Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg launched a fierce attack on rivals this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer on WordPress.”
Mullenweg criticized the company, which has been commercializing the open-source WordPress project since 2010, for taking profits without giving much in return, while disabling key features that made WordPress a powerful platform in the first place.
For context, WordPress powers more than 40% of the web, and while individuals and companies can take the open-source project and run their own websites, several companies have sprung up selling hosting services and technical expertise, including Automattic, which Mullenweg founded in 2005 to monetize a project he had created two years earlier. WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting provider that has raised nearly $300 million in funding over its 14-year history, most of it from private equity firm Silver Lake, which invested $250 million in 2018.
Speaking at WordCamp US 2024, a WordPress-focused conference in Portland, Oregon, this week, Mullenweg was not shy about criticizing WP Engine. On stage, Mullenweg read a post he had just published on his personal blog, in which he pointed to the distinct “Five Points for the Future” investment commitments made by Automattic and WP Engine, the former contributing 3,900 hours per week, while the latter contributed just 40 hours.
While he acknowledges that these figures are just “proxies” and may not be completely accurate, Mullenweg says the difference in contributions is notable, since Automattic and WP Engine are “roughly the same size, with $500 million in revenue.”
Mullenweg has criticized at least one other popular web host in the past, accusing GoDaddy of profiting from open source projects without giving anything meaningful back. More specifically, he called GoDaddy a “parasitic company” and “an existential threat to the future of WordPress.”
Mullenweg’s latest attack extends his criticism beyond WP Engine to the company’s major investors.
“The company (WP Engine) is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management,” Mullenweg said. “Silver Lake doesn’t care about your open source ideals, they just want capital gains. So now is the time for me to ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with their wallets. Who are you going to give your money to? Someone who will grow the ecosystem, or someone who will crush all the value until the ecosystem withers?”
When an audience member later asked Mullenweg to clarify whether he was asking WordPress users to boycott WP Engine, he said he hoped all WP Engine customers would watch his presentation and think about their next steps when it came time to renew their contracts.
“There are other really hungry hosts out there—Hostinger, Bluehost Cloud, Pressable—who want to get your business,” Mullenweg said. “Even if you switch to someone else, you get faster performance, and migrations are easier than ever. That’s part of the idea of data liberation. It takes a day to migrate a site to something else, and if you’re a current WP Engine customer, you might want to think about it when your contract comes up for renewal.”
‘Cancer of WordPress’
In response to the uproar following the talk, Mullenweg published a follow-up blog post in which he called WP Engine a “cancer” on WordPress. “It’s important to remember that cancer will spread if left unchecked,” he wrote. “WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others can look at and think is okay to replicate.”
Mullenweg said WP Engine is profiting from the confusion between the WordPress project and WP Engine as a commercial service company.
“The one thing that absolutely needs to be said and repeated is that WP Engine is not WordPress,” Mullenweg wrote. “Even my mother was confused and thought WP Engine was the official one. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and all their promises to customers are that they offer WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting from the confusion.”
Mullenweg also said WP Engine is actively selling an inferior product. The core WordPress project saves all changes so that users can revert their content to a previous version, but WP Engine disables this feature, according to its support page.
Customers can request that edits be enabled, but support only extends to three edits, which are automatically deleted after 60 days. WP Engine recommends that customers use a “third-party editing system” for extensive edit management needs. The reason, according to Mullenweg, is simple: to save money.
“They don’t want to spend that money disabling revisions and protecting their content because it costs more to store the change history in the database,” Mullenweg argues. “That strikes at the core of what WordPress does, and they shatter it: the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, there’s no way to roll back your content, and it breaks the core promise of what WordPress does, which is to manage and protect your content.”
TechCrunch has reached out to WP Engine for a response and will update here when we receive a response.
