LocalWP vs DDEV vs SiteShift: Which Local WordPress Tool in 2026?

Three tools come up whenever someone asks how to run WordPress locally in 2026: Local (LocalWP), DDEV and, if you deploy to a lot of different hosts, SiteShift. They solve different problems. This post compares them on the things that decide the choice: what they run on, where they can deploy, and who they are built for. I make SiteShift, so I’ll say where each of the other two is the better pick.

The short version

• Your clients are on WP Engine or Flywheel: use Local. It is free and its one-click push and pull is built for those two hosts.
• You work in a team, use Git and Composer, or want the environment defined in the repository: use DDEV.
• You are a freelancer or small agency with sites spread over shared hosts, VPSes and regional hosts, and you want a GUI: SiteShift is built for that.

Local (LocalWP)

Local is the default answer for a reason. It is free, it runs on macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows and Linux, and it has a lot of polish: one-click WP admin login, SSL, switching PHP versions per site, WP-CLI, and Live Links for showing a local site to a client without deploying it.
Its push and pull (“Local Connect”) works with WP Engine and Flywheel. For any other host, Local’s own documentation points you to a migration plugin instead. That is the one real limit for people with clients on other hosts: the local half of the workflow is excellent, the deploy half depends on where the site lives.

DDEV

DDEV is an open-source, terminal-first tool that runs your project in containers. You need a container runtime: Docker, or on macOS something like OrbStack or Colima, or rootless Podman. In return you get an environment that lives in the repository (a .ddev folder), so everyone on the team gets the same PHP version, database and services, and you can reuse it in CI.
DDEV can pull and push the database and uploaded files with Pantheon, Acquia, Lagoon and Upsun, and it ships example recipes for generic rsync, Git and local-file sources. Those integrations move the database and user files; code is expected to travel through version control. That fits a Git-based workflow very well. It fits less well if you simply want to press a button and send a site to a shared host.

SiteShift

SiteShift is a desktop app with a dashboard, and it does not use Docker. It runs sites on native PHP and database binaries it manages itself, gives every site a .localhost address with HTTPS, and pushes and pulls files and the database over SSH or SFTP to any host you can reach that way. Before a push you get a review screen that lists what will change, and a push only adds and overwrites files on the server, it never deletes them (why that rule matters).
The trade-offs are real. SiteShift is paid (€9 per month excluding VAT, see pricing), it runs on macOS with Apple Silicon and on Windows, and there is no Intel Mac or Linux build. It is also a tool for one person or a small team at a laptop, not a replacement for a Git-driven team setup.

Side by side

How to choose

Start from where your sites live, not from the tool.

1. If most of your sites are on WP Engine or Flywheel, stop here: Local is free and does exactly this.
2. If the project is code-heavy (Composer, a custom theme with a build step, several developers), DDEV’s environment-as-code is worth the container overhead.
3. If your hosts are a mix of shared hosting, a VPS and regional providers, and you want one app to get a site there and back, try SiteShift. There are guides for Hostinger, TransIP, SiteGround, Hostnet and DigitalOcean.

Plenty of people use two of them. A DDEV project for the codebase and a different tool to move a client site from an old host to a new one is a perfectly sensible setup. For a closer look at SiteShift next to Local, see the LocalWP comparison, or six LocalWP alternatives compared.