The lowdown on MainWP

Plate spinning is a common occurrence for many developers and agencies.

When it comes to your website maintenance and support offering, your plates – i.e. all of the tools you use – should come from the same ‘set’. A product such as MainWP has a lot of fans, because it lets you manage client sites using a modular set of tools and services.

As a MainWP alternative though, Glow sends it packing.

While MainWP looks like a great all-in-one solution on the surface, Glow is the only truly all-in-one WordPress support & maintenance product on the market. If you need convincing, stick around. We’re going to lay it all out for you over the next few minutes.

MainWP has been a part of WordPress for a long time. It’s a mainstay due to a few different factors:

• You use it within a familiar environment (i.e. the WordPress dashboard)
• It’s an open-source solution
• There is no practical limit on how many sites you can manage
• You add functionality as you see fit, through a modular, extension-based approach

MainWP focuses on the developer with features such as dedicated hooks and filters, a Command Line Interface (CLI), and REST API support. Though, unlike Glow, your client isn’t catered for with MainWP. There aren’t any client-facing features or functionality.

The MainWP business model is much like WordPress itself. There’s a core set of fundamental features, which you bolster using a combination of free and premium extensions. Depending on how you like to work, this could bloat your plugin list to an overwhelming proportion. Take client reports as an example. To create a meaningful report, you’ll need install no less than EIGHT, yes 8 MainWP extensions. I mean, ain’t nobody got time for that.

It’s worth noting however, that MainWP is hot on security. In fact, there’s a dedicated Hackerone page for MainWP. Even so, the number of plugins you’ll have to install across the sites you use is ripe for malicious attention at worst, and intrusive at least.

We’ll talk more about these points throughout the rest of the article. First, we’ll look at why a MainWP alternative should be in your thoughts.

Why you’d want to consider a MainWP alternative

We’d bet you’re reading this because you’re a MainWP user looking to switch, or considering the right solution to make life easier for you in managing all your clients’ WordPress sites. Glow can do the business regardless of your initial needs.

We’re not suggesting MainWP is a bad product by any stretch of the imagination. On the contrary, it’s a successful product that serves thousands of developers, agencies and site owners and has done for many years. Still, we know Glow is competitive and can provide you with great value for your money.

As such, there are a few reasons you might be looking for a MainWP alternative:

• You’re well aware of the pitfalls of email and want to provide a more structured and organised helpdesk support service to your clients … after all, client support is the most important part of your service
• You’re growing tired of slow / non-existent support and need a product where you can rely on getting quick help and support when you need it
• Being able to personalise your WordPress maintenance product to match your brand, is high on your list of priorities
• You want a product that’s moving forward and constantly looking to improve its feature set and user experience
• You’ve checked out other MainWP alternatives and found them all to do basically the same things … you’re looking for something innovative and different
• You’re after a solution that has an excellent set of technical website maintenance and support tools at its core
• You want to use a product tailored to users, without high level business decisions affecting features and functionality
• You’d like a product that covers all aspects of support and maintenance, rather than a select set of available tools

There’s a lot more we could note about Glow as the perfect MainWP alternative. And we’re going to …

Introducing Glow: The truly all-in-one MainWP alternative

At its core, Glow brings client ticket support and WordPress maintenance tasks into one central dashboard.

With your website support and maintenance service, nothing is more important to your clients than the quality of the support you provide them. So we passionately believe that no WordPress management software is complete, without some kind of client support system built-in.

Here’s a few things Glow offers:

• A support ticket system to help you provide the best possible support service to your clients. It integrates with our Reports, Time tracking and Timeline features. No other WordPress management app can offer you a built-in ticketing system.
• All the usual technical WordPress maintenance tools, such as bulk WordPress updates, Uptime monitoring, Performance monitoring, Vulnerabilities and Backups.
• Client Reports and our Timeline feature help you easily showcase the value of ongoing WordPress maintenance to your clients.
• There are some helpful account management tools too, such as one-click access and Teams.
• You can even track the time you’re spending on support and maintenance tasks, for each website you’re looking after.

In short, Glow’s WordPress management software is truly all-in-one and goes well beyond the bare minimum of competing products, making it a perfect MainWP alternative.

Why Glow should be your next MainWP alternative

Let’s break down why Glow makes for a top-notch MainWP alternative. Throughout the next few sections, we’ll show you how Glow compares to MainWP. First off, we’ll talk about Glow’s overall features.

Glow is truly all-in-one, MainWP isn’t

We’ve used the phrase “truly all-in-one” product a few times already. Most website maintenance products state that they’re all-in-one. We disagree with their claims.

