWP plan is 70 cents per site per month, with the highest plan at $4.20 per site per month. If your clients pay you to manage their sites, the cost is very small compared to the time you save by managing everything from one central location.
White labeling. When I started using ManageWP, a few of my clients were utterly confused – I started getting emails asking, What’s this plugin for? Why did you install something new? With the option to white label the plugin (available only on the pricier business plan), I could give the plugin my company name, reducing panic on the client side (and making me look more professional in the process).
Content management. From your ManageWP dashboard, you can view and edit recent posts and comments for all your managed sites. Need to clean up databases or remove post revisions? No problem!
ManageWP: The Cons
Monthly pricing. The whole reason I left ManageWP is because of the monthly fees. While $55 a month (what I was paying at the time I closed my account) isn’t a huge sum, it just adds up over time. And as a business owner who shells out a lot of money each month for various services, it was one I couldn’t justify when there were other ways to accomplish the same tasks.
“Meh” support. I only had to contact ManageWP’s support a few times, and I always got the impression that their support team was…. not based in the US. I’m not inherently biased against anyone from other countries, but the language barrier made communication difficult at times. It was frustrating to explain something clearly and get a response that didn’t make sense.
Occasional bugginess. A few times, my white labeling randomly disappeared from client sites, and since I rarely logged into the actual dashboards, I didn’t know it had happened. (Saving the white label settings fixed the problem, but still.) Other times, sites would randomly disappear from the list and I had to add them again. Not a huge deal, but it was irritating.
Trouble with backups. Some of my clients have very old sites with tons of posts and images, which make for large backups. For those sites, I had to resort to my BFF BackupBuddy because ManageWP’s backups always failed no matter how I configured them. I didn’t mind, necessarily, but for what I was paying, backups should have worked. And I couldn’t troubleshoot because ManageWP hosts everything.
The client reports SUCK. One of the things I loved about ManageWP was the ability to send a report to each of my clients letting them know what tasks I completed every month. Except the stupid things rarely worked, the customization options weren’t great, and it ended up being more hassle than it was worth.
MainWP: The Pros
A full list of features. Like ManageWP, MainWP offers one-click updates, backups, cloning, uptime monitoring, SEO analysis, white labeling, etc. However, MainWP also offers extensions for things like spinning content across multiple sites (great for people who are managing their own sites in the same niche), storing and using code snippets, and integration with Piwik stats, with new extensions being released regularly. MainWP also offers API hooks for developers who want to create their own extensions.
Control. Since MainWP is installed on my server, I have full access to logs for troubleshooting any issues that might come up. I can also access MainWP on Github if I want to customize the plugins for my own use. MainWP’s transparency allows developers to contribute and help improve the service in ways that make sense for their needs, which is awesome.
Pricing. MainWP is free to download and use, with paid extensions to enhance its functionality. I needed to purchase 3 extensions at $18.99 each (you save a dollar if you pay with a credit card) to get the features I need, meaning I spent less than the cost of one month with ManageWP to get up and running. I don’t have to pay for features I don’t use and each extension I buy has lifetime support and updates.
White labeling that works. The white labeling extension was recently updated to allow white labeling of the entire WP dashboard, allowing me to rebrand my clients’ entire experience if I choose. The child plugin I installed on my client sites doesn’t lose my branding during updates, which was a problem with ManageWP at times. Overall, this part of MainWP has been great.
Auto updates. With MainWP, I can configure “trusted” plugin and theme updates that will update automatically across all my client sites with no intervention from me. While this option should be used with caution, there are some plugins that never cause problems and can be set on auto pilot with a few clicks, which saves me even more time.
MainWP: The Cons
Installation. Installing and configuring MainWP and the extensions I bought took a little over an hour. While I would assume that anyone managing multiple sites (especially for clients) could handle this, it did require some time and effort. The uptime monitoring extension in particular was a bear to set up and I had some difficulty getting it working.
