One company owns WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, a managed host, and enormous influence over WordPress itself. Why that concentration matters to anyone hosting a WordPress site.
WordPress powers a large share of the web and is free, open-source software governed by a foundation. Around it sits Automattic — a private company with a commercial interest in almost every layer of the ecosystem, run by the same person who co-created WordPress. That arrangement has served the project well for two decades and has an obvious structural tension in it.
What Automattic owns
| Property | What it is |
|---|---|
| WordPress.com | Hosted WordPress, from a free tier to enterprise |
| WordPress VIP | Enterprise WordPress hosting for large publishers |
| Pressable | Managed WordPress hosting aimed at agencies |
| WooCommerce | The dominant ecommerce plugin, and its paid extensions |
| Jetpack | Security, backup, CDN and stats, sold as subscriptions |
| Akismet | The spam filter most WordPress sites use |
| Gravatar, Tumblr, Simplenote, Day One | Assorted consumer products |
Separately, the WordPress Foundation holds the WordPress trademark, and WordPress.org — the plugin and theme repository every self-hosted site updates from — is not run by the Foundation but controlled personally by Automattic's chief executive. That distinction is usually invisible and occasionally very consequential.
Why the concentration is mostly benign
Automattic employs a large share of WordPress core contributors, funds development that no one else would, and has kept the software free and GPL-licensed for twenty years while every commercial incentive pointed the other way. Compared with the fate of most open-source projects with a single dominant corporate sponsor, WordPress has done well.
It also means WordPress.com and Pressable never suffer the version mismatches other hosts do, and that WooCommerce is maintained rather than abandoned. The alignment produces real benefits.
Where the tension shows
Jetpack. Bundling security, backup, CDN and statistics into one plugin, promoted from inside the WordPress admin, competes directly with independent plugin businesses that cannot advertise there. It is legal, normal, and an advantage no competitor has.
The 2024 dispute with WP Engine. The most public example of what concentration means in practice. Automattic and its chief executive took a trademark and contribution dispute with WP Engine — one of the largest independent WordPress hosts — into the open, and WP Engine's access to WordPress.org resources was cut off. Control of a popular plugin was transferred away from WP Engine's subsidiary and continued under a new name. Litigation followed and the parties dispute nearly every characterisation of events.
Whatever the legal merits, the episode demonstrated something structural: WordPress.org is infrastructure that thousands of businesses depend on, and it is not neutral infrastructure. A host's access to plugin updates for its customers turned out to be revocable.
What it means for you
For a single small site: very little day to day. WordPress remains free, GPL, forkable and portable, and that is the fundamental protection — nobody can take your site away from you.
Three practical implications worth holding:
- Do not depend on any single plugin you cannot replace. Ownership and maintenance can change hands abruptly, and a plugin renamed or re-pointed mid-flight is now a demonstrated scenario, not a hypothetical.
- Keep your own backups, including the plugin files. If update infrastructure becomes unavailable to your host, having the code you are running matters.
- Treat WordPress.com as a hosting choice, not an allegiance. It is a good managed host with an export button. That export button is the reason it is a safe choice — use it if you ever need to.
The reasonable position is neither alarm nor deference. WordPress is genuinely open and genuinely portable, which is why it remains our default recommendation. But the ecosystem around it has a single very large actor, and building a business on it means understanding where the leverage sits.
Published 30 April 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.