Amazon S3 vs Flywheel (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict
Amazon S3 is our pick, scoring 7.8/10 against 5.4/10 for Flywheel on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria. Its biggest advantage: higher Integration score (10/10 vs 5/10). Neither Amazon S3 nor Flywheel lists a free plan.
Last updated: November 2026
A
Amazon S3
7.8/10
Amazon S3 is AWS's pay-as-you-go object storage service. Businesses use it to store files, backups, data lakes and static website assets at almost any scale.
Flywheel
5.4/10
Managed WordPress hosting from WP Engine for designers, freelancers and agencies, with staging, nightly backups, a Fastly CDN and multi-site workflow tools.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | A Amazon S3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 7.8/10 | 5.4/10 |
| Integration | 10/10 | 5/10 |
| Support | 6/10 | 5/10 |
| Cost | 5/10 | 3/10 |
| Customization | 8/10 | 4/10 |
| Security | 9/10 | 7/10 |
| Reliability | 9/10 | 7/10 |
| Ease of Use | 5/10 | 8/10 |
| Analytics | 8/10 | 5/10 |
| Scalability | 10/10 | 5/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | No | No |
| Cheapest paid plan | Contact for pricing | $30/mo Starter |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Contact for pricing | $30/mo Starter |
| Features | ||
| Managed WordPress | ||
| Automatic Backups | ||
| Multiple Regions | ||
| Uptime SLA | ||
| API and CLI | Not listed | |
| Content Delivery Network | Not listed | |
| Free SSL Certificates | Not listed | |
| Object Storage | Not listed | |
| Shared Hosting | Not listed | |
Amazon S3 vs Flywheel cost by team size
| Team size | Amazon S3 | Flywheel |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | Contact for pricing | $30/moStarter |
| 5 users | Contact for pricing | $30/moStarter |
| 10 users | Contact for pricing | $30/moStarter |
| 25 users | Contact for pricing | $30/moStarter |
| 50 users | Contact for pricing | $30/moStarter |
The plan that fits each team size, billed monthly, before add-ons and usage charges. Each cost opens that tool's pricing calculator for the team size.
Who Amazon S3 and Flywheel suit
Amazon S3 fits enterprise better than Flywheel.
| Audience | Amazon S3 | Flywheel |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | 9/10It offers Object Lock, replication, audit logging and organisation-wide analytics through Storage Lens. | 3/10WP Engine places Flywheel as its small-business and agency brand, so larger companies are steered to WP Engine instead. |
| Small Business | 5/10The storage rates are cheap, but reviewers say the console and the pricing model are complex. | 6/10Hosting is fully managed, which suits a single business site, but the cost per site is above budget hosts. |
| Agencies | Not rated | 9/10Blueprints, Organizations, billing transfer, collaborators and the multi-site Freelance and Agency plans are built for agencies that manage client WordPress sites. |
| Developers | 9/10S3 is managed through a widely adopted API and SDKs, and that API has become the standard interface for object storage. | Not rated |
| Freelancers | Not rated | 8/10The Freelance plan and the free Local development app suit solo WordPress designers, though the price is high for very small budgets. |
| Marketing Teams | Not rated | 6/10Marketing teams running WordPress sites get staging and managed updates without needing to run servers. |
| SaaS Companies | 8/10It scales without limit for application data, and transfers to other AWS services in the same Region are free. | Not rated |
| Startups | 7/10There are no upfront costs, and new AWS accounts get Free Tier credits. | Not rated |
Which One Should You Choose?
AWhy choose Amazon S3
- Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 5/10)
- Higher Scalability score (10/10 vs 5/10)
- Better fit for enterprise (9/10 vs 3/10)
Why choose Flywheel
- Higher Ease of Use score (8/10 vs 5/10)
- Includes Managed WordPress, which Amazon S3 lacks
Pros & Cons
AAmazon S3
Pros
- Very high scale: about 500 trillion objects stored and around 200 million requests per second, according to Wikipedia.
- The S3 API is the industry standard, so a wide range of tools and competing storage providers support it.
- Strong data protection: versioning, MFA Delete, Object Lock in compliance mode, and cross-Region replication with a time-bound SLA.
- Many storage classes, from Express One Zone to Glacier Deep Archive at about $0.001 per GB-month, let teams match cost to how often data is accessed.
- Reviews are consistently positive: about 4.7 out of 5 from more than 1,100 Capterra reviews.
Cons
- Internet egress costs about $0.09 per GB after the first free 100 GB a month, and competitors widely criticise these fees.
- Request, retrieval and lifecycle-transition fees make monthly bills hard to predict.
- Reviewers on Capterra and TrustRadius call the console navigation and user interface complex.
- The SLA pays only service credits toward future bills, never refunds, and infrequent-access classes have a lower 99% uptime threshold.
Flywheel
Pros
- Agency tools such as Blueprints, Organizations, collaborator access and billing transfer make it easy to build sites and hand them over to clients.
- Every plan includes staging, nightly backups kept for 30 days, free SSL and a Fastly-powered CDN.
- Malware cleanup and plugin vulnerability alerts are included at no extra cost.
- It works closely with Local, Flywheel's free local WordPress development app.
- Independent tests found fast response times, with no downtime during monitoring periods.
Cons
- Reviewers consistently call it expensive compared with other managed WordPress hosts, especially when hosting many sites.
- Going over visit or storage limits brings extra charges of $1 per 1,000 visits and $1 per GB.
- Hosts WordPress only and includes no email hosting.
- Some users say they have limited control over server and PHP settings, and one review says the control panel hides most features under an Advanced tab.
- Ratings on Trustpilot are much lower than on G2 or Capterra, with complaints about support and billing.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon S3 scores higher on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria: 7.8/10 against 5.4/10 for Flywheel. The largest gap is in Integration: 10/10 for Amazon S3 and 5/10 for Flywheel.
No, neither Amazon S3 nor Flywheel lists a free plan.
Amazon S3 is the better fit for enterprise: we rate it 9/10 for them, against 3/10 for Flywheel.
Flywheel has Managed WordPress, which Amazon S3 lacks.