Server load. As of right now, there is no way to control what time of day backups run. I’ve actually got backups running as I write this post, which is odd since it’s 9am. The server load jumps up considerably, slowing down my own sites, which is annoying. I could resolve this by setting up separate backups per site instead of saying “update ALL the sites every day” but who has time for that? Hoping this changes very soon.
Speaking of servers… If you use shared hosting, shame on you! you will likely not be able to use MainWP. I can’t see a shared host allowing the type of resource usage I’ve seen in a week of use on my own server. It’s not outrageous, but it does heat things up a little, especially when intensive tasks like backups are running.
No client reports. This wasn’t a deal-breaker for me since I wasn’t using ManageWP’s crappy reports anyway, but it would be nice to see this feature pop up as an extension sometime soon. I have a manual solution in place using Gravity Forms, but I can never remember everything I’ve done by the end of the month – I’d love to use MainWP to keep up with this for me. Edit: MainWP released a client reporting extension about a month after this post was published, and I’m now trying it out.
So Who’s the Winner?
For me, MainWP is definitely an improvement over ManageWP. I’m saving money, I can do the things I need to do, and I still save a ton of time managing sites for my clients. I don’t think ManageWP is a horrible service; it’s a great one! It just isn’t feasible for me when MainWP offers the same features with no monthly fee. Plus I’m a control freak and I like being able to see what’s going on under the hood.
MainWP’s website offers a handy comparison of its product compared to a number of similar services, including ManageWP, InfiniteWP, and iControl WP. While we can’t count on them to present a completely unbiased picture, the comparisons do show a number of features that are either more expensive or not offered by MainWP’s competitors.
Overall, I think MainWP is an excellent choice for designers, developers, and anyone else who needs to maintain multiple WordPress websites. If you have your own server and don’t want to pay monthly fees, yet find InfiniteWP’s extensions to be too expensive (like I did), check out MainWP for a cost-effective, feature rich solution that just works.
Are you using a service to manage multiple WP sites? Which one is your favorite? I’d love to hear from you!
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Christoph says
Hi Andrea, first we wanted to say thank you for the kind words we work very hard on making MainWP the best it can be.
We also wanted to take a second and point out that cron jobs can now be scheduled manually. What this means for you (and other users) is that you can now control the time your backups run instead of depending on the internal wp-cron scheduling, which as you can see sometimes runs during peak user engagement time. The help doc can be found here http://docs.mainwp.com/disable-wp-cron/ and please feel free to contact us if you need any additional help or information.
Christoph
Hi Christoph,
Thanks for stopping by, and thanks for that info re: scheduling cron jobs. I’d still prefer a way to schedule them within MainWP, but I’ll take what I can get for now. You guys have a great product and I’m glad someone sent me your way!
Craig Grella says
I had so many frustrations with ManageWP. Reports were wrong, analytics didn’t match google, backups were not reliable, restoring took an act of god to work, cloning not reliable…the list goes on and on. Support was terrible. Quick to respond but that was about it. Bugs galore - many that never got fixed. We left them over a year ago in favor of a system called XmarkPro, a server based system too. It was run by one person and it was even worse. That company folded. We switched over to IcontrolWP, which is very good, support is super quick to react, and it just works. We use that now and are very happy, but are experiencing increasing costs due to increasing client management. The one thing I really like about icontrolwp is that it does incremental backups, not full backups each time, so server load is really low. That’s one advantage over every other system.
I’ve also started using ithemes sync on a few small sites. It is reliable and works well, but not nearly as full-featured yet so we can’t roll it out across the board, but we’re watching it with excitement.
Thanks for that info, Craig! I didn’t know that re: the incremental backups; I’ll have to take a look at iControlWP again.
I’m waiting on iThemes Sync as well - I’m sure it will be great, but right now it just doesn’t offer enough features to make sense for what I need.
Thank you for the comparison Andrea. I have used infinitewp but yes the prices for the extensions are high. With ManageWP my main positive is the reporting because like you said, trying to remember every update, change made to a client site is frustrating. How can you tackle this with Gravity forms?