As you know, your WordPress care plan service isn’t just about the technical tools you need to do things like update plugins, monitor uptime or take backups.

A huge part of the job is handling client support requests. It’s also, in our opinion, the most important part. Here’s why: if you do this bit poorly, your clients will leave, simple as that. Clients cannot abide by poor quality, slow and unreliable support. Conversely, if you do this bit really well, you’ll have clients for life.

So if you’re using a WordPress maintenance product that doesn’t provide any features that allow you to communicate directly with your clients and handle their support requests, then you should definitely be considering an alternative. Your business will be significantly better off.

Much like Glow, MainWP offers the core features you’d expect from WordPress management software:

• Uptime monitoring
• BackupsA robust set of security features
• Client reporting
• WordPress updates + core/plugins/themes management
• One-click access to clients’ sites

These are all vital and any website maintenance product worth its salt will provide them. However, we’re not a leading MainWP alternative for this reason alone.

One of the biggest differences between Glow and MainWP (and all the other WordPress management products on the market) is that with MainWP, you’ll still need another system of some kind to handle client support requests. In contrast, we prioritise client communications, right within the app.

For starters, there’s a dedicated support ticket system built into the app so clients can reach you whenever they need. This provides you and your team with a disciplined setup to handle every client support request quickly and diligently.

Furthermore, each interaction with your client is recorded and accessible (by both your team and your client’s team) via our Timeline, Client Dashboard and Reporting features.

Also, we have Stopwatch – a way to track the custom development you do on a client-by-client basis. It’s quite likely that you offer your clients an allotted amount of time each month, to request changes and fixes on their website. Well, with Glow, you can track the usage of that time and display it to your clients too. It’s such an easy and effective way to help prove the value of your service. And if you don’t provide allotted time to clients, you can simply use Stopwatch as a way to internally track the time you and your team are spending on your clients’ websites.

There are a bunch of client-facing features too, which we’ll look at next.

Glow gives power to your clients too

If you take even a glancing look at MainWP’s core product, you’ll notice it focuses on the benefits to a developer. For example, easy updating, code snippets, asset management and more. This is, no doubt, a key facet of your WordPress care plan service.

Glow goes further though and is on the side of your clients too. Of course, we offer you the same benefits of working within our ecosystem. Though, your clients will love it too. In fact, we have lots of client-facing features across the board:

• Clients can raise and reply to support tickets directly from their own email, or by accessing their own Glow dashboard (branded to your agency)
• They’re able to access and download reports that you’ve generated
• If you’re managing more than 1 website for them, they can see a list of those sites and one-click log in to any of them, right from the dashboard
• Time tracking, Timeline, Uptime, Backups and Performance information is all available to them as well, so they can easily see how you’re looking after their website(s) (you can turn these features on or off for each client, to customise the experience as you see fit)
• You can add multiple team members for each client and send reports to more than 1 person at a time
• You can also run Glow from your own domain, white label our plugin and have all comms setup to show as having come from you, not us

Our Timeline feature is a huge for helping you prove the value of your service. It integrates with all the other features and really helps your client understand why regular website support and maintenance is vital to their business.

In a nutshell, every action will be recorded, so that your client can see where their money goes. It helps you to be more transparent and keeps your clients in the informed and updated, consistently. Consequently, when combined with regular reports, you’ll have almost everything you need to keep your client convinced in your support and maintenance service, ultimately driving up your client lifetime value.

Glow offers a flexible and personalised experience

One thing that sets Glow apart as a MainWP alternative is how personal the whole experience can be. With MainWP, you’ll have a deep number of WordPress maintenance features, no doubt, but they’re all rigid in design. In other words, the feature set of MainWP doesn’t account for your clients as living entities, only as a pack of features. On the other hand, Glow offers a few ways to make using the app individual for each client.

For example, you’ll likely have some kind of Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your clients, outlining, among other things, the time you’ll spend working on their website. Stopwatch is time tracking for WordPress support and maintenance service providers. It helps you to log all the time you and your team spend working on a client’s website. In simple use cases, you can offer this as proof of the work you’ve completed. On the flip side, the information Stopwatch provides will help you determine how profitable a client is, based on the work you do.

The MainWP alternative: Glow

Your time is precious. As such, you need to bring time-saving tools onboard to manage, maintain, and support your clients’ sites. As a MainWP alternative, Glow offers the ideal blend of features and functionality to make your life easier and keep your clients onboard for longer.

If you’ve been nodding your head all the way through, we’d love to bring you into the fold! We’re really confident that your clients will be more informed than ever, about the value of the service they’re paying you for.

Interested? Book a free demo here.