MainWP and WPCentrify solve the same problem from opposite directions. MainWP gives you ownership and no per-site fee in exchange for running the infrastructure. WPCentrify runs the infrastructure in exchange for a subscription. Neither is universally correct.
Free assisted migration. We move your sites for you.
Comparison verified against publicly documented features, August 2026. Reviewed quarterly.
MainWP is open source, self-hosted, and charges no per-site subscription. You install a dashboard on your own WordPress site and connect unlimited child sites to it. For a portfolio of a hundred sites, the economics are genuinely compelling and no SaaS product can match them on raw cost.
The privacy and data ownership argument is also real. Nothing leaves your infrastructure, there is no third party holding credentials to your client sites, and for anyone with strict data handling requirements or a philosophical objection to SaaS, that matters. The extension ecosystem is mature and the product is actively developed.
The MainWP dashboard is itself a WordPress site. It needs hosting, updating, securing, backing up and monitoring. It holds connection keys to every site you manage, which makes it the highest-value target in your infrastructure. The per-site fee you saved reappears as your own time and risk.
If your dashboard host has an outage, your monitoring goes down with it, and it goes down at exactly the moment you would most want to know something. External monitoring does not share a failure domain with the thing it monitors.
At scale the dashboard does real work: polling child sites, storing history, generating reports. On modest shared hosting that becomes slow, and cron reliability on shared hosts is a recurring source of silently missed jobs.
The core is free but meaningful functionality lives in paid extensions. Once you have added several, the cost gap narrows considerably, and you own the work of keeping them compatible with each other.
| Capability | WPCentrify | MainWP |
|---|---|---|
| Bulk core, plugin and theme updates | Yes | Yes |
| Update risk scoring before running | Yes | No |
| Visual regression testing | Yes | No |
| Automatic rollback on failed checks | Yes | No |
| Off-site encrypted backups | Included | Extension plus your own storage |
| Scheduled restore testing | Yes | No |
| Vulnerability matching | Included | Extension |
| Uptime monitoring | 60 second, external | Extension, from your dashboard |
| Monitoring survives your own outage | Yes | No |
| Core Web Vitals tracking | Included | Extension |
| White-label client reports | Included | Extension |
| Client portal | Yes | Partial |
| Care plan profitability tracking | Yes | No |
| Per-site subscription fee | Yes | No |
| Infrastructure you maintain | None | Dashboard site, hosting, updates, security |
| Data stays entirely in your control | Regional residency, full export | Yes, fully self-hosted |
| Cost at 100 sites | Predictable subscription | Licence plus hosting plus your time |
| Open source | No | Yes |
Products change. Verify current capability and pricing on the vendor site before making a decision. We review these pages quarterly and date every revision.
Every product suits somebody. If any of these describe you, MainWP is probably the right call and we would rather you knew that now.
Install the WPCentrify connector alongside your existing MainWP connection. Nothing is removed and no site is touched.
Sites, client groupings, tags, schedules and report settings are brought across. Assisted migration is included.
Keep MainWP active for one full backup retention cycle so you have overlap and a fallback.
No pressure and no deadline. Export everything from WPCentrify at any point if you change your mind.
It is a different risk profile rather than a straightforwardly better one. Self-hosting removes third-party access, which is a real benefit. It also creates a single WordPress site holding connection keys to your entire portfolio, which is a high-value target that you are now responsible for hardening, patching and monitoring. Which is safer depends mostly on how well that dashboard is actually maintained.
The core plugin is genuinely free and there is no per-site fee. Meaningful functionality, backups, uptime monitoring, client reports, comes from paid extensions, and you provide hosting and your own time. Free in licensing, not free in total cost.
Yes. The connectors are independent and can coexist on the same site. Run both, compare them on your real portfolio for a month, and keep whichever suits you.
You export it. Sites, clients, activity history, reports and backups are all exportable from the dashboard or through the API, at any time, with no exit fee. The lock-in objection to SaaS is legitimate in general and we have tried to answer it specifically.
How WPCentrify compares to ManageWP, including where ManageWP wins.
Read moreHow WPCentrify compares to WP Umbrella, including where WP Umbrella wins.
Read moreHow WPCentrify compares to WP Remote, including where WP Remote wins.
Read moreManaged platform against a self-hosted dashboard, compared on cost of ownership, safety and data control.
See the head-to-headTwo very different answers to the same problem, compared without us in the picture.
Read the comparisonConnect a few sites alongside your current tool and compare them on real work rather than on a feature table.
Free during early access. Keep your data, export any time.