Staxly

Cloudways vs CircleCI

Managed cloud hosting across DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud
vs. Fast, configurable CI/CD with Docker, ARM, GPU runners and orbs

Try Cloudways (free trial) ↗CircleCI website ↗

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
Try Cloudways (free trial) ↗

CircleCI

Free
$0. 6,000 build minutes/mo (Linux medium). 30 users. Unlimited projects.
Free
Performance
$15/mo (3 users). Credit-based: 80K-240K credits/mo bundles. More concurrency.
$15/mo
Scale
$2,000/mo+ (custom). High concurrency, self-hosted runner support, SSO.
$2000/mo
CircleCI Server
Custom. On-prem deployment of CircleCI. Enterprise only.
Custom
CircleCI website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing auto-free-trial on Cloudways vs free on CircleCI.

MetricCloudwaysCircleCI
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.

CircleCI · 17 features

  • ARM + GPU Runners — ARM64 + T4 GPU resource classes.
  • .circleci/config.yml — Single source of truth (YAML 2.1).
  • Contexts — Org-scoped shared env vars.
  • Deploy Markers — Track deployments + rollback.
  • Docker Layer Caching — Reuse Docker layers.
  • Dynamic Config — Generate config based on changed paths.
  • Manual Approval — Gate workflows with manual step.
  • Matrix Jobs — Parameterized parallel jobs.
  • Orbs — Packaged reusable jobs + commands.
  • Parallelism — Split a job across N parallel containers.
  • Rerun with SSH — SSH into failed job.
  • Restricted Contexts — RBAC for secrets.
  • Scheduled Pipelines — Cron-triggered runs.
  • Self-Hosted Runners — On your infra.
  • Test Insights — Flaky test detection + trends.
  • Test Splitting — By timings, filenames, classnames.
  • Workflows (DAG) — Fan out, fan in, conditional.

Developer interfaces

KindCloudwaysCircleCI
CLI—circleci CLI
RESTCloudways APICircleCI REST API v2
OTHERCloudways Platform (web UI), Server SSH Access, SFTP.circleci/config.yml, CircleCI Orbs Registry, CircleCI Webhooks, CircleCI Web UI, Self-Hosted Runner
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Cloudways and CircleCI 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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