But I am going to try out MainWP, because any tool that can lower what we spend monthly is a big timesaver. Thank you again
Hi Donesia,
I set up a Gravity Form called client reports and published a private page with the form embedded - at the end of each month, I fill out the form for every client and it is set up to send the output (which I’ve customized with my logo, etc.) to the client via email. It’s pretty clunky and requires a lot of manual action on my part, like keeping up with what plugins were updated, but for now it’s the best solution I’ve got.
If you try MainWP, be sure to stop back in and let us know what you thought of it! I’m very pleased with it so far.
Rick says
Alas, I must (for the time being) still use shared hosting, so while the product review is nice (and helpful, good to know stuff), seeing as how I’m just getting back into the business after a ten-year break and don’t have a large enough client base to be able to afford my own server, one thing at a time. Good review, Andrea! Thanks!
Liz Schneider says
Most of my web clients have simple sites, definitely not power users. Wouldn’t it be the case that MainWP could be used on the shared hosting system I use for them if they aren’t large bandwidth sites?
Pam says
This post is very timely for me, and I thank you for writing it, especially the tip about using Gravity Forms to create the client reports.
A few days ago, I had the unfortunate experience of finding my ManageWP account downgraded to “FREE” without any warning, after their credit card processor failed to bill me. I was initially told by ManageWP “support” to go talk to their credit card processor, and that (and I quote) ” the mixup was not on our side” and if I repurchased a subscription all would be well again. Um, I don’t think so! I’ve been a paying customer since 2012.
I compared a few services and landed on MainWP (even though I am also a BackupBuddy BFF, Sync is not robust enough yet). Your article was spot on on, on all points and helped to reinforce that I did the best thing by switching to MainWP, and purchasing a few extensions.
In the interest of fairness I rattled enough cages at ManageWP, that someone reached out with an admission, an apology and a few free months, but it was too little, too late.
Sorry to hear about your experience, Pam! I had some wonkiness with ManageWP last year - I downgraded my account, then upgraded it again later, and I was still getting text messages with downtime alerts for sites I wasn’t managing anymore (even when I was on the plan that didn’t include those alerts). No one there could figure out why the glitch was happening and it was SUPER annoying not to have a way to turn them off.
Overall, I’ve been extremely pleased with MainWP. There were a few things I had trouble figuring out, but reading the documentation helped (who would’ve thought?) and I’ve received great, quick responses in the support forums. I have no regrets about switching away from ManageWP.
I do think ManageWP is trying hard to fix some of the issues and I believe they truly want to offer a great product, but saving that monthly fee has been worth the move away for me.
Christine Ferguson says
Hey Andrea - As someone who is still learning about web design and development, I would be interested in hearing why a shared hosting account is not a good choice for a developer and at what point a dedicated server (which I’m assuming is the next step up?) is more appropriate. Thanks!
Hi Christine,
I don’t recommend shared hosting for anyone - dev or not - simply because the resource limits, poor support, and over-filled servers aren’t an ideal environment. You can get a managed VPS, which is kind of in-between shared and dedicated, without spending a ton of money each month (though it’s definitely more than you’d pay for shared).
There are some good shared hosts out there; Siteground and Big Scoots are two that I’ve worked with on behalf of clients, and both provided great support experiences. But I don’t trust either one to remain awesome or not to sell out to a bigger company - cheap shared hosting is just dangerous all around, in my opinion. I’m extremely biased on the topic of hosting, though, so always do your own research, and if something works for you, don’t worry about what anyone else thinks!
Mara Alexander says
Whoa. You had me (as a fan) up until this comment. As an owner of a small Web Hosting company (and I’m a Developer myself), I take issue with your words, and painting an entire industry with a single brush. Yeah…wow. I’m purposefully not including my website in this comment, so it doesn’t come across as an advertisement.
I *do* agree that cheap shared hosting is dangerous, as well as unreliable. And I should note that the reason I expanded into hosting in the first place 11 years ago was because of experiences I had - on behalf of design/development clients - with shared hosting. TBH, I also came across plenty of bad dedicated server companies as well. I knew how it should be done, and I didn’t see it being done the right way…. so I expanded our company to do hosting as well.
