Pantheon User Reviews, Pricing & Popular Alternatives

Item: Pantheon
Rating: 4.4

By Bianca Caballero on October 23, 2018 | Reviews, Web Hosting Reviews

Average Rating 4.4 4.4 from 15 ratings

Pantheon is a web hosting provider specifically made for WordPress and Drupal sites. It provides professional developers with tools needed for high performing sites, including staging environments, version control, backups, and workflows. In this review, we covered user reviews and pricing. Ready to try Pantheon? Get a free trial.

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What Pantheon Does Well

Users who gave Pantheon a positive review said that the system simplifies the process of setting up and maintaining a development environment for WordPress and Drupal sites. They also commended the platform’s security updates and speed of services.

“Pantheon does Drupal and WordPress hosting extremely well — they are arguably the best at it. Their platform is very flexible and powerful, and their team is knowledgeable and friendly. Their git-based development workflow and simple multi-dev environments make testing changes and keeping multiple developers working on something a cinch. They also provide free CDN and SSL service for all customers.”
— Ben McClure

What Pantheon Does Not Do Well

Users who gave Pantheon a negative review complained about the limited flexibility of the software when it comes to customizations. They also cautioned about the steep learning curve and high pricing.

“Flexibility to do certain things with your cloud that fall outside their preferred structure is very rigid. It’s a sandbox (a safe and isolated environment for testing) during development, but it allows no sand to spill over the sides. It’s not a bad thing, it just doesn’t allow for the system administrator type of person to tweak things.”
— Lee Edward Quessenberry

Pantheon Pricing

Pantheon offers three types of hosting subscriptions: Basic ($50/month), Performance (ranging from $175-$1,000/month), and Elite (custom prized). The main differences between the plans include the maximum number of domains, monthly visits, pages served, disk storage space, and more.

	Monthly Pricing ($/Month)	Maximum No. of Domains
Basic	$50	5
Performance
Small	$175	10
Medium	$300	15
Large	$600	35
Extra Large	$1000	70
Elite	Customized Pricing	200
Exclusive Offer: Get 65% off Bluehost

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Top Web Hosting Providers 2019

	Bluehost	Squarespace	Weebly
	3.3	4.4	4.1
Best For	Businesses that need cheap hosting that is reliable and packed with free extras	Boutiques, restaurants, and other businesses that prefer an elegant look and are seeking a website builder and web host in one	Businesses looking for an easy-to-use website builder and web host in one
Pricing	Starts at $2.95 per month	Starts at $12 per month	Starts at $0 per month (see more pricing details)
	Read Reviews	Read Reviews	Read Reviews

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Pantheon Features

Check out the list below of some of Pantheon’s features:
SEE FEATURES

Pantheon FAQ

Does Pantheon offer special plans for educational institutions?
READ ANSWER

Will Pantheon help users with the onboarding of their sites to the platform?
READ ANSWER

Popular Integrations

Here is a list of some of Pantheon’s popular integrations:
VIEW INTEGRATIONS

Pantheon Alternatives

Not sure if Pantheon is the right fit for you? Read our reviews of all top web hosting providers.

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Reviews (15)
Disclaimer: Reviews on FitSmallBusiness.com are the product of independent research by our writers, researchers, and editorial team. User reviews and comments are contributions from independent users not affiliated with FitSmallBusiness.com's editorial team. Banks, issuers, credit card companies, and other product & service providers are not responsible for any content posted on FitSmallBusiness.com. As such, they do not endorse or guarantee any posted comments or reviews. Post Your Review

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John Cassidy
7 Reviews
87 Points
7 Screenshots
0 Answers

