Matt Mullenweg Calls WP Engine ‘Cancer for WordPress’ and Urges Community to Switch Providers

CEO of Automattic and Co-Founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg this week unleashed a devastating attack on a rival company, calling it WP engine “WordPress cancer.”

Mullenweg criticized the corporate — which has been commercializing the WordPress open source project since 2010 — for making profits without giving much in return, in addition to disabling key features that make WordPress such a robust platform in the primary place.

For context, WordPress has the facility over 40% network, and while any person or company is free to use the open-source project and run an internet site themselves, various firms have sprung up that sell hosting services and technical expertise based on it. These include Automattic, which Mullenweg founded in 2005 to monetize a project he created two years earlier; and WP Engine, a managed WordPress hosting provider that has raised nearly $300 million in funding over its 14 years of operation, the vast majority of which got here from a $250 million investment from private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018.

This week I shall be speaking at WordCamp USA 2024WordPress-focused conference held in Portland, Oregon, Mullenweg didn’t mince his words in his criticism of WP Engine. Taking the stage, Mullenweg read get out of the post has just published on his personal blog, where he points out a separate “five for the long run“investment commitments made by Automattic and WP EngineWith former co-creator 3900 hours per week and the last one spending just 40 hours.

While he admitted that these numbers are only “approximate” and will not be entirely accurate, Mullenweg said the disparity in contributions is critical, as each Automattic and WP Engine “are about the same size, with revenues of around half a billion (dollars).”

Mullenweg has criticized a minimum of one other outstanding hosting provider up to now, accusing GoDaddy of making the most of an open-source project without giving anything meaningful in return — or more precisely, he called GoDaddy is “parasitic company“and “an existential threat to the future of WordPress.”

In his latest offensive, Mullenweg didn’t stop at WP Engine, but prolonged his criticism to the corporate’s major investor.

“The company (WP Engine) is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm $102 billion in assets under management,” Mullenweg said. “Silver Lake doesn’t care about your open source ideals, they just want a return on their capital. So at this point, I’m asking everyone in the WordPress community to vote with their wallets. Who are you giving 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 query asked by audience member Later, when asked to make clear whether Mullenweg was urging WordPress users to boycott WP Engine, he said that he hopes every WP Engine customer watches his presentation and that when it comes time to renew their contract, they need to consider their next steps.

“There are other hosts who’re really hungry — Hostinger, Bluehost Cloud, Pressableetc., that will love to have that business,” Mullenweg said. “You can get faster performance even by going to someone else, and migrating has never been easier. That’s part of the idea of ​​liberating data. It’s like a day’s work to change your site to something else, and I highly encourage you to think about that when it comes time to renew your contract if you’re a current WP Engine customer.”

“WordPress Cancer”

In response to the uproar over the speech, Mullenweg published continuation of the blog postwhere he calls WP Engine a “cancer” on WordPress. “It’s important to remember that if left untreated, the cancer will spread,” he wrote. “WP Engine sets a bad standard that others may find appropriate to replicate.”

Mullenweg said WP Engine is making the most of the confusion that exists between the WordPress project and the business services company WP Engine.

“It needs to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress,” Mullenweg wrote. “My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they are giving you WordPress, but they are not. And they are profiting off of that confusion.”

Mullenweg also said that WP Engine is actively selling an inferior product since the core WordPress project stores every change made to allow users to revert their content to a previous version — something that WP Engine doesn’t allow, according to his support page.

While customers can request to enable revisions, support only covers three revisions, that are routinely deleted after 60 days. WP Engine recommends customers use an “external editing system” in the event that they need extensive revision management. The reason for this, according to Mullenweg, is straightforward: saving money.

“They turn off commits because it costs them more money to keep a history of changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that money protecting your content,” Mullenweg says. “That goes to the heart of what WordPress does, and it destroys it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to recover 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. We’ll update here after we hear back.