Pantheon Reviews & Product Details

What defines Pantheon other than the intelligently designed DevOps setup is speed and efficiency. The speed of deployment, setup and the development workflow as well as content delivery on the front end.

I have been recommending Pantheon to my clients for years, not just because of the great workflow, performance benefits and great support but mostly because it makes developing so streamlined, from the effortless multi-dev environments to game changing tools like Terminus. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only downside I find is there is a lack of an entry level option lower in price and performance than the "Basic" offering. I find some clients would prefer something like that for very small websites or blogs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pantheon does an excellent job of balancing ease of use for site owners with powerful development tools that make it an agency favorite for both our Drupal and WordPress teams. They provide an easy to use development-staging-production WebOps workflow that makes it simple to avoid nasty surprises on a production site, and it’s free to get started building a “sandbox” of your online experience. Scheduled backups, Varnish caching, a global CDN, SSL certificates, and strong server security are all rolled into even their most basic plan, giving you a fast and secure site at a competitive price point.

One of the unique standout features of Pantheon from an agency perspective is their “multidev” capability, which allows us to create feature-based testing environments without touching the main development site. This makes it much easier for client teams and stakeholders to take their time reviewing proposed changes to the site, without interrupting or complicating ongoing maintenance and real-time deployment.

Pantheon is also intentional about giving back to both the Drupal and WordPress communities to provide training, tools, conference and meetup sponsorship, and support to various open-source projects, which is laudable and worth rewarding. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A downside of strong server security and caching configuration is that your access to the servers at Pantheon is extremely limited. They have a custom command line tool you can use; and if that tool doesn’t do what you want to do, then you don’t have many other options (unless you’re working with a team who knows Pantheon inside and out). If your organization requires specific security audits, penetration testing, or other server review processes, they can be challenging to conduct thoroughly in Pantheon’s environment. We’ve also found that layering additional “best practices” caching and security tools, especially for WordPress, can have unpredictable and opaque results.

Pantheon’s pricing is competitive, but large spikes in your traffic can cause costs to skyrocket quickly. Their base plan may be a financial stretch for small, lean organizations or personal sites.

Finally, be aware that if you’re running a “multisite” network of sites from a single instance of Drupal or WordPress, Pantheon does not support this architectural model. They offer alternative approaches, but this can be a dealbreaker if you simply want to migrate what you already have. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pantheon's automation is the best. Pantheon's dashboards and the isolation between dev, test, and production environments let us stage changes for public, client review. Then, once the client approves the changes, it's only one click to deploy. It's also one-click for most Drupal core upgrades.

Pantheon is also high performance -- they somehow handle varnish caching automatically without getting in my way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pantheon has had some high-profile outages and data loss lately. Adding insult to injury, their response to these outages has not been handled well. As a long-time customer of Pantheon, during these outages I didn't feel like Pantheon really cared what impact the outage had on my business. They also made several promises to follow-up and keep us informed that they didn't follow through on.

Separately, we are finding it difficult to integrate Pantheon into a larger multi-cloud, micro-services architecture. We wish there was an easier way for sites hosted on Pantheon to communicate with our private clouds without going over the public internet. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pantheon knows what they're best at, and focuses on just doing that. By focusing on WordPress and Drupal as their only supported platform, support staff is able to offer support for software as well as the hosting environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are a lot of limitations or specific requirements for using the Pantheon platform. If you follow coding best practices you should be in good shape, however all of the optimizations they do for site performance as well as the CDN require some changes to your workflow. For example one can only write to the server on the Dev environment, Test and Live are locked down. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the way the backups for code and database are managed those are very helpful to keep the site integrity over time.

It is very easy to manage the content between environments some times you did an incorrect update in the database and it is necessary to start over with the deploy so in those cases those tools for restoring previous backups are very helpful.

The security option to avoid the site being 100% public is very helpful during development phases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

By default, you are only able to use master branch so initially in the first level without the multisite option working only in the master branch makes it difficult to test different functionalities that can be added to a different branch and deployed to the site.

Some times when you are working with different repositories the use of different tools to improve the deploy as terminus so the documentation related to the integration of terminus with different repositories as GitHub, bitbucket, and others will be helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If you are skilled and want to learn Pantheon, I believe they're a good option. I also don't think those considering Pantheon because of its differences with the majority of hosting companies should read into my review.

However, if your anything but super technical, they might not be ideal.