Still, to make such a broad statement that ALL shared hosting is bad…. is frankly pretty short-sighted and just flat out wrong.
There are plenty who do it right, or even close to right. The thing is, the consumer has to know what they’re buying, and they have to know enough about what they’re buying (in this case hosting) to know what good support and proper server management *is*. Too often people will spend more time researching buying a .59 can of green beans than find out what they should be looking for in a web hosting company.
Beyond that, WordPress has some very specific resource requirements. You, as the Developer, can tweak it to both conserve on resources yet load the pages fast. It requires spending some time learning about what you’re doing.
I see too many WP owners load up with every crazy plugin imaginable, have no cache management, no performance tuning, and yet blame the hosting company when the thing crashes.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Mara. I ran a small hosting company as well for quite awhile, with just under 200 customers, and I still stand by my opinion that (in a general sense) shared hosting results in bad experiences. Let’s face it - if I’ve never had a website before, I’m not going to approach a small host with great customer service because I’ve never heard of that host. I’m either going to (1) go with whatever company I’ve heard about on TV or (2) go with whatever company comes up on page 1 when I search. Either way, I’m getting the same large, crappy hosts - GoDaddy, 1and1, Bluehost, etc. - with ancient, overloaded servers. But to me that exists in a totally different realm than the service I used to offer, and likely yours as well.
This wasn’t a post about web hosting, so I didn’t go into detail. But in general, I don’t recommend mainstream shared hosting to any of my clients. Then again, my clients have way too much traffic for shared hosting anyway, so it may be a difference in clientele and their needs. All the sites I develop load in under a second on my own servers, but if I have to move them to HostGator or Dreamhost, there’s little I can do other than tell the client where s/he can find better hosting.
I definitely agree with you that few people spend time researching before choosing a host, but most of the time I think they simply don’t know what questions to ask (or whether the answers they get are acceptable). But at least with a VPS, I can tweak enough settings to get a site loading reasonably quickly no matter who is hosting it. With shared hosting, that option doesn’t exist.
Apologies if I offended you, but one of the great things about blogging is the ability to share opinions. I appreciate you taking the time to share yours.
Mark says
I agree that shared hosting is generally something to stay away from if you want to run a business hosting client’s websites or want to do anything that’s more demanding and important.
However, a few hosts have been starting to offer a new type of shared hosting that utilizes a particular linux functionality that basically makes it impossible for any other website on the server to effect another. A couple hosts that do this are Web Faction and SiteGround. I know that Web Faction has info about this feature on their site somewhere.
Also, I’m going to try out MainWP. Currently a mostly happy ManageWP user.
Very good point re: hosts like SiteGround. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, those usually aren’t the ones people have heard of until they start out with a crappy host and go looking for something better. I’m interested to hear what you think of MainWP since you’re a ManageWP user as well! I’ve been pleased with it and don’t see any reason to go back to ManageWP.
Also, love your branding! Your site was really fun to look through. 🙂
Mark says
@Andrea Thank you very much! - I think we reached the limit of comment depth here. - This is the first time I’ve come across your website, so I’m looking forward to poking around as well.
Hopefully more and more web hosts will adopt this functionality to fully separate shared accounts.
I have not yet setup MainWP, but I will try to soon. Then I’ll let you know what I think 🙂
My two main concerns with MainWP (I think I just made a pun) are any security issues since it’s self hosted, and server load. As for security, I wonder if I should install an SSL for it or if that’s not necessary. As for the server, I have a cloud account (vps) at SiteGround in fact, so I hope there’s no issue with the load MainWP could present.
Thanks again!
THREAD ALL THE COMMENTS!
I have a wildcard SSL cert, so I put mine on a subdomain, but there’s no front end for anyone to access so it shouldn’t be a problem. *knocks on wood* I don’t think you’d run into any issues on a VPS, though I will say I got an out of memory error a couple times while I was on your site, so it may be a bit underpowered for your traffic.
