WP Engine
More info
- Founder
- Jason Cohen
- Founded
- Headquarters
- Austin, Texas
- Type
- Managed WordPress host
- Website
- wpengine.com
The managed-WordPress giant that went to open war with WordPress's own founder in 2024.
Jason Cohen started WP Engine in 2010 in Austin and turned managed WordPress into an industry of its own; private-equity firm Silver Lake stepped in during 2018. The company also owns Flywheel, Local, and the popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin. In autumn 2024 a feud erupted when Automattic's Matt Mullenweg called WP Engine "a cancer" to WordPress and had WordPress.org block the company's access to the update and plugin servers. WP Engine sued; a court restored access that December. The dispute laid bare how much of "open" WordPress rests on a single person's goodwill.