Review SourceOrganic
October 1, 2019 at 1:39 am
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Overall Experience
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Ease of Use
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Pricing
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Customer Service
What does Pantheon do well?
It has many good features that are very helpful, including data retention, content handling in its life cycle, publishing web content to name a few. The system lets companies design and launch websites with WordPress and host it in a container-like infrastructure, ensuring fast and efficient content loading. In addition to this Pantheon comes with development testing environments which allow the user to make quick fixes, improvements of functionalities and a daily backup of the website database.
What does Pantheon not do well?
The program only installs WordPress and Drupal. I would have liked it to have a wider set of options to choose from, thus adding a much larger tool integration thus making the software more versatile. The documentation is not easy for novice users to digest, forcing to make questions to the support staff to solve what should be simple to understand. Module updates and upgrades can fail due to resource shortages by software servers.
What do you wish you had known about Pantheon before using?
I would have liked to know that the experience with the support team was a little unstable, which demands that some members knew their product very well and provided me with a correct solution and even recommendations depending on the degree of complication the task had but there were certain occasions when an agent did not seem to know anything about the program, giving me very vague suggestions that did not help me at all. This was a really annoying because i was getting back to contacting them so I could communicate with someone who really gave me the right instructions to solve the problem that I had.
Have you used a competitor to Pantheon? If so, how does it compare?
I have used Joomla in the past as CMS and compared to Pantheon has very similar and excellent functionalities in its execution, one of the main differences is that Joomla is a free and open source application while Pantheon has a monthly payment. When it comes to integrations Pantheon has a long list of third-party systems and applications like Jenkins, GitHub, Asana which are not present in Joomla. The Joomla help material found online is much higher than Pantheon’s, which allows for troubleshooting and development aid that is much more efficient and faster to solve.
Review SourceOrganic
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Matthew Cannon
1 Review
10 Points
1 Screenshot
0 Answers
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
December 3, 2018 at 4:13 pm
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Overall Experience
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Ease of Use
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Pricing
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Customer Service
What does the company do well?
Provides a corporate level hosting environment with dev tools that make launching a site a breeze. Most importantly, it’s all available at a more consumer level cost. With a DEV, STAGE and PROD environment and a UI that seamlessly allows a user to jump between environments, you never feel like time is being wasted. The most important feature, one which keeps my clients happy, is the automation of keeping the CMS up to date with security patches. My one client is on Drupal when a bunch of high alert security patches were released. Without doing anything, Pantheon patched it all and the client never experienced any outages. That was great for the client and for myself.
What does the company not do well?
Even though I already mentioned that the cost is on par with consumers, it’s still high for some whom have no experience with what it takes to keep a site up and running. Services like GoDaddy farther cloud the market with cheaper cost and inferior products making consumers think hosting services should be really cheap. Pantheon is a great tool, but maybe deals can be developed to aim at getting consumers who might not know that there are better ways to manage their sites.
What do you wish you had known about the company before using?
Really, nothing. The fact that Pantheon lets you create a DEV and STAGE environment to try out their platform without any upfront costs allows you to learn everything before deciding that it’s right for you. If it is, only then are you asked to pay for their service in order to publish the PROD environment.
Review SourceOrganic
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Joshua Harbor, CSM, MBA
1 Review
10 Points
1 Screenshot
0 Answers
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
December 1, 2018 at 7:24 pm
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Overall Experience
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Ease of Use
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Pricing
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Customer Service
What does the company do well?
Pantheon does a great job of making developing, launching, and managing sites built with WordPress and Drupal. Their plans include 3 environments (DEV,TEST,LIVE) to promote best practices in your development team. Their support team is knowledgeable for any snags you might run into during your deployments and setup of DNS. Additionally they regularly have webinars/learning events to keep up with the latest updates to WordPress and Drupal, so you always know the newest trends.
What does the company not do well?
It’s hard to think of something they don’t do well, they have a great service and their team is consistently helpful. Aside from occasionally longer than 5minute wait times on chat, there really isn’t anything I can suggest for them to improve. If you are looking for high level of control on your server or database, this probably isn’t the service for you.
What do you wish you had known about the company before using?
I wish I would have known how much easier they make managing WordPress or Drupal projects compared to using other providers that give you more control over your setup. I’ve used bargain hosting plans and industry standard hosts as well, but for managing a WordPress or Drupal site, you really can’t get a better partner than Pantheon.
Review SourceOrganic
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Rob Watson
9 Reviews
112 Points
8 Screenshots
1 Answer

Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
November 27, 2018 at 1:31 pm
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Overall Experience
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Ease of Use
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Pricing
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Customer Service
What does the company do well?
Pantheon has really upped the ante on how hosting should be done. They essentially built a next-generation WordPress and Drupal hosting platform from the ground up, with security, performance, and an optimized and predictable DevOps workflow as the primary consideration rather than as an afterthought. It’s NOT a typical cPanel or Plesk host, which really revolutionizes the way we think of hosting.
What does the company not do well?
Pantheon doesn’t do anything with email or domain registration. In many ways, that’s a good thing because they’re hyper-focused on providing the fastest and most secure hosting on the planet. On the other hand, it leaves me explaining to customers why they have to stay with GoDaddy or other registrars/hosting providers for email and domains. Even though Pantheon competes well on price once you tally all the “upsells” other hosting providers force onto unsuspecting subscribers, for some clients, Pantheon can be a non-starter because they just one one bill to pay to one provider for all of it. If Pantheon can figure out a way to provide email and domain registration without compromising its core hosting or pricing, my conversations with clients will go much easier. Also, it would be great to see them offer the ability to use 3rd party SSL certs. Right now they offer a super-easy LetsEncrypt SSL that provisions automatically without any need for me to mess with command line provisioning, and it auto-renews. But some clients have invested sometimes thousands of dollars over a long term in the “brand name” certs like Digicert (formerly Norton) because the ability to display the trust marks of such companies has been proven to lead to better customer conversions. Customers don’t understand that LetsEncrypt and Digicert and any other SSL are equal, cryptographically speaking, so it’s a hard sell to show a “LetsEncrypt” seal and expect the same level of trust. A third thing I’d like to see Pantheon do, which I’m told is being developed, is to combine the strengths of Kalabox and Lando into a GUI-based interface (like Kalabox, but better-performing) so that outside developers I need to briefly bring in on a Multidev project can get up and running in minutes rather than having to spend a lot of time in the Pantheon DevOps documentation. They’d still have the CLI strengths of Lando if they need it, but the relative productivity of a GUI when they just need to quick see and manage everything graphically.
What do you wish you had known about the company before using?
Even though I discovered Pantheon early in its genesis, I wish I had known about it even sooner! I had used and been a reseller of multiple other hosting companies, but they can’t hold a candle to Pantheon.
Review SourceOrganic
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Wolf (Timothy) Bishop
4 Reviews
40 Points
3 Screenshots
0 Answers

Review SourceOrganic
November 23, 2018 at 7:46 pm
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Overall Experience
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Ease of Use
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Pricing
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Customer Service
What does the company do well?
The Pantheon workflow and staging tools are the best I have seen. I LOVE that I can stage sites at no cost and only pay when I am ready to make them live.
What does the company not do well?
Well, I have no real complaints. But if I had to knitpick, the Git integration could be a little easier.
What do you wish you had known about the company before using?
Well, nothing really.
Review SourceOrganic
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