Keep UpdraftPlus running
Nothing conflicts. Install Backvera alongside it and let both run through the 14-day trial. Compare the restores rather than the marketing.
Thinking of leaving UpdraftPlus?
UpdraftPlus is the most installed backup plugin on WordPress and supports more storage destinations than anyone. The difference is structural, not a feature list: it runs inside your WordPress install and expects you to own the storage, while Backvera runs off your host and includes it. Backvera is less to manage. At volume UpdraftPlus is cheaper.
The short version
Only the rows where the two products actually differ. Everything else is covered further down.
| UpdraftPlus | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $70 a year, 2 site licences | $15 a year per site, or $0 forever on Free |
| Storage included | 1 GB of UpdraftVault. 50 GB only on Gold, at $399 a year | 1 GB Free, 2 GB Starter, 10 GB Business, 50 GB Scale |
| Where the work runs | Inside your WordPress install, on your host’s PHP | On Backvera’s servers, off your host |
| Incremental backups | A Premium feature | Every plan, including Free |
| Fastest schedule | Every 2 hours | Hourly on Business, realtime on Scale |
| Restore granularity | Components: database, core, plugins, themes, uploads | Whole site, files and folders, single tables, or one row such as an order |
| Staging | UpdraftClone, metered in tokens, from $15 for 5 | Included on Business and Scale at no extra cost |
| Store awareness | None documented | WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads and SureCart on Scale |
UpdraftPlus figures taken from teamupdraft.com pricing, feature and documentation pages, checked 12 August 2026. Prices change, so confirm on their site before you decide.
Where the two are the same
Both take incremental backups, encrypt them, restore a whole site, migrate to a new host and let you exclude paths from a snapshot. Neither is unusual there. UpdraftPlus supports more storage destinations than Backvera does, 18 across free and Premium against our 10, so if your requirement is one particular unusual target they will probably win it.
Storage, and who owns it
The central difference. UpdraftPlus is a pipe to storage you own. Backvera is storage with a pipe attached.
| UpdraftPlus | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Included storage | 1 GB of UpdraftVault on every Premium tier. Gold, at $399 a year, includes 50 GB. | 1 GB Free, 2 GB Starter, 10 GB Business, 50 GB Scale, per site. |
| Buying more space | Extra UpdraftVault: 5 GB $35 a year, 15 GB $70, 50 GB $175, 250 GB $450. | Included in the plan price. 50 GB is the Scale plan, at $60 a year. Optional storage addons are available |
| Your own destinations | The whole model. 9 targets on free, 9 more on Premium, 18 in total. | Ten export destinations on Business and Scale: Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, SFTP or a signed webhook. |
| Two places at once | Sending to multiple destinations simultaneously is a Premium feature. | Always. The primary copy stays in Backvera Cloud and your destination receives a mirrored second copy after each backup. |
| Where the data sits | Wherever your account is. Residency is whatever your Drive or S3 account happens to be. | EU, US or Oceania, chosen at setup, on every plan including Free. |
| When the space runs out | Backups to UpdraftVault stop until you delete some or buy more quota. | You are notified at 80% of your allowance. |
This is the row most comparisons get wrong, so here it is precisely. UpdraftPlus does include storage, just not much: 1 GB on every Premium tier below Gold. For a 4 GB site that is not a backup destination, it is a demonstration. The real UpdraftPlus setup is your own Google Drive or S3 bucket, which you configure, pay for and manage. Backvera includes the space, and then on Business and Scale lets you add your own bucket as a second copy on top of it. Those are different products, not different price points.
How the backup actually runs
One runs on your host’s PHP. One does not. Most of what follows is a consequence of that.
| UpdraftPlus | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it executes | In your WordPress install. | On Backvera’s infrastructure. The plugin’s job is to be reachable. |
| What triggers a scheduled run | WordPress scheduling, inside the site. | Backvera’s own scheduler, not WP-Cron, so a site nobody visited still gets backed up. |
| Incremental | A Premium feature. | Every plan including Free. First backup is full, everything after stores only what changed. |
| Fastest schedule | Every 2 hours. | Realtime on Scale. |
| Realtime | Not offered at any tier. | Scale plan. A periodic baseline plus a stream of small deltas, so recent work is protected within minutes. |
| Effect on your host | Backup work uses your PHP workers, memory and execution time. | None of the packing happens on your server. |
To be fair to them, UpdraftPlus is unusually confident about large sites and says so on the record: their documentation states the architecture imposes no limits on backup size and that they are not aware of a website too big to back up. The constraint is not really size. It is that the work competes with your visitors for the same server.
