Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine ‘cancer on WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Automattic CEO and WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg attacked the rival company this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer on WordPress.”

Mullenweg criticized the company — which has been selling the open source WordPress project since 2010 — for making a profit without much return, while crippling the key features that made WordPress such a powerful platform in the first place.

In context, WordPress powers more than 40% of the web, and while any person or company is free to take on an open source project and run the website themselves, several businesses simply sell hosting services and technical know-how behind the scenes. of it. These include Automattic, which Mullenweg founded in 2005 to monetize a project he had created two years earlier; and WP Engine, a managed WordPress hosting provider that has raised nearly $300 million in funding over its 14-year history, the bulk of which came with a $250 million investment from private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018.

Speaking this week at WordCamp US 2024, a WordPress-focused conference held in Portland, Oregon, Mullenweg didn’t hold back in his criticism of WP Engine. Taking the stage, Mullenweg read a text he had just published on his personal website, in which he pointed to “five future” investment pledges made by Automattic and WP Engine, who were contributing 3,900 hours a week, too. the latter offered just 40 hours.

While admitting that these figures are only “representative”, and may not be completely accurate, Mllenweg said that this disparity in contributions is significant, as Automattic and WP Engine are “almost equal, and the revenue in the ballpark is half.” – a thousand [dollars].”

Mullenweg has criticized at least one other big-name web host in the past, accusing GoDaddy of profiting from an open source project without giving anything meaningful in return – specifically, he called GoDaddy a “pest company” and “a threat to the future of WordPress”.

In his latest lawsuit, Mullenweg didn’t stop at WP Engine, extending his criticism of the company’s biggest investor.

“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 give you a chance for your open source ideas, they just want your money back. So it is at this time that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to go vote with your wallet. Who do you give your money to—someone who will feed the ecosystem, or someone who will extract every bit of value from it until it withers?”

In response to a question sent by an audience member later, asking for clarification on whether Mullenweg was asking WordPress users to boycott WP Engine, he said he hoped all WP Engine customers would watch his presentation, and when the time came when they ‘renewed their contracts, they have to think about their next steps.

“There are some hosts that are really hungry – Hostinger, Bluehost Cloud, Presable, etc., that would love to get that business,” Mllenweg said. “You can get quick work and even switch to someone else, and migration has never been easier. That is part of the concept of data liberation. It’s like, another day of work to change your site to something else, and I’d strongly encourage you to think about that when your contract renewal comes up, if you’re currently a WP Engine customer.”

‘Cancer on WordPress’

In response to the brouhaha that followed the speech, Mullenweg published a blog post, in which he called WP Engine a “cancer” on WordPress. “It is important to remember that if left unchecked, cancer will spread,” he wrote. “WP Engine sets a bad standard that others can look at and think it’s okay to repeat.”

Mullenweg said that WP Engine is profiting from the confusion that exists between the WordPress project and the commercial services company WP Engine.

“It bears saying and repeating: WP Engine is not WordPress,” Mllenweg wrote. “My mother was confused thinking that WP Engine is a legitimate thing. Their marketing, marketing, advertising, and overall promise to customers is that they offer you WordPress, but they don’t. And they benefit from the confusion.”

Mullenweg also said that WP Engine is actively selling a low product, because the main project of WordPress keeps all the changes made to allow users to restore their content to the previous version – something that WP Engine disables, according to its support page.

Although customers can request that updates be enabled, support is limited to three updates, which are automatically removed after 60 days. WP Engine recommends that customers use a “third-party editing system” if they need extensive review management. The reason for this, according to Mullenweg, is simple – to save money.

“They disable updates because it costs a lot of money to keep a history of changes to the database, and they don’t want to spend that to protect your content,” argues Mullenweg. “It goes to the heart of what WordPress does, and they destroy it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to restore your content, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is to manage and protect your content. “

TechCrunch has reached out to WP Engine for comment, and will update here if we hear back.