Mark says
Thanks for letting me know. I’ve seen that error on my site before, and it’s output by iThemes Security. If I disable the plugin, no error outputs, and I don’t get a lot of traffic to my site actually. I’ve asked SiteGround, and they upped the memory, but it’s still occurring. I’ll have to take another look. I guess that was totally off topic now 😀
Jared Pomranky says
Andrea,
Thanks for the breakdown. I’ve been waiting for a few months to pull the trigger on MainWP hoping that they would work out a few kinks and release some new functionality. It looks like they have done that and this review was really helpful as I’m currently on ManageWP. The issues with mwp backups really irritate me on bigger websites and I have had countless issues with websites dropping and not being able to be re-added.
I guess I didn’t know that they allow people to create extensions for MainWP. That’s definitely a plus as I can tailor it to exactly what I want using one of my developers.
For the cleanup portion of deleting revisions, do you know if MainWP allows you to set a number that are safe? i.e. If you set the number to 5, only revisions greater than 5 would be deleted. I found that was a nice option with ManageWP because while excessive revisions do need to be cleaned up, they’re still nice to have.
In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that a colleague of mine had issues with MainWP’s backups and just went back to ManageWP (though she had issues with the backups there as well). Personally, I’ve only had a few sites where backups don’t complete every time, and I’m usually able to go in and run a manual one when that happens. Overall, I find the backups to be far more reliable and the reporting when one doesn’t complete is immediate - with ManageWP, half the time I didn’t even realize the backup had failed unless I checked Dropbox and didn’t see the files there.
As for the cleanup, MainWP currently does not allow you to choose a number of revisions to keep. That’s something I do miss from ManageWP, though I’ve got most of mine set to delete every 3 days (assuming that any post problems would surely be addressed by the time 3 days have passed). One client in particular schedules posts about a week out, so hers only delete every 10 days.
Liz Schneider says
Andrea,
So you use the Backups on MainWP rather than your BFF BackupBuddy?
I’m considering the purchase of BackupBuddy, not realizing that the backup plugin I had was only backing up the database and not into a form that I could easily restore if needed.
I actually use both - I’m kind of paranoid when it comes to backups, so I have multiple backup plugins sending files to multiple locations. I recently invested in the BackupBuddy Gold license; it’s definitely my favorite of all and one of the most useful plugins I’ve ever purchased.
Liz Schneider says
Have you found any conflict with the iThemes plugins and MainWP (I am seeing an error message regarding iThemes Security and MainWP , though one post says that the issue is not really valid and they just keep the message up there)
I did read about the conflict - basically if you’ve added a site to MainWP with your login info, then you use iThemes Security to change the “admin” user, it won’t be able to connect. But all you would have to do is edit the login information on the MainWP side and click the reconnect link. None of my clients use “admin” as their login so we haven’t run into that (plus most of them are using Wordfence).
David says
Thanks for the writeup. I had installed InfiniteWP back when it was really new but never got in on their lifetime plan. Now looking at their extension pricing, I’m looking for something else. MainWP looks pretty cool and the pricing is far more reasonable.
Also, I noticed they now have a client report extension:
http://extensions.mainwp.com/product/mainwp-client-reports-extension/
So there’s one con that can hopefully be nixed from the list 😀
Good call re: the reporting extension - I bought it on the day of release but haven’t had time to try it yet, but I’ll be updating the post once I test it out.
sanjay says
Nice review, and perfect timing btw! I was about to look for a better management for my Clients and didn’t want to pay monthly fee for ManageWP. I saw ithemes sync and will give it a go, hopefully everything will work out 🙂 Too bad most of my Clients are on shared hosting.
Hi Sanjay,
It’s okay if your clients use shared hosting - you just wouldn’t want to install the MainWP dashboard (where you actually go to manage client sites) on a shared host. I think iThemes Sync will eventually be a contender, but right now it just doesn’t have enough features. Interested to hear what you think of it!
Jon Schroeder says
Andrea, just wanted to check in on MainWP’s backups. I’m noticing that when I start a backup, it’s not actually backing anything up (I’m backing up to S3, trying to do a backup across about 70 sites, and the first 10-15 came through just fine, but my server is acting a bit slow and none of the rest of the backups are in my S3 bucket).
