Tools for looking after many WordPress sites have been around for more than ten years and they are mature: they do their job well, and they have a free plan that is hard to beat when the sites are many and the demands few. If you are weighing up a switch, this page tells you how we differ — including the things they have and we do not.
The prices below come from the public price list of the most widely used tool in this category, checked in August 2026, and they are in dollars and per site; ours are in euros and per plan. We do not name names because price lists change and a comparison ages: if something looks wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
Helm puts everything inside a single plan and charges by number of sites. The classic model does the opposite: it starts from a generous free plan — often unlimited sites, with a monthly backup — and then sells every function as an add-on, per month and per site. The difference shows when the sites become the real ones, the ones you answer for.
Their amounts are per site and per month: multiply them by how many sites you have, every month. The one item we do not have is written as missing, not as “coming soon”.
Take the bare minimum for a site you answer to a client for: backups, monitoring, vulnerabilities and reports. With us they are inside the plan; in the à la carte model they are four add-ons — $2 + $1 + $2 + $1 = six dollars a month per site.
From 25 sites upwards these tools usually offer a bundle — the most common one costs $150 a month for up to 100 sites — which beyond a certain scale beats their own à la carte numbers. Below that threshold, and for anyone with ten or twenty serious sites, the gap stays wide. Above 50 sites we currently have no listed plan: it is agreed case by case.
included · free on their free plan · paid add-on · absent · not present in their public lists
They are ten years older than us and it shows: a breadth of tools we do not have today, and a free plan that is hard to beat when the sites are many and the demands few.
We did not try to rebuild what already existed. We looked at what actually wastes the time of people who look after other people's sites, and built on that.
WordPress answers “200 OK” even when it is dead: the database error screen, the critical error, the blank page, the suspended account. A check that stops at the response code reports everything as fine while your client's site shows an error screen. Ours recognises those pages, and on top of that you can name a word that has to be there — the cart button, a phone number — and we tell you when it disappears.
HTTPS certificates and domains have a date, written months in advance, and they are the two most embarrassing outages to suffer: there is nothing to diagnose, it is just that nobody remembered. Warnings at 30, 14, 7, 3 and 1 day, and two months ahead for the domain. It is usually absent from the others' feature lists.
Ask in plain language which sites run plugins with known flaws and it answers on your fleet's real data, then offers to update them — and only starts after your confirmation. It explains vulnerabilities in normal words instead of handing you a CVE code. And if you also sell content, it writes the article, generates the images and publishes it. In this category's feature lists, as of August 2026, there is no trace of AI.
There is no checkbox for each capability, site by site. What you see in the plan is what you get on every site, and you know the end-of-month bill in advance — including when you add the tenth client.
Keys with the scopes you choose, a rate limit, and a full endpoint reference: sites, updates, backups, security, availability, articles. If you already have a dashboard of your own, Helm plugs into it.
Global search, a unified activity log that also sees changes made outside it, live status updates, and a complete guide with real screenshots. It sounds like a detail until you spend two hours a day in there — and the interfaces in this category often carry ten years on their shoulders.
Two sites forever, no credit card. Connecting the first one takes a couple of minutes: if it does not convince you, you have lost a coffee.