WP Umbrella vs. ManageWP : Our Comparison
(Disclaimer: The WordPress corporate community can be full of taking sides and putting one company down in favor of another. Especially when specific hosting companies come into play. This article is not meant to disparage anyone who works at or with ManageWP or WP Umbrella. We aim to give an objective and fair review of both tools without malice so that you can decide which is the better fit for you. Because we honestly love them both.)
Here at Web Pro Geeks – like thousands of other companies around the world – we provide WordPress maintenance services. Up until recently, we did the bulk of that work using a tool called ManageWP. But about five months ago, we began exploring a new option: WP Umbrella. So we wanted to try to answer the question…Which is better – WP Umbrella vs ManageWP?
What is ManageWP?
ManageWP is one of the most popular WordPress website management tools. It’s got a lengthy history, growing and evolving with the ecosystem over time. It was first launched in 2012, created by developer Vladimir Prelovac. In 2016, they launched an updated version of the tool called Orion. And later that year, they partnered with GoDaddy and began integrating ManageWP into the GoDaddy Pro program.
Its flagship features include:
- Managing and updating multiple WordPress websites from one dashboard
- Backups and migration tools
- Monitoring for security and site health
- Tracking for SEO and sending custom reports
You connect your site to ManageWP with a plugin. Once installed, you can either grab a connection key from your dashboard which goes into ManageWP, or you can use your login credentials.
The plugin is available for free in the WordPress plugin directory.
ManageWP operates with a “freemium” model. The pricing kicks in only with premium versions of the add-ons. You can upload sites and manage them from the dashboard for free; there is no membership fee to get started.
For more dynamic, powerful, or automated versions of the add-ons, there are fees. For example, monthly scheduled automatic backups are free. If you want on-demand backups, flexible scheduling, cloning and migration tools, or multisite network support, you’ll need to pay $2/month per site.
Manage WP Review
Speaking personally, I’ve used ManageWP (or some version of it) for years. I was an ambassador for the GoDaddy Pro program through which I was able to travel and tell people how awesome I thought the product was.
We’ve relied on ManageWP here at Web Pro Geeks for nearly the entire lifespan of the company. We currently have 50 sites on our account and our team uses it every day.
Here’s What we Love About ManageWP
Free backups
We love that we can pop a site on our account and set up free backups for it. This is great for old sites, staging sites, or sites we just want to hold on to but don’t need a ton of attention.
Migration tools
One of the things we use ManageWP for most often is migrating sites. It’s stupidly easy to add both the old and new site to ManageWP. Just two steps and you can “copy” the new site design over the new. This process has been nearly flawless for us each time, barring the odd caching issue.
Modular add-on options
It’s very useful to be able to customize each site individually. We’re able to sell different packages and options to clients based on how we can scale the add-ons. If you want one site to just be on the site so you can monitor that, you can for free. If you want to give one site every feature, bell, and whistle, you can. And you’re only paying for what you need.
Customer support
We love the support team at ManageWP. Every time we’ve written in with a question, issue, or emergency, their team has been quick to reply. There is minimal back and forth. Instead, they work quickly to solve the problem with us.
As much as we like ManageWP, we’re publishing this review because in the past year, we have migrated some of our management to another tool: WP Umbrella.
GoDaddy perks
ManageWP offers the paid add-on features to GoDaddy hosted sites for free. Need we say more?
Here are our Biggest ManageWP Frustrations:
Reporting
The reporting tools are inelegant, a little bulky, and worse still… don’t entirely work. There is a function to email a report to a client automatically once the report is generated. However, this function never worked for us. It would say “Generating” forever, then fail. We had to generate the reports manually, download a PDF, then send the report to the client directly. We also found that visually, the provided report never looked as professional and clean as we wanted.
Managing services
As much as we like the modular way you can add and remove add-ons from sites, it’s hard to see at a glance which sites have which add-ons. There is a great filter tool which shows you sites that have certain addons (Show me all the sites using premium backups, etc.) But we always wished we could look at one site, see all the active add-ons, and the total cost of that site.
Struggle to get reliable notifications
We wanted to be able to get notifications in our company Slack channel if something went wrong with a site. We were never fully able to get these notifications to work on a reliable basis.
Buggy/slow behavior
This was the biggest frustration for us. On a regular basis, we’d experience bugs, slow speeds, or unexpected behavior. Sometimes it wouldn’t properly flag plugins or themes that had gone out of date. ManageWP would sometimes disconnect from sites for no apparent reason. This lack of reliability was huge for us.
Let’s move on to discussing the newer tool: WP Umbrella
What is WP Umbrella?
WP Umbrella is one of the newer WordPress management tools. It was founded in 2021 by Thomas Deneulin and Aurelio Volle. They rely on values of freedom, agility, iteration, kindness, and benevolence. And they actively market themselves as a modern alternative to ManageWP.
Its flagship features include:
- Safe updates and automation
- Backups and restoration
- Monitoring and site health
- Security and vulnerability management
- Client reporting
You also connect your site to WP Umbrella with a plugin. Once installed, you paste in your universal API key into the plugin settings. This ties your site to WP Umbrella instantly.
