Cloudways vs Buildkite
Managed cloud hosting across DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud
vs. Hybrid CI/CD — your compute, their orchestration. Built for scale.
Pricing tiers
Cloudways
Autonomous — Free Trial
3-day free trial. 1 server, 20 GB disk, 150 GB bandwidth.
Free
Flexible — DO Micro
DigitalOcean-backed. 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB storage, 2 TB bandwidth. Starting tier.
$11/mo
Flexible — DO Medium
4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB, 5 TB bandwidth.
$88/mo
Autonomous — Growth
WordPress-optimized autoscaling. 1 baseline server, 20 GB disk, 150 GB bandwidth.
$100/mo
Autonomous — Scale
2 baseline servers, 50 GB disk, 250 GB bandwidth.
$200/mo
Flexible — DO 8XL
24 vCPU, 128 GB RAM, 2.56 TB storage, 11 TB bandwidth.
$342/mo
Autonomous — Plus
3 baseline servers, 100 GB disk, 1 TB bandwidth.
$400/mo
Enterprise
Custom autoscale, volume pricing.
Custom
Buildkite
Free (Developer)
$0. Unlimited jobs on self-hosted agents. 10K jobs/mo on Buildkite Hosted.
Free
Buildkite Hosted (usage)
Per-minute on Buildkite-hosted agents. $0.002/min Linux baseline.
$0/mo
Pro
$20/user/mo. SSO. Audit log. Support. Unlimited self-hosted.
$20/mo
Enterprise
Custom. SAML, RBAC, audit SLA, dedicated support.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing auto-free-trial on Cloudways vs free on Buildkite.
| Metric | Cloudways | Buildkite |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Cloudways · 17 features
- Autonomous (WordPress) — Fully managed WordPress with autoscaling.
- Backups — Automated daily + on-demand. Retention configurable.
- Bot Protection — Cloudflare Enterprise bot filtering add-on.
- Bot Scaler — Autonomous: auto-scale based on traffic patterns.
- Breeze (WP cache plugin) — In-house WordPress caching plugin.
- CloudwaysCDN — Built-in CDN add-on (StackPath-backed).
- Flexible Plans — BYO-sized servers on any of 5 providers. Full control over stack.
- Free Let's Encrypt SSL — 1-click cert install + auto-renewal.
- Free Migration — 1 free app migration per plan. Cloudways team moves your site.
- Horizontal Scaling — Auto-scale app servers (Autonomous plans).
- Malware Protection — Add-on ($4/app/month). Scan + clean.
- Object Cache Pro — Included on certain plans. Redis-backed object cache for WP.
- SafeUpdates — Automated WordPress plugin/theme updates with rollback.
- Staging Environments — 1-click staging clones with push-to-live.
- Team Collaboration — Invite team members with granular role permissions.
- Thunderstack (Optimized) — Apache + Nginx + Varnish + Redis + Memcached preconfigured for speed.
- Vertical Scaling — Resize server specs without migration.
Buildkite · 17 features
- Agent Queues — Route jobs to specific agents by tag.
- Annotations — Rich Markdown in build UI.
- Artifacts — Upload + download build artifacts.
- Audit Log — Enterprise audit.
- Automatic Cancel — Cancel stale builds on new push.
- Automatic + Manual Retries — Configurable retry semantics.
- Buildkite Hosted Agents — Managed agents (opt-in).
- Dynamic Pipelines — Generate YAML in a command step.
- input Step — Block for user input.
- Parallelism — Parallel step scaling with BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB.
- Pipelines — YAML + optional dynamic upload.
- Plugins — Agent-level lifecycle hooks.
- Secrets (Vault) — Integrate with HashiCorp Vault, SSM.
- Teams + RBAC — Enterprise permissions.
- Test Engine — Flaky test + timing insights.
- trigger Step — Fire another pipeline.
- wait Step — Sync point in pipeline.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Cloudways | Buildkite |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | bk (Buildkite CLI) |
| REST | Cloudways API | Buildkite REST API |
| GRAPHQL | — | Buildkite GraphQL API |
| OTHER | Cloudways Platform (web UI), Server SSH Access, SFTP | Buildkite Agent, Buildkite Dashboard, Buildkite Plugins, pipeline.yml |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Cloudways and Buildkite may be affiliate links — Staxly may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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