Backups are easy, and can be scheduled or manually done. When manually backing up, it works 90% of the time. There is significant support documentation which is helpful because Pantheon is not similar to any other hosting provider, so everything you've learned from cpanel can be thrown out the window.

The interface is nice, and easy to navigate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I want to preface this with the fact that I don't know if my review is fair. I believe Pantheon is a good company, and I am the wrong customer. I am a business owner with an ability to build and maintain my site, however, all of my skills come from me following tutorials online. - So take this for what it is worth.

Pantheon requires a high level of understand, not basic. Virtually anytime I want to implement something I've learned elsewhere from a tutorial online, I am immediately confronted with the fact that Pantheon runs on nginx, so most tutorials found elsewhere are of no use.

Multidev always have 504 errors. Which requires you to refresh your page a couple of times to get it to clear. - This is always frustrating, but only happens on multidev and not live.

Support is hit or miss. I've been on support chats with some incredible people on Pantheon, and they will go above and beyond to help. They're patient, provide me with suggestions and documentations, and walk me through what I need to do with clear screenshots and explanations.

However, other times, I am met with someone who is not interested in supporting me, is not patient, and does not want to clearly explain things.

Their staging platform is too complex and there are always issues. After using Pantheon for a few years and struggling to find a seamless was to commit changes, I hired a developer with Pantheon experience, and he too was met with complex issues just committing a staging site to live. - So I believe the complexity does carry over a little bit to those with more skill than me.

I believe some of my most frustrated moments in the last years have been a result of me simply trying to publish changes to my site, only for Pantheon to throw issue after issue my way.

The price is also too high. Once you reach 30k page views, the cost goes from around $40 to more than $200. Comparing that with WPX.net, a company I have my eye on switching over to, the price bump would go from $25 to $50 once you reach that mid-tier. - Maybe I am comparing apples to oranges here because Pantheon does a bit more, but their added features are not justifiable by someone who just has a simple Wordpress business site. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The process of pushing local development to a dev server, then to a test server, then live, then pulling a live db back down to local to implement new tools or testing... this is extremely smooth and easy. From the pantheon lando recipe to terminus commands, the process is smooth and easy. Spin up dev environments and create full backups with a click of a mouse. And, they take care of a lot of security details that we no longer have to be so crazy about... it's just done for you. I've even had issues with third party stuff that Pantheon doesn't necessarily provide support for, and they've always been 100% helpful in getting me answers or pointing me in the right direction. It's really a breath of fresh air using their service. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I can't think of much to dislike other than price. Pricing is fine to pass on when you have business clients, but, not necessarily doable for personal sites or startups without funding. Still, in those cases, I would recommend starting up your site elsewhere and then moving it to pantheon when budget allows, to take advantage of all pantheon offers in performance, security features, etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It makes it super easy to set up WordPress along with being able to have multiple environments to make testing super easy. I also like the requirement to actually commit code to install a plugin which requires a little more knowledge and adds a little barrier to add code to the site that is not custom-built for the site. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The quality of support has gone down a little over the past year. There is still a fair amount of help it just seems like Pantheon has been going through a growth spurt and I've been through this with other similar companies in the past hopefully it will pass and everything will get better. Pantheon is still a good choice. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The support with Pantheon is top-notch. We now have 3 websites on Pantheon and I wouldn't think about switching. They work with each year on our billing and we are so grateful for having great people that work at Pantheon. Overall, the system is great and offers. lots of services. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only downside is you have to pay for multisite if you don't have a certain subscription. Support can also be expensive if you don't go with a certain plan.

I would love a little more control over our server settings. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Customer support is amazing, constant training courses, and 24-7 help.

With Pantheon, there is no system administration or server management to do. Backups can be scheduled automatically.

Berkeley has negotiated reduced rates and improved features for all levels of hosting service.

The monthly hosting cost is lower than an on-campus solution (webfarm web server and database instance).

Basically the entire process of dev ops makes this wonderful and having constant support is just unbelievable.

Their terminus command lines also allow you to make changes without having to log into Pantheon's back-end. This feature is wonderful and when used in conjunction with WP CLI is is even better. These often are how you can get things done when WordPress is having an issue.

They offer 24-7 support but also in chat logs with people. I have used this many times and love it. One of the best features. These chat logs are saved and emailed to you so that you have records of them.

Lastly, they offer free 2-3 hour training courses. These are wonderful for people and I was very excited when I started using them. They will record the entire session and will email you the video of it as well for future use.

