Leave BackWPup installed
Two backup tools do not conflict. Run both through the 14-day trial and compare what happens when you actually restore something.
Thinking of leaving BackWPup?
BackWPup has over 400,000 free installs and is now maintained by WP Media, the WP Rocket team. As a scheduler writing archives to storage you own, it is solid and cheap. The gap is everything after the backup: no staging at any tier, no advertised incremental, and a restore that offers you two choices, the database or the whole site. If you need to put one broken thing back without rolling everything else back with it, this is a different product.
The short version
Only the rows where the two products actually differ. Everything else is covered further down.
| BackWPup | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $49 a year, 2 domains | $15 a year per site, or $0 forever on Free |
| Storage included | None, at any tier. Bring your own. | 1 GB Free, 2 GB Starter, 10 GB Business, 50 GB Scale |
| Incremental backups | Not advertised anywhere on their site | Every plan, including Free |
| Staging | Not offered at any tier | Included on Business and Scale |
| Restore granularity | Database restore, or full restore. That is the whole choice. | Whole site, files and folders, single tables, or one row such as an order |
| Restore on the free tier | Download the archive and upload it yourself. One-click restore is Pro. | Full restore and download on every plan, including Free |
| Google Drive and OneDrive | Pro only | Included as export destinations on Business and Scale |
| Fastest schedule | Hourly, driven by WP-Cron | Hourly on Business, realtime on Scale |
BackWPup figures taken from backwpup.com pricing, features and documentation, checked 12 August 2026. Prices change, so confirm on their site before you decide.
Where the two are the same
Both encrypt backups. Both let you exclude paths and choose what goes into a snapshot. Both migrate a site to a new host.
Storage and destinations
BackWPup includes no storage at all. That is not a criticism, it is the design, and it decides most of the rest.
| BackWPup | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Included storage | None, at any tier. There is no BackWPup storage product. | 1 GB Free, 2 GB Starter, 10 GB Business, 50 GB Scale, per site. |
| Free destinations | Amazon S3 and S3-compatible services, Dropbox, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, FTP, FTPS, a local folder, SugarSync. | Not applicable. Storage is included, so there is nothing to connect. |
| Behind the paywall | SFTP, Google Drive, OneDrive, Amazon Glacier, HiDrive. | All ten export destinations on Business and Scale, none priced separately. |
| Your own bucket as a second copy | It is not a second copy. It is the only copy. | Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, SFTP or a signed webhook, mirrored after each backup completes. |
| Data residency | Whatever you chose when you created the bucket. | EU, US or Oceania, chosen at setup, on every plan. |
| Retention | A per-job file count in the plugin. No retention policy is published on their site. | 30 days Free, 60 Starter, 90 Business, 365 on Scale, configurable per site up to your plan’s cap. |
Notice where the paywall sits. Google Drive and OneDrive, the two destinations an ordinary person actually has, are Pro-only on BackWPup.So if the plan was free plugin plus my own Drive, that plan starts at $49 a year.
How the backup actually runs
BackWPup is the most candid of these plugins about running inside your site, and its own documentation is the best evidence.
| BackWPup | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it executes | In your WordPress install, driven by WP-Cron. | On Backvera’s servers. |
| What triggers a scheduled run | A visitor. WP-Cron fires when someone loads the site. | Backvera’s scheduler. No visitor needed. |
| Incremental | Not advertised on the features page, the pricing page or the free-versus-Pro documentation. | Every plan. Full first backup, then only what changed. |
| Fastest schedule | Hourly. | Hourly on Business. Realtime on Scale. |
| Tuning you have to do | Their documentation asks you to set a maximum script execution time and suggests experimenting around 20 to 25 seconds. | None. There is nothing on your server to tune. |
| Memory | Their documentation notes that 512 MB can reach its limits during a job on a busy site. | Your host’s memory is not part of the backup path. |
Their own documentation puts it plainly: if no one visits your website for some time, it can lead to trouble with the cron. That is an honest thing for a vendor to publish, and it is also exactly the failure mode of a backup that lives inside the site it is protecting. A quiet site is a site that may not have been backed up.
Restore
This is where the two products stop resembling each other.
| BackWPup | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Choice of what comes back | Database restore, or full restore. | Whole site, individual files and folders, individual database tables, or a single row such as one order or one post. |
| Restore on the free version | Download the archive, upload it yourself, and enter your database credentials from wp-config.php by hand. | Full restore and download on every plan, including Free. |
| Restoring from cloud storage | Pro. Restore from Dropbox, Google Drive, S3, FTP and SFTP are each listed as Pro features. | Every restore reads from Backvera Cloud. Nothing to reconnect. |
| Preview before anything is written | Not offered. | Dry run shows which files and tables would be touched, and writes nothing. |
| Safety copy first | None. The documentation warns you to check you picked the right archive. | Optional safety backup of the live site before an in-place restore. |
| When WordPress itself will not boot | A standalone restore app that runs without WordPress. Theirs alone. | Restore is driven from the Backvera dashboard. |
Staging
There is nothing to compare here. BackWPup has no staging feature at any tier.
| BackWPup | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Staging environment | Not offered. | Included on Business and Scale. |
| Testing a plugin update first | On a copy you build yourself, on hosting you pay for separately. | Create a stage from your most recent snapshot, test, then push to live. |
| Testing a PHP upgrade | Not applicable. | Run the stage on 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 or 8.4, switchable on a running stage. |
| Pushing changes back | Not applicable. | Push to live, with a safety backup of the live site taken first by default. |
| Privacy of the copy | Not applicable. | Password protected by default. |
This is the largest functional difference between the two products, and it is a category absence rather than a weaker version of the same thing. If your workflow is test the update somewhere first, BackWPup does not take part in it.