Restore
Everyone can put a whole site back. The question is what happens when you broke exactly one thing.
| UpdraftPlus | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Whole site | Yes. | Yes, on every plan including Free. |
| Choosing what comes back | Tick boxes for database, WordPress core, plugins, themes and uploads. | Individual files and folders, individual database tables, or a single row such as one order or one post. |
| Preview before anything is written | Not offered. | Dry run shows exactly which files and tables a restore would touch, and writes nothing. |
| Safety copy first | Not documented. | Optional safety backup of the live site before an in-place restore, and on by default when you push staging to live. |
| While the restore runs | Through wp-admin, on your own server. | Prepared on an off-host worker, so the site keeps serving visitors while it is prepared. Caches are cleared afterwards. |
| Restoring another plugin’s archives | Premium can restore backups made by other backup plugins. | Not offered. |
That last row goes to UpdraftPlus, and it matters if you are switching. Backvera cannot read an UpdraftPlus archive. The section on moving across says what that means in practice, which is less than it sounds.
Staging and testing
UpdraftClone is a good idea. The pricing model is the thing to check before you assume $70 is your total.
| UpdraftPlus | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Included in the licence | No. UpdraftClone is metered in tokens, bought separately: $15 for 5, $49 for 20, $99 for 50. | Included on Business and Scale at no extra charge. |
| What one clone costs | One token to create, one more for each week it stays up, and 2 to 16 tokens for larger sites. | Nothing beyond the plan price. |
| How long it lives | As long as you keep spending tokens. | 7 days on Business, extendable once. 30 days on Scale, extendable without limit. |
| PHP version | Choose the PHP and WordPress version when you create the clone. | 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 or 8.4, chosen at creation or switched on a running stage, which rebuilds it and keeps your files and database. |
| Privacy of the copy | Not documented. | Password protected by default, with credentials you can see, rotate or replace. |
| Pushing it back to live | Yes, as a migration to any destination including the original site. | Yes, with a safety backup of the live site taken first by default. |
Work the arithmetic before you compare licence prices. A clone kept up for four weeks costs five tokens. Do that on three sites during a redesign and you have spent a $49 pack. Staging is a line item on one side and a plan feature on the other.
WooCommerce and other stores
The clearest gap on this page, and their own blog post is the best evidence for it.
| UpdraftPlus | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Store-specific handling | None. No WooCommerce feature page and no mention of order storage. | WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads recognised on the Scale plan. |
| Orders placed between backups | Lost. On a 2-hour schedule, up to 2 hours of orders. | Realtime on Scale captures store changes as they happen, so a new order is protected within minutes. |
| High-Performance Order Storage | Not mentioned anywhere on their site. | Captured. |
| Getting one order back | Restore the database, and everything else rolls back with it. | Restore the single row. |
| Large catalogues | Bounded by your host’s execution time and memory. | Large databases are backed up in pieces across several passes, and large media libraries stream and resume. |
UpdraftPlus published a guide advising that a busy WooCommerce store should back up daily or in real time. Their product does not offer real time at any tier.
What it costs at your site count
Plan names are not the useful comparison. This is the yearly total for the same job.
| Sites | UpdraftPlus | Backvera |
|---|---|---|
| 1 site | $70 a year (Personal, covers 2), plus storage beyond 1 GB | $36 a year (Business) or $60 (Scale), storage included |
| 2 sites | $70 a year | $72 a year on Business |
| 5 sites | $95 a year (Business, covers 10) | $180 a year on Business |
| 10 sites | $95 a year | $360 a year |
| 35 sites | $145 a year (Agency) | $1,260 a year |
| 50 GB of storage, 1 site | Gold at $399 a year, or Personal plus 50 GB of Vault, $70 + $175 = $245 | Scale, $60 a year |
Read that honestly. Above roughly three sites UpdraftPlus wins on licence cost, and by ten sites it is not a contest. What the licence price leaves out is the storage, which you buy and manage separately unless 1 GB is enough for you. The one place Backvera is dramatically cheaper is storage volume: 50 GB is $60 a year here and $399 a year on UpdraftPlus Gold. If you are one site with a large media library, that is the entire argument. If you are an agency with thirty small sites, so is theirs.
