UpdraftCentral Review: What It Does and What It Costs
On this page, 9 sections
UpdraftCentral is a dashboard for managing many WordPress sites from one screen. You can use it as a hosted service (UpdraftCentral Cloud) or as a plugin on a site you control. The cloud version is free for up to 5 sites, and paid tiers on the vendor’s page start at $112.95 a year including VAT for up to 15 sites.
I have not run UpdraftCentral on my own sites. This is a documentation-based read of the vendor’s pricing page, its self-hosted page, its setup guide and the WordPress.org readme, all read on 11 October 2026. Nothing here is a hands-on test, and I say so wherever it matters.
The aim is to answer three things before you connect a site: what it does, what each version costs, and what the free versions leave out.
What it does
The cloud product page lists these jobs from one browser-based view.
- Updates: see all updates across your sites and apply them from the dashboard or from each site.
- Plugins and themes: install and activate across all connected sites in one go.
- Comments, users, pages and posts: moderate comments, create or delete users, and edit or publish pages and posts without logging into each site.
- Backups: through UpdraftPlus, choose remote storage, run manual backups and schedule automatic ones.
- Optimization: through WP-Optimize, clean database tables, auto-drafts, trashed posts and transients.
The WordPress.org readme adds one-click login to each connected site’s dashboard, control of update policies through Easy Updates Manager, and tools to inspect system information. It also lists Google Analytics overviews, tags for organizing sites and a ticketed support service for the cloud version.
How a site gets connected
The setup guide assumes UpdraftPlus is installed on every site you want to control. The dashboard lives either at the vendor’s hosted service or on a site you pick as the “mothership”.
- On the managed site, open the UpdraftPlus settings page, then the Advanced Tools tab and its UpdraftCentral (Remote Control) section.
- Choose where your dashboard is: the vendor’s hosted one or a self-hosted dashboard, and enter its URL if self-hosted.
- Press Create to generate a key and copy it. The guide warns that the key is shown only once.
- In the dashboard, click Add Site and paste the key.
The vendor says communication between sites is RSA encrypted and signed, with a unique key pair per connection. That is the vendor’s description. I did not test the connection or review the code.
What the cloud version costs
The pricing page showed these prices on 11 October 2026. They are displayed including VAT for Finland, because that was the country the page defaulted to when I read it. Prices will differ by country.
| Tier | Monthly | Yearly | Yearly price per site at full capacity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 5 sites | Free | Free | Free |
| Up to 15 sites | $11.30 | $112.95 | $7.53 |
| Up to 35 sites | $23.85 | $238.45 | $6.81 |
| Unlimited | $48.95 | $489.45 | Depends on site count |
The page says to pay yearly and get 2 months free. The numbers match: the yearly price in each row is almost exactly 10 times the monthly one, for example 10 times $11.30 is $113.00 against $112.95.
The free tier gives “all UpdraftCentral features” for up to 5 sites. Paid tiers add premium support and access to new releases. The vendor offers a 14-day money-back guarantee on its plugins, and subscriptions renew automatically unless cancelled.
Self-hosted: free or paid
The same company sells UpdraftCentral Premium for self-hosting, with the dashboard on servers you control. The page lists a single unlimited tier at $237.20 including VAT (Finland), described as “pay once, use for life”. The price is the same whether you manage one site or a thousand.
One caution. The same page also carries a general line that subscriptions renew automatically unless cancelled. Because the product is described as a one-time payment, I read that line as generic across the vendor’s products, but I did not confirm it. Check the checkout page before you buy.
There is also a free self-hosted plugin on WordPress.org. The self-hosted page says it has fewer features: a single master login, with management of updates and backups only. Comments, users and plugin management are labelled premium in the readme, and the cloud version is where the readme places the extra features.
The readme lists requirements for each site being controlled: WordPress 3.4 or later, UpdraftPlus installed and active, and no active security module that blocks traffic based on unusual patterns. It warns that encrypted traffic from a remote control plugin can look unusual to such modules.
Security notes from the changelog
The readme changelog for the self-hosted plