Cloudways for Laravel Agencies: Worth the Switch in 2026?

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If you’re running a two-to-ten person agency juggling a dozen Laravel client sites across a mess of DigitalOcean droplets, you already know the real cost isn’t the hosting bill — it’s the Sunday night spent patching a server nobody remembers configuring. That’s the pitch behind Cloudways for Laravel agencies: pay a markup, stop being the sysadmin. Whether that trade actually pencils out depends on how many sites you’re running and how much you value not getting a 2 a.m. Slack message about a dead server.

Quick Take: Cloudways vs Laravel Forge vs Ploi for Agencies

Last updated: July 2026

Cloudways wins on convenience and agency-specific tooling. Forge and Ploi win on raw cost and Laravel-native deploy tooling once you’re past a handful of servers. The rest of this post walks through why.

What Cloudways Actually Offers Laravel Agencies

Cloudways isn’t a Laravel-specific tool the way Forge is — it’s a managed layer sitting on top of a cloud VPS from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, or Google Cloud. For Laravel specifically, it ships a pre-configured stack with PHP-FPM, an Nginx/Apache hybrid, MySQL or MariaDB, and Redis, plus full SSH/SFTP access so your devs can run Composer exactly the way they would on a bare VPS. Cloudways handles the patching, monitoring, and backup layer that Forge and Ploi deliberately leave to you.

Every plan also includes free staging URLs with one-click server cloning, so a dev can push a Laravel release to a staging environment, test it, then promote database and files to production without provisioning a second server by hand. Git comes pre-installed for push-to-deploy workflows, but Cloudways’ native deploy trigger is push-based rather than a full CI/CD pipeline — several independent guides recommend pairing it with GitHub Actions if you want a proper automated pipeline. For an agency that’s also hosting WordPress or Magento sites for some clients, Cloudways’ one-click app support for non-Laravel stacks means one platform instead of three.

Cloudways Pricing for Agencies (2026)

Last updated: July 2026

The $11 vs $14 discrepancy you’ll see across review sites isn’t an error — it’s provider-specific. DigitalOcean-backed servers start at $11/mo, while Vultr and Linode-backed servers start at $14/mo. Every Flexible plan includes unlimited websites and applications per server, free staging and advanced cloning, free Redis cache, and a free WordPress vulnerability scanner even if you’re not hosting WordPress. New signups through Cloudways get a 3-day free trial with no credit card required, plus 30% off the first three months via the tracked link — worth factoring in if you’re testing this against a Forge + VPS setup for a quarter before committing.

Cloudways also runs a separate “Autonomous” product line starting at $99/mo, but that’s a WordPress-focused autoscaling platform and isn’t the relevant comparison for a Laravel agency.

The Real Cost Per Client Site: Cloudways vs a Self-Managed VPS

This is the math most comparison posts skip, and it’s the number that actually matters for an agency. Because Cloudways bills per server — not per site — and every plan allows unlimited application installs, ten low-traffic client Laravel sites on one $22/mo (4GB) or $88/mo (8GB Medium) DigitalOcean-backed server works out to roughly $2.20 to $8.80 per site per month, before accounting for the resource-contention tradeoffs of stacking client workloads on shared RAM and CPU.

Compare that to a self-managed stack: Laravel Forge’s Hobby plan ($12/mo) covers one server, Growth ($19/mo) and Business ($39/mo) cover unlimited servers, and you add a raw VPS on top — Forge’s own Laravel-branded VPS starts at $6/mo, or you bring your own DigitalOcean, Vultr, or Hetzner droplet. At small scale, consolidating ten sites onto a couple of larger droplets can beat Cloudways on the raw dollar figure. What that comparison leaves out, according to independent Laravel hosting analysis from Benjamin Crozat, is that the “true cost per project” for self-managed VPS is often higher once you price in developer time for setup, patch management, and incident response — the exact overhead Cloudways is charging its markup to absorb.

If your agency is already comfortable running its own infrastructure and wants to see what that DIY path looks like end to end, our Laravel on Vultr VPS setup guide walks through provisioning a production-ready Laravel stack manually — useful context for judging whether the Cloudways markup is buying you something you’d otherwise have to build yourself.

Cloudways vs Laravel Forge vs Ploi: Feature Breakdown

Laravel Forge, built by the Laravel core team, is a provisioning and deployment tool, not a host — you still pay your cloud provider directly, and Forge only manages provisioning, deployment, and server configuration. Its tighter Laravel-native tooling (queue worker management, a scheduler UI, and zero-downtime deploy hooks modeled on Laravel’s own release flow) is a genuine advantage for teams that already know their way around a Linux box. Ploi undercuts both on price: Ploi Core became a free tier as of August 2025 (one server, one site), with paid tiers from roughly €8/mo, and it supports a few extra providers like UpCloud and Scaleway.

Cloudways is the more hands-off option across the board — automated backups, security patching, monitoring, and 24/7 support are bundled into the price, while Forge and Ploi leave server security and support escalation to the agency or to community documentation. Cloudways also supports a wider range of one-click applications beyond Laravel (WordPress, Magento, Joomla, custom PHP), which matters if your agency’s client roster isn’t 100% Laravel.

For a closer look at how the hardware underneath Cloudways compares to running Vultr directly, our Cloudways vs Vultr comparison breaks down exactly what that markup buys on identical infrastructure.

Team Access, White-Label Billing & Client Management

This is where Cloudways separates itself from Forge and Ploi for agency use specifically, and it’s the part most comparison posts miss because they’re written from a solo-developer angle. Cloudways supports unlimited team members under one account with role-based, fine-grained permissions — you can give a junior dev access to only the two apps they manage, and give a client read-only visibility into just their own site. The “Teams” feature also lets a freelancer collaborate across a client’s own separate Cloudways account without needing a second login.

More importantly for a multi-client agency, Cloudways offers a Client Billing / white-label add-on that lets you issue your own branded invoices and automate recurring billing to clients from a single reseller-style panel. Neither Forge nor Ploi has an equivalent built in — agencies on those platforms typically bill clients manually or bolt on separate invoicing software. If you’re already spending time reconciling client invoices by hand every month, this feature alone can offset a chunk of the price difference versus Forge.

What Users Actually Say: Support, Reliability & the Markup Debate

Cloudways holds a 4.6/5 rating on Trustpilot across more than 3,600 reviews and 4.7/5 on G2, with reviewers repeatedly praising support responsiveness and the general “set it and forget it” convenience of not managing patches yourself. That said, the sentiment isn’t uniformly positive. Recurring complaints center on the markup versus provisioning the same droplet directly — a 1GB DigitalOcean droplet runs about $4/mo on its own versus roughly $11/mo through Cloudways for a comparable tier — and on support-quality concerns some users trace back to Cloudways’ 2022 acquisition by DigitalOcean.

Independent developer commentary from Benjamin Crozat frames Cloudways as the easiest traditional managed option for teams that don’t want to think about package updates or security hardening, while cost-focused forum commentary takes the opposite read: the same markup as a reason to stick with Forge or Ploi plus a raw VPS. Neither side is wrong — it’s an audience-dependent tradeoff, and an agency’s answer should come down to whether someone on the team actually wants to own server ops, not which take sounds more convincing online.

Alternatives Worth a Look: Laravel Cloud, Coolify & Going Raw

Cloudways and Forge/Ploi aren’t the only options on the table in 2026. Laravel Cloud is Laravel’s own first-party serverless hosting platform, positioned by Laravel itself as a direct alternative to both Cloudways and self-managed VPS setups. Coolify is a self-hosted, open-source alternative to Forge and Ploi that’s gained traction with cost-conscious solo developers who don’t mind running the panel itself on their own server. And plenty of teams skip the panel entirely, provisioning raw VPS instances from Hetzner, Vultr, or DigitalOcean and managing everything by hand.

If cost is the deciding factor and your team is willing to do its own ops, a raw VPS is still the cheapest way in — new Vultr accounts get $300 in free credit valid for 30 days, which is enough runway to test a multi-site Laravel setup before committing to a monthly bill either way.

Who Should Switch to Cloudways for Laravel Agencies (and Who Shouldn’t)

Cloudways for Laravel agencies makes the most sense if you’re a two-to-fifteen person shop hosting sites for multiple clients, nobody on your team wants to own server patching as an ongoing job, and you’d genuinely use the white-label billing to stop invoicing clients by hand. The per-server pricing math works in your favor specifically because you’re consolidating multiple low-to-moderate traffic sites onto shared infrastructure — the more sites per server, the better the per-site economics get.

It’s the wrong move if your agency already has someone comfortable managing Linux servers, you’re running fewer than four or five client sites total, or your clients’ sites have traffic patterns that make co-hosting on a shared server risky (a single high-traffic client site can starve the others on the same box). In that case, Forge’s flat-rate pricing plus a raw VPS — or Ploi’s free tier if you’re just starting out — will cost less and give your devs the Laravel-native deploy tooling Forge was actually built for. For a broader look at where Cloudways makes sense outside the agency use case specifically, our full Cloudways use-case verdict covers the rest of the buyer landscape.

Worth It If Server Patching Is Eating Your Time

If your agency is spending more time patching servers than building for clients, Cloudways for Laravel agencies is worth the switch — the per-server pricing genuinely gets cheaper per site as you consolidate, and the white-label billing tool solves a real operational headache Forge and Ploi don’t touch. Start with a Micro server on DigitalOcean through Cloudways and migrate two or three low-traffic client sites over first; the 3-day free trial and 30% first-three-months discount make that test cheap enough to run before you commit anything larger.

If your team already owns its Linux ops and you’re running a lean roster of client sites, stick with Forge or Ploi and put the savings toward a bigger VPS instead — you’ll get the same uptime with more control and a lower monthly bill.