Launching EasyEngine Web Dashboard with WP Cloud Integration

Since we launched EasyEngine Command Line Interface (CLI) in 2014, one of the most requested features has been a web interface to manage WordPress sites and servers.

After powering 75000+ WordPress sites across the world through the CLI, we’re excited finally to launch EasyEngine Dashboard, a modern web interface built for developers, agencies, indie hackers, and teams who want the same EasyEngine power but without the command-line overhead.

Why We Built It

While originally people wanted just a web interface, many other features, such as team collaboration, backups, and monitoring, were cumbersome to use via command line and hence remain in our backlog.

So we started building a web dashboard internally at rtCamp to solve our needs. Every day we have hundreds of WordPress sites to manage for our more than 200 employees. A web interface with added features (explained below) has reduced our system team’s workload dramatically.

What happens to the EE CLI version?

Our commitment to open source remains unchanged. We will continue to build and maintain the CLI version. In fact, when you use Dashboard to provision a server, we check if the remote server has CLI. If not found, we automatically install CLI on the remote server.

Thereafter, most site-related features from the web interface trigger CLI commands on your server.

If you login to the server directly, you will be able to use EE CLI commands directly on it. In fact, we are the only solution in this “WordPress control panel” category where you can cancel our subscription, delete your EE Dashboard account, and still continue to manage your server using EE CLI commands.

After supporting the CLI project for 11 years, we hope that we manage to find a business model for EasyEngine with the Dashboard offering. If this works out, we will be not only supporting CLI but doubling down its development.

Our vision is to offer Dashboard as a web interface for convenience and additional features.

More about WP Cloud

As mentioned earlier, EasyEngine Dashboard was started as an internal project. We showed it to some friends who felt that we need more features to handle production-grade WordPress hosting than what EasyEngine can offer out of the box. 

That is when we came across WP Cloud and felt its compliments on what EE offers. As of now, you need to bring your WP Cloud API keys. We provide an interface and some additional features (e.g., team management) on top of WP Cloud. 

In the future, we plan to offer WP Cloud site creation under our API key.

We expect people will use a mix of EE CLI-based and WP Cloud sites based on their needs.

Here is a feature comparison between EE CLI and WP Cloud so you can decide when to use what.

EE Dashboard only features 

Below are some features you will get right away:

1. Web interface for site management (create, delete, edit)
2. Enable/disable/update credentials for PHPMyAdmin, Mailhog, HTTP Auth, and other admin tools
3. Manage multiple servers from a single interface 
4. Automatically create VPS with different providers
5. Team management with granular roles per user/per site
6. Easy site sharing within your organization
7. Permanent audit trail of user actions
8. Backups with the option to offload them to S3-compatible cloud storage.
9. View PHP, Nginx, and WordPress logs via the web interface.
10. Cache toggle/ purge from the web interface
11. CI/CD integration with GitHub
12. SSH key management
13. Realtime server load graphs for CPU, RAM, and disk space
14. Single sign on using Google Login
15. New Relic integration

A few upcoming features we have on the roadmap are:

1. Uptime monitoring
2. WordPress theme and plugin update checks, including vulnerabilities scanner
3. CrowdSec for better security and firewall
4. Performance monitoring and integration with webauditor.io
5. WordPress multisite support on WP Cloud 

VPS Provider Supported

In the first release, we added support for AWS, DigitalOcean, and Hetzner. If you add your API keys, we can directly provision servers on your account.

Apart from above, we support any Linux VPS running Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04.

One special addition is WP Cloud support, which is the only provider where EE CLI is not used.

Pricing

We have plans starting at $9/month. Different plans have different servers and site limits. 

We do not plan to offer an unlimited plan, but at scale, you can manage additional sites for $0.5/month. This addon is a work in progress but will only affect you if you plan to manage more than 100 sites. In this case, just be on our currently highest plan ($49/month) and open a support request. We will manually and temporarily remove the server/site limit on your plan to unlimited while addon pricing feature is being implemented.

All our plans offer unlimited team members. We believe in teamwork, so we want you to invite all your team to the party!

We also offer a free plan so you can test out things and decide if it’s worth paying for the dashboard.

A Note of Thanks ❤️

In the past 11 years, EasyEngine CLI has been through many ups and downs, largely because it was a zero-revenue project. 

We want to thank our thousands of users for still sticking around and our donors who cheered us from time to time.

Whether you prefer the command-line interface or the dashboard, we hope to make it easy for you to manage WordPress sites at scale.

Links: EasyEngine Dashboard | CLI | WPCloud | Feature Request