Have you experienced any of this behavior? I’ll probably dig into it further, but a bit disappointed so far. The largest sites on my account are roughly 1.2GB, which is a lot, but I’ve seen those complete just fine when doing the backups manually through MainWP (just not when the job is scheduled).
I’m getting this error a lot in my log as well: “WordPress database error Row size too large”
I did have an issue awhile back where backups were hanging on one site - none of the ones after that completed. Once I removed the backup schedule for that particular site, the rest were able to finish with no problems.
Since you’re getting an error, I would suggest posting in the MainWP forum. They’ve been very responsive in my experience and I was able to get a fix for the issue I was having.
Mark says
I’m back to update my opinions on MainWP now that I’ve used it for a couple months.
I really like being able to host my own maintenance app and I do find it easy to use, but there’s a few things I wish were different.
The biggest issue I have is that I have to stay on top of keeping my installed extensions up to date. For example, I bought a handful of extensions such as remote backups and maintenance. These were purchased and then downloaded and installed. But when MainWP releases a new version of an extension, they email me and I have to login to their site and download the newest version from my account page and install it again in order to update it. That becomes tedious when you have a lot of extensions, not to mention I may not always be so prompt to update them. That’s bad if there are bug fixes in the latest update.
I also miss certain features that ManageWP had, that MainWP does not. Most notably is in the maintenance extension where I’m able to delete auto saved post drafts, spam comments, clean the database, etc. In MainWP it’s just a checkbox to select which action to take and then hit go. I don’t get any data telling me how many drafts each site has or how many spam comments there are. I loved being able to see just how much I cleaned up using ManageWP. But not in MainWP.
I also had a weird experience where one of my managed sites suddenly stopped pulling in accurate update numbers. I would sync all my sites, and it would tell me there’s only two plugins that need updating for this particular site, when in fact if I visited the site’s admin page I saw there were six updates available. Plus some other inconsistencies with the MainWP child plugin somehow no longer being detected on a site even when I know it’s activated. These issues were fixed by simply reinstalling the child plugin on the problem sites, but that’s a pain and I’d prefer not to have to deal with such issues.
I’m sure a lot of this stuff can either be improved if the extension developer wants to do so, in terms of adding new features. Also, in the future I’m sure the plugin itself will become more reliable.
For me, the low cost of using MainWP is the primary draw, however in the future if I have the income to support it, I can certainly see myself moving back to ManageWP and paying for the higher level service.
Nel says
MainWP is great but it has a big issue that’s if use it to backup a site, than next time you restore or move the site to other server, you gonna need rely on it. Because it wasn’t backup a regular type of database file. So. you can’t restore the site’s database file by manual in phpMyAdmin and this is the reason I gave up to use the MainWP.
I use MainWP for extra database backups only, since I use BlogVault for full site and database backups. In looking at the MainWP backups, though, they are zipped SQL files, which are exactly what you need to restore in phpMyAdmin. So I’m a little confused.
Nel says
Ok, maybe it’s only happened on me. But I think maybe you can try to restore the database file form MainWP backups through phpMyAdmin one time.
Graham says
I love MainWP BUT!!!! I use updraft plus for my backups. More flexible, offsite copying and I can schedule frequency, timing and what to backup. Also spreads the resource load.
I haven’t tried Updraft Plus yet but I’ve heard great things. BlogVault is my weapon of choice, but I agree that MainWP’s backups still leave a bit to be desired when it comes to performance.
Miguel says
HI, great review. I’ve had MainWP on Lunarpage’s shared server, and it occasionally did eat up my resources and everything went offline row while. But besides that, its perfect.
I do have one technical question, since it does consume a lot of resources, and it put my other websites down, I imagine that if I have mainwp on a server by itself, it won’t affect my other sites right?
Thanks.
You’re correct - you could put your MainWP install on its own server and it would be completely separate from your other sites. Another option (which I’ve switched to recently) is a local WordPress install. I love the fact that it’s more secure since no one outside my home network can access the site, and it doesn’t use resources on my server because it’s not on the server. So that’s a thought!