WooCommerce and other stores
BackWPup has no ecommerce handling. Neither does UpdraftPlus or WPvivid. That is the actual state of this market.
| BackWPup | Backvera | |
|---|---|---|
| Store-specific handling | None mentioned anywhere on their site. | WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads recognised on Scale. |
| Orders placed between backups | Lost. Hourly at best. | Realtime on Scale captures store changes as they happen, within minutes. |
| High-Performance Order Storage | Not mentioned. | Captured, because every full backup includes the entire database. |
| Getting one order back | Restore the database, which rolls everything else back with it. | Restore the single row. |
| Large stores | Bounded by execution time and memory on your host. | Large databases are backed up in pieces across several passes. |
What it costs at your site count
Plan names are not the useful comparison. This is the yearly total for the same job.
| Sites | BackWPup | Backvera |
|---|---|---|
| 1 site | $49 a year (Starter, covers 2), plus your own storage | $36 a year (Business), storage included |
| 2 sites | $49 a year, plus storage | $72 a year |
| 5 sites | $99 a year (Advanced), plus storage | $180 a year |
| 20 sites | $199 a year (Pro), plus storage | $720 a year |
| Free option | Free plugin, unlimited sites, your own storage, manual restore | Free plan: 1 site, 1 GB, weekly, 30-day retention, restore included |
| Storage for a 10 GB site | Your S3 or Drive bill, plus the licence if you want Google Drive | Included in Business at $36 a year |
On licence price alone BackWPup wins from two sites upward, and the free plugin on unlimited sites is unbeatable if it does what you need. Two things the licence price leaves out. Storage is yours to buy and manage, and Google Drive is Pro-only, so the cheapest free plugin plus my Drive plan actually starts at $49. And restore is where the difference bites: on the free tier you are downloading an archive and uploading it by hand at the exact moment your site is broken.
Moving across, in practice
There is no archive conversion in either direction. You are not moving history, you are starting a new one, and the old one stays exactly where it is.
Your archives stay in your bucket
They are in your own S3, Dropbox or FTP space. Backvera does not touch, move or delete them, and BackWPup can still restore them.
First backup is full, then deltas
One full pass, then incrementals on every plan. Large media libraries stream and resume, so let the first one finish.
Then retire the job
Once you have a Backvera restore point you trust, disable the BackWPup job. No export, no import, nothing to convert.
When BackWPup is the better choice
Three of these, and the first is the strongest argument against us anywhere on this site.
You want free backups on many sites and you already own storage.
The free plugin runs on unlimited sites and writes to S3, Dropbox, Azure, FTP or a local folder at no cost. If you are comfortable restoring by downloading an archive and uploading it by hand, that is genuinely free, forever, and our Free plan does not compete with it at scale.
You want one price and no feature ladder.
BackWPup’s three tiers have identical features and differ only in how many domains they cover. There is no wondering which tier has the thing you need. We gate staging, external destinations and realtime by tier, which is more to think about.
You run a multisite network on the free plugin.
BackWPup supports multisite for free. Backvera puts multisite on Business and Scale. If free multisite is the requirement, that is the end of the comparison.
Where we would push back on ourselves: our Free plan is weekly backups, 1 GB and 30-day retention on a single site. It is a real free plan with real restores, but it is something you can live in while you decide, not a free product for a portfolio.
Questions people ask before switching
Can Backvera restore a BackWPup archive?
No. Backvera restores from its own snapshots. Your BackWPup archives stay in your own storage and BackWPup can still restore them.
Does BackWPup do incremental backups?
They do not advertise incremental backups on their features page, pricing page or free-versus-Pro documentation, so plan your storage on the basis that every run is a full backup. Backvera takes one full backup then incrementals, on every plan.
I use the free version. What do I actually gain?
Restores you can run while you are panicking. On free BackWPup, restoring means downloading the archive, uploading it and entering database credentials by hand. And staging, which BackWPup does not offer at any price.
Do I need my own S3 or Dropbox?
No. Storage is included on every Backvera plan. On Business and Scale you can additionally mirror each backup to your own bucket if you want a second copy.
Can I test a plugin update somewhere safe?
On Business and Scale, yes. Create a staging environment from your latest snapshot, pick the PHP version, test, then push to live with a safety backup of live taken first. BackWPup has no staging at any tier.
Is encryption included on the cheap plan?
Yes, on every plan including Free. BackWPup encrypts too, but restoring an encrypted backup is a Pro feature there.
What if my site is completely down?
Restore from Backvera dashboard, including FTP/SFPT.
How many sites does a Backvera plan cover?
One. Their cheapest tier covers two domains and their top tier covers twenty, so above a couple of sites their licence is cheaper.
Compare the restore, not the backup
14 days free, no card. Break something on a staging copy and put it back both ways.
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. BackWPup and WP Rocket 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.