WP Umbrella uses a very linear payment structure: $2.19 per site, per month, with all features included. There are a few add-ons that are available, but they’re very specialized (Site Protect with Patchstack for $2 per site per month and Hourly Backups for $2.49 per site per month.) There are no limits on how many sites you can add for the base price of $2.19.
WP Umbrella Review
WP Umbrella hasn’t taken over in place of ManageWP for us. We use both tools for their own unique strengths simultaneously. We started using WP Umbrella on October 24, 2025. We’ve been using it daily for five months. We currently manage 60 websites through this tool. After conducting some research into ManageWP alternatives, WP Umbrella was most appealing and relevant to our needs.
Let’s get into the WP Umbrella pros and cons.
Here’s What we Love About WP Umbrella
Flexible and reliable monitoring
WP Umbrella reliably sends us reports to our Slack channel about software vulnerabilities, downed sites, etc. These were things we struggled to keep track of in the past and WP Umbrella makes them seamless.
Auto cache clearing
We love that WP Umbrella will give you the choice to automatically clear the site’s cache for you after every update. Doing this from the dashboard helps prevent plugin conflicts and cuts back on any potential site downtime.
Automatic database updates for WooCommerce and Elementor
No-brainer. We like not having to log into the site in order to check for and perform these updates. The point of a website management tool like this is to eliminate the need to log into the site at all. So we like this additional feature.
Backups are GDPR compliant
ManageWP does have GDPR ready features. But they need to be configured by you, the account owner. WP Umbrella does it all for you out of the box.
Extra information, like domain and SSL expiry
WP Umbrella just gives us more information about our sites that we can use for maintenance, optimization, and that we can pass on to our clients. We love being able to see things like:
- The dates on which a site’s domain or SSL expires
- Extra details within the speed and performance section
- Monitoring for PHP errors
- The ability to optimize the database per site
Beautiful and powerful reporting
One of the biggest gripes we had with ManageWP was the reports. WP Umbrella has beautiful modern reports that are not only easier to send, but easier to update with details about custom work. We wish they were a bit more customizable, but they are an improvement.
Price total
While we do like the ability to scale the cost up and down with each site on MWP, for us, the WPU won in this category. When we made the switch, we found that we cut our monthly maintenance bill down by 14%.
Here are our Biggest WP Umbrella Frustrations:
Slower updates
The first thing we noticed when moving sites over to WP Umbrella was how slow it is. Plugins and themes take longer to complete than they do in ManageWP. This isn’t the worst thing in the world; we assume that it’s doing it in a more thorough or careful way. However, the backups are where we really hit a wall.
Can’t bulk client reports
While we love the reporting feature in WP Umbrella, we find it seriously lacking in one aspect. We have one client for whom we manage ten websites. We want to be able to generate one report for them that includes details about all of their websites. This is possible, but only if it’s scheduled. We aren’t able to pull a report for this client whenever we want. Instead, we have to pull a report for each of the ten sites one by one.
And if we do select the scheduling option, it’s very limited. We can select either a day of the week, or a date of the month. So for example, every 28th of the month. It doesn’t matter if the 28th lands on a Saturday. Or if we need the report on the 30th. The scheduler just doesn’t work that way.
Frustrating backups
The initial backup of a small/medium sized website can take hours. We contacted WP Umbrella support about this and they let us know that that is the expected behavior. Later backups take less time, but the first one takes a while.
Having used ManageWP for years, I’m accustomed to being able to do multiple things at once. Bulk updates, or setting one site to do something, then triggering a different site to do something else. WP Umbrella forces you to move much slower. A few of our sites crashed because more than one backup was set to run at once. This is why we still use ManageWP for all of our backups and WP Umbrella for everything else.
No migration option
ManageWP’s aforementioned migration feature is not present with WP Umbrella. They offer migrations as a service, but not as a part of our tools. Given that we don’t use the backup feature on WP Umbrella anyway, it’s not the end of the world. But if you like being able to use your management tool to do migrations, you’ll miss it here.
Login issues
We like being able to manage site access to certain team members. Very few of us have direct login access to a client site. Our site managers and developers have access through WP Umbrella and ManageWP. We have found on WP Umbrella that sometimes the login access does not work.
So, let’s sum up the pros and cons for our team of using WP Umbrella vs. ManageWP.
ManageWP Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Free backups | Reporting |
| Migration tools | Managing services |
| Modular add-on options | Struggle to get reliable notifications |
| Customer support | Buggy/slow behavior |
WP Umbrella Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Flexible and reliable monitoring | Slower updates |
| Auto cache clearing | Frustrating backups |
| Automatic database updates for Woo and Elementor | No migration option |
| Backups are GDPR compliant | Login issues |
| Extra information | Can bulk client reports |
| Beautiful and powerful reporting | |
| Price total |
So, WP Umbrella vs. ManageWP: Which one should you use?
It really depends on what services and features are the most important to you. For our WordPress website maintenance packages, we use both. At Web Pro Geeks, we do the bulk of our maintenance on WP Umbrella. It has everything we want and some things we didn’t even know we needed. Luckily, most of the things that it’s missing, we can still find on ManageWP for little to no cost.
I highly encourage you to try out both. You can add sites to ManageWP for free, and WP Umbrella provides a free trial. Try them on with your sites, your team, and your workflow.