David Waumsley says
Andrea, thank you for this great post.
I have just started up with MainWP and It never crossed my mind that I could run it locally. Just how clever are you! Are you still doing this and are the any problems with it? My broadband connection is often very wobbly!
Actually I ended up moving my MainWP install to my server - I have a few sites with SSL, and MainWP had a hard time connecting to them from a local install. That’s been quite awhile back and I’m not sure whether the issue has been resolved or not. It’s definitely worth a try! Other than that issue, I loved having it available locally.
David Waumsley says
Thanks so much Andrea. I’m really excited about MainWP. The present bundle deal is so good it would have been rude not to take it. Now I’m like a kid in sweetshop.
Oh, did you get the huge bundle with all the extensions? That didn’t exist at the time that I switched from ManageWP but I eyeball it every now and then.
Nemanja Aleksic says
Nemanja from ManageWP here, thanks for an in-depth comparison. We took this review to heart and put a lot of effort into fixing our weak points.
The backup has always been the focus of our development efforts, and we’re quite happy how it’s evolved over time, especially in the past six months - we’re proud of our baby since it’s an in-house project we’ve been working on from scratch. Our particularly proud moment was when we dropped reliance on cron jobs for scheduled backups, but there are still a lot of great ideas floating around our office that will help our backups handle even larger sites and provide an even more consistent experience.
The client report feature upgrade is another thing our users keep requesting. We’ve figured out what we need to do to give it the funk it needs to sweep their clients off their feet, but it requires a lot of code upgrades that will come with the new ManageWP dashboard that’s soon getting into the beta stage. In the meantime we’re polling our users and making sure the specs are according to our their needs.
The only thing I cannot agree with you is the quality of support: It’s always been one of our strongest points, with a 30 minute average response time and a 57% first answer resolution. These are the people you want in your corner when things take a wrong turn (which they inevitably do in the world of WordPress :D). We did, however, beef up our support team to handle the increase in the number of user base (we’ve passed the 250.000 mark for websites managed through ManageWP and the million download mark on WordPress.org, yay!) and we’ve emphasized language skills as well as technical skills in our hiring efforts (two of our latest hires are language majors). We’ve also built up on this further by getting everyone involved in support, from sales to our CEO, and we’re also planning to take things to the next level with chat support.
I wish you the very best in your future endeavors and I hope you’ll give our service another shot at some point in the future, even if it’s only to reaffirm your faith in MainWP 🙂
Nemanja
Hi Nemanja,
Thanks for stopping by! I appreciate the updates and look forward to taking a peek at the new dashboard when it’s available. I’m big fan of MainWP but I didn’t hate ManageWP at all - I still think it’s a great service and an excellent choice for those who are bringing in enough maintenance fees from clients to cover the cost. In my case, I have narrowed down the number of maintenance clients I work with, so I couldn’t justify it, but when I had lots and lots of them, ManageWP was a no brainer.
If you think of it, ping me on Twitter when the new dashboard is available so I can check it out! I’d love to write an updated posts since it sounds like both services are constantly working on improvements. 🙂
Nemanja says
Will do! 🙂
Nice comparison Andrea. I have used ManageWP for over 2 years and then changed to InfiniteWP due to cost. I do not use a lot of extra features but only for updates. So, it was not a huge issue as I saved at least a couple of hundred dollars a year. Anyways, I was using ManageWP basic for 50 site license and there were hardly many features there. InfiniteWP has been working well for me till now but I am not sure how it connects to the client websites. Today saw this MainWP which looks to be another good option. In both ManageWP and InfiniteWP, the password is not required for adding the sites. A unique code is generated and we need to use that code only once while adding the site. Does MainWP need the password to be used or such unique codes are used there too. Is the wordpress username and password of the network sites stored inside MainWP.
One line that got my interest in MainWP is mentioned in their website:
Won’t Google or my competitors be able to track my sites and know I am using MainWP?
The MainWP plugin contains Network Discovery protection which hides the MainWP Child plugin folder makes it virtually impossible for anyone to know your using MainWP on your Child sites.
