ServerPilot vs RunCloud Pricing, RunCloud vs ServerPilot Cost for Agencies and Freelancers

ServerPilot and RunCloud both manage PHP sites on a server you rent from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or similar, and both charge a monthly fee on top of that server. The way they charge is opposite. ServerPilot bills per server and per app, by the hour. RunCloud bills a flat plan with a server cap and unlimited apps. That single difference decides which one is cheaper for you far more than any feature list, so this page starts with the money. Every price below was read off serverpilot.io and runcloud.io in September 2026, and the server bill from your cloud provider is left out because it is the same either way.

ServerPilot vs RunCloud pricing at a glance

RunCloud is cheaper for almost every real fleet: $19 a month covers up to 50 servers with unlimited apps, while ServerPilot Business costs $10 per server plus $1 per app. ServerPilot only wins on one server with a handful of sites on its Economy plan, which has no monitoring.

ServerPilot offers a 14 day trial with no credit card. Each ServerPilot server can sit on a different plan, and a plan change mid month is split by the hour between the two rates.

RunCloud vs ServerPilot cost for real fleets

At three servers and 20 sites ServerPilot Business costs $50 a month and RunCloud Professional $19; at 20 servers and 150 sites the gap is $350 against $49. The table below prices six fleets we see often. Every total was added up by hand.

The crossover is easy to find. On one server, ServerPilot Economy costs $5 plus 50 cents per app, so it stays under RunCloud's $9 up to seven apps ($8.50) and ties at eight. Past that, or on a second server, RunCloud's flat fee wins and keeps winning, because ServerPilot's bill grows with every client site for as long as that site exists. Over a year, the growing agency row is $1,080 on ServerPilot Business against $228 on RunCloud Professional.

A fair comparison uses ServerPilot Business, not Economy, for client work. Economy has no monitoring at all, so nobody on the team sees a server running out of memory until a client calls. If you resell hosting to clients, the per app fee also has to be passed on somewhere, and agencies that bill each client a monthly hosting fee usually end up setting up a way to chase the unpaid hosting invoices automatically once the client list passes twenty or so.

ServerPilot vs RunCloud features that change the decision

The biggest functional gap is deployment: RunCloud deploys from Git and offers atomic deployment on its Business plan, while ServerPilot has no built in push to deploy. The rest of the differences are smaller but real.

• Web server stack. ServerPilot installs Nginx in front of Apache on every server, so .htaccess rules work. RunCloud lets you choose Nginx only, an Nginx plus Apache hybrid, or OpenLiteSpeed when you connect a fresh server.
• Deploys. RunCloud pulls from GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket and runs a deploy script; atomic releases with a symlink switch are on Business at $49. With ServerPilot you upload over SFTP or wire up your own CI to copy files, which is fine for WordPress and awkward for Laravel.
• Staging and backups. RunCloud includes staging environments (1 on Essentials, 10 on Professional) and backup storage on every plan. ServerPilot does not list staging or backups on its pricing page, so you bring your own.
• Monitoring. ServerPilot puts server metrics and a log viewer on Business and application and MySQL metrics on First Class. This is the area where ServerPilot's higher tiers give you something RunCloud Professional does not advertise.
• Team. RunCloud includes 10 seats on Business and 50 on Enterprise. If more than one person touches servers, check seats before comparing prices, because that is what pushes RunCloud from $19 to $49.

Is RunCloud better than ServerPilot?

For an agency or a developer with more than one server, yes: RunCloud costs less, deploys from Git and includes staging and backups. ServerPilot is the better pick only for one server with a few WordPress sites where you want the smallest possible bill. ServerPilot's per app pricing made sense when a server held two or three sites. Most people comparing the two today have outgrown that, which is also why so many of them end up reading about a ServerPilot alternative in the first place.

RunCloud has its own ceiling. Atomic deploys and team seats sit on the $49 Business plan, and a site deployed to two servers behind a load balancer is still two separate deploys. If that is where you are heading, our RunCloud alternative page compares the panels that handle it.

When neither ServerPilot nor RunCloud fits

If your fleet mixes WordPress with Laravel or Node.js apps, needs one release to land on several servers at once, or needs an audit log of who deployed what for clients, a general deployment panel fits better than either. DeployManage costs more than both: Starter is $59 a month for 3 servers and 2 people, Growth $129 for 10 servers, 50 sites per server and 10 people, Business $299 unlimited. For a freelancer with one WordPress server that is not worth it, and we would point you to RunCloud Essentials or ServerPilot Economy.

What Growth adds is the part RunCloud and ServerPilot leave to you: every push becomes an atomic release across all the servers behind a site, migrations run once, queue workers restart on each server, and the previous release stays on disk for a one click rollback. It provisions servers on DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr, AWS, Linode or any VPS you own, and it runs WordPress, Laravel and Node.js side by side. If you are an agency weighing all of this, the WordPress VPS control panel page goes through the agency setup in more detail.

How to move sites from ServerPilot to RunCloud or another panel

Connect a fresh server to the new panel, recreate each app, copy files and the database, then switch DNS one site at a time. Neither panel imports the other's configuration, so it is a rebuild rather than a transfer. Lower each domain's DNS TTL a day ahead, copy the site, test it with a hosts file entry, switch the record and keep the old server until every site has moved. ServerPilot bills hourly, so the old server costs only the hours it stays connected. Plan roughly 15 to 30 minutes per WordPress site once the new server is ready, more for sites with custom Apache rules that need rewriting for Nginx.