You have direct contact with them at all times and their higher silver and gold packages are wonderful for a direct contact.

All in all I am so impressed with Pantheon and I have NEVER seen a better service and stability than them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Learning curb at the very start can be slightly challenging. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My team purchased Diamond Support with our hosting plan and it has proven to be a great value. The onboarding process has been very smooth so far. I really like my "customer success" engineer.

The tooling is great, too. I am so excited to be offering my clients SOLR search, caching with Redis, and fastly's CDN. Our web pages have never loaded so fast. I love how I can hookup GitLab CI/CD with Pantheon in a comprehensive pipeline that includes multi-dev, dev, test, and live environments. My developers and I have never had it so good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some members of my team are disappointed that they don't get to manage our servers anymore. Hahaha! Seriously, I haven't encountered anything on Pantheon that I have disliked. Well, I suppose I dislike that we don't have access to the cutting-edge version of Apache SOLR. On the other hand, I'm sure they'll upgrade soon enough. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pantheon has allowed me us to automate our workflow, limit malware and php intrusions, and get a handle of our dev-ops with a single container for each applications environments and version control. This saves a ton of time spent on maintenance and in many cases eliminates some of the tasks we needed to complete for our maintenance contracts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I can't say I have any dislikes of the Pantheon system. However, I would recommend some form of built-in reporting that can be presented in a simple way for managed clients. I.e. after making upgrades, maintenance fixes it would be great if Pantheon kept a log with some details that can be auto-compiled into a white-labeled report. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pantheon provides development and test environments, GIT access, SSL certificate, and content delivery network (CDN) for every site and the cost is very reasonable. They provide excellent documentation. We've transferred a dozen sites to Pantheon and the performance is great. Once the sites were uploaded, there was no additional work needed to tweak the configuration to improve performance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is no option for only using an external git respository unless you create a custom upstream. Once configured on a local machine, you can push to both Pantheon and an external repository however the external repository would now contain Pantheon specific files. It would also be create to have the option to enable image compression (e.g. GooglePagespeed). Sales and support performance are on par for similar organizations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pantheon automatically gives each site a dev, test, and staging server and has a good workflow. Code is pushed up, content is pushed down. It also automatically backs up each server on a daily and weekly schedule and has a CDN and page cache. It works in git or SFTP Mode, and has a multi-dev environment too. It also has nice error alert features and great security. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This host takes a bit of getting used to for non-technical users. I use it with my clients and handle their hosting for them. I imagine I would have a hard time training a non-technical client in managing the hosting and teaching them the process for updating plugins and pushing the code up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that I can easily download a copy of my site to work on and either push directly to Pantheon, or use something like Bitbucket to host the code and Pantheon updates pretty quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes guides are a little hard to find, so usually I google a question about pantheon, find the guide that way, and then leave it open in a tab until I need it again. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Agile developer flow that doesn't let you take shortcuts to send something live - needs to pass through dev and staging. Code changes made through FTP must be committed. Multi-dev environments where you can develop components in isolation. Easy to update WordPress/Drupal cores using the provided upstream branch. Never had an issue with performance. Unlimited backups. Support team can be reached in a matter of minutes via live chat. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Bit costly when hosting a basic website. Solr indexing provided by Pantheon is quite an old version. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Moving our domain to the new hosting provider was very easy and the hoster did all the bureaucratic work for us. I find it very good that we can see all the functions in the admin panel and can independently activate or deactivate extensions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Registering new domains now takes a long time and a lot of additional information is obtained each time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pantheon's "opinionated" platform is well thought out, and the setup saves tons of development time compared to more basic hosting plans. Pantheon may as well be the gold standard for how to host -- how to keep sites running well, how to avoid common development problems, and how to develop more quickly because you're not fiddling around with creating a custom setup that keeps things running well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Pantheon Dashboard, once excellent, is now a barely functional mess. They said that a new version is coming soon, but I wish it hadn't broken so badly in the meantime. The problems don't stop me from getting things done, but they make certain tasks more confusing and a little slower than they need to be. I hope that they fix all the dashboard problems soon. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One of the nice features of Pantheon is how easy it is to migrate from a dev environment to production. As most WordPress developers know it's difficult to migrate files and a database between local, dev, staging and production environments Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not being able to ssh into the containers is a big draw back. For most users i'd think Pantheon is sufficient to host their WordPress website. Then there are people who want access to their entire infrastructure. I'd like to b able to use my own image maybe with a base image from Pantheon and have ssh access to the container Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.