So, does it mean that using InfiniteWP or ManageWP let the search engines or competitors detect the sites I added there. Or it is the same case there too. The reason I am asking is because there seems to be a lot of redirection using InfiniteWP and ManageWP. Does it also redirect in MainWP. If not how does it work. And are there a list of sites in the dashboard once I login as is the case with ManageWP and InfiniteWP.
Hi David,
MainWP doesn’t require you to enter a password for the sites you add. Once you’ve added the child plugin to the sites you want to manage and added each site in your MainWP dashboard, the sites are connected. I’m not sure I understand the questions re: tracking your sites and redirecting - you might reach out to each provider directly as they will be the best ones to explain exactly how each system works.
Thank you for the clarification Andrea. I will probably try MainWP in the next few days. I would start with a few sites to check how it goes before transferring all the sites to MainWP. The best part about MainWP usage is that I hardly need to change anything when shifting to MainWP as they are all WordPress plugins. So, I would just install MainWP plugins and add the sites. So, testing them should work out even easier. As I grow in confidence, I would probably add more sites to MainWP and remove them from ManageWP.
Rawang Blogger says
Hi Andrea,
I was looking at those 2 platform when I decided to find a review before I jump in. Glad to find your post.
I agree with most comments above. I manage several clients site and find it hard to monitor every single one of them, updating the sites manually etc.
I was almost sold to ManageWP since it does not require a lot of work compare to MainWP but after reading your review I think I’m gonna use MainWP.
Do you have any other platform or suggestion? There is also EasyBlogNetworks.com I’m considering. I don’t really care about blog network but like MainWP and ManageWP, they also provides hosting.
Can you take a look at their service?
TQ
Hi TQ,
I’m not familiar with Easy Blog Networks, but in looking around the site, it seems they offer a totally different solution vs. something like MainWP or ManageWP. I’ve looked at several other solutions (CMS Commander, InfiniteWP, etc.) but MainWP has been the best value for me personally. I’m still using it and loving it, especially with a recent update that makes some vast improvements to the way backups are handled.
One of the good things about each platform is the ability to try it out before you commit - I would suggest trying different ones to get a feel for what works best for you. 🙂
I’m still a bit confused on why shared hosting is bad for small clients and if mainwp will work on shared hosted sites. I have about 5 clients right now and am just starting out. They are under my shared hosting platform through godaddy and i’ve never experienced any issues. Thoughts would be highly welcomed.
MainWP will work fine for sites that are hosted on a shared server, but the MainWP dashboard itself should probably be hosted on a VPS or dedicated server. Certain tasks use considerable resources while running, so I could see shared hosts taking issue with that as it would affect other sites on the server.
Graham says
I’ve been using MainWP since it came out. I have used it with all the free extensions on shared hosting with no issues - it sometimes takes several goes to update everything as it seems to find more to do with each update (Update 10 items, refresh, 2 more to update, update, refresh, 1 more to update). But NO issues at all.
I recently purchased the extension pack and run a few of the more useful ones with no problem.
However, as Andrea points out, SOME of the extensions will be resource hungry. It all depends on how intensively you use it. For the basics - No worries on shared.
I’m off to a VPS for my sites and then I will up the use of MainWP extensions.
David Waumsley says
Andrea, seems I used up the space on our thread, but yes, I got the MainWP bundle. Huge isn’t it, and I can’t image anyone using all the extensions. I like that those who purchased early have points towards the bundle and it includes all future extensions.
Obviously the deal will end or there will be no revenue kept the project supported. I have to say that as much as a like a lifetime deal - it worries me a little too.
I’m sure they’ll change the pricing structure eventually, but for right now it’s an amazing deal. I only bought a couple of extensions since I don’t need many, but I’m sure they’ll roll out some new ones that I can’t live without. Their support has been absolutely fantastic and I can’t wait to see what’s coming next!
Oshik says
Thanks. Just started thinking about using one of them and your post helped me a lot.
You’re very welcome! Let us know which one you choose and how you like it! 🙂