Moving across, in practice
The honest answer is that you cannot import UpdraftPlus backups into Backvera. In practice this matters less than it sounds, because you are not migrating history, you are starting a new one, and the old one stays where it is.
Your old archives stay put
They are in your own Google Drive, Dropbox or S3, and Backvera never touches them. UpdraftPlus can still restore them. Treat them as an archive rather than a migration source.
Only the first backup is slow
Backvera takes one full backup, then incrementals. On a large media library that first pass streams and resumes, so let it finish before judging the speed.
Then switch the old schedule off
Once you have a Backvera restore point you trust, disable the UpdraftPlus schedule. There is no export step and nothing to convert.
When UpdraftPlus is the better choice
Four situations where we would tell you to stay. They are specific because a vague concession is worth nothing.
You want your backups only in storage you control.
Backvera’s primary copy always lives in Backvera Cloud, and an external destination is a second copy on top of it. If your requirement is that no byte is held by the vendor, that is an architecture we do not offer, and UpdraftPlus pointed at your own S3 bucket is the right answer.
You need an unusual storage target.
Eighteen destinations against our ten. If you specifically need Microsoft Azure, WebDAV, pCloud, SCP, Rackspace, OpenStack Swift or DreamObjects, they support it and we do not.
You want your old archives from other plugins to stay readable.
UpdraftPlus Premium can restore backups made by other backup plugins. We cannot. If you have years of BackupBuddy or BackWPup archives you want to keep openable, that feature has no equivalent here.
You are on the free plugin and it is working.
The free version backs up and restores to your own Google Drive, on unlimited sites, at no cost. Our Free plan is weekly backups, 1 GB and 30-day retention on one site. If you already have the storage and the schedule suits you, free is hard to argue with, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
A limitation of ours that has nothing to do with them: Backvera is billed yearly per site, with no lifetime option and no bundled multi-site tier.
Questions people ask before switching
Can I run both at once?
Yes, and during the trial you should. Two backup tools do not conflict, and running them side by side for a fortnight is the only comparison that tells you anything real.
Can Backvera restore my existing UpdraftPlus backups?
No. Backvera restores from its own snapshots. Your UpdraftPlus archives stay in your own storage, untouched, and UpdraftPlus can still restore them.
What happens to my Google Drive or Dropbox connection?
Nothing. Backvera does not need it. If you want a copy there anyway, connect it as an export destination on Business or Scale and Backvera mirrors each backup to it after the backup completes. The full list is Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, SFTP or a signed webhook.
Do I have to cancel UpdraftPlus first?
No. The trial is 14 days with no card, and there is nothing to cancel if you decide against it.
Is incremental really on the free plan?
Yes. The first backup is full, everything after stores only what changed, and every snapshot still restores as a complete site. UpdraftPlus lists incremental as a Premium feature.
What does staging cost here?
Nothing beyond the plan. It is included on Business at $36 a year and Scale at $60. UpdraftClone is metered in tokens bought separately.
How many sites does one Backvera plan cover?
One. That is why Backvera is inexpensive for a handful of sites and more expensive for a large portfolio.
Do you offer a lifetime licence?
No. Backvera is billed yearly, per site.
Run them side by side for a fortnight
14 days free, no card. Keep UpdraftPlus installed and compare what happens when you restore.
Start your 14-day trialComparison figures are taken from each product’s own published pricing, feature and documentation pages and were checked on 12 August 2026. They change, so confirm before you buy, and tell us at [email protected] if you find something out of date here. UpdraftPlus, UpdraftClone and UpdraftVault are the trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to identify those products. Backvera is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of them. WordPress is a trademark of the WordPress Foundation. WooCommerce and its associated designs are trademarks of Automattic Inc.