WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, and has been for several years. This means that an entire ecosystem of services and infrastructure has grown around WordPress. The beautiful thing is that consumers now have many different options when it comes to hosting, themes, plugins, and even DevOps tools like SlickStack for setting up easy WordPress LEMP servers.

The below comparisons are not meant to be “which one is better” because it depends on your situation and goals. For many years, WordPress has held a “decisions, not options” philosophy meaning that best practices should typically be implemented to ensure quality and consistency, instead of giving end users too many options. This philosophy is deeply held by SlickStack, perhaps even more than WordPress Core team at this point. But if you are a super geeky computer engineer, you might like having more “options” to play around with.

What are the main alternatives to SlickStack? Please see below list and click for a comparison table.

EasyEngine. King of WordPress DevOps tools for several years, EasyEngine has recently pulled back a lot of their development and moved to using Docker containers after version 4. This greatly divided their fanbase, leading to a few forks/copycats, as many users felt Docker was too bloated/overkill for most WordPress servers. With love from India.

CentminMod. Options galore, with the benefit of a traditional Bash CLI. Useful for tinkering around and trying many different stacks including bleeding edge new features. However, too many options for some less geeky users who just want something stable and easy to manage. Out of Australia, brilliant.

Webinoly. Not exactly a fork of EasyEngine, but a sort of copycat that grabbed a good chunk of fans pretty quickly. Actively developed, based out of Mexico, which is kinda cool.

WordOps. A direct fork of EasyEngine v3, before the Docker drama. Actively developed.

OneInStack. They’re not kidding, a million options available, but with the downside of tons of maintenance and attention required. Not for newbies, or even mid-level users. Very extensive, but if you don’t know what you’re doing you will definitely mess up your stack.

VPSSIM. Created in Vietnam, which for some reason has a very passionate and even disproportionately large LEMP fan community. Their homepage has suffered in recent years with some malware infections and the appearance of looking kinda dead, but it seems the stack itself is still sometimes updated.

AnsiPress. Dead. Probably for the same reason as most Ansible focused WordPress stacks, which is that it requires tons of time and upkeep, and is kinda complicated.

Trellis. Made by the super smart guys at Roots agency, who have been ahead of the curve for years now. Many of their tools are too much to handle for typical developers, and Trellis does rely on Ansible which is a no-go for many teams. But if you have a very established IT department, with strict workflow, it might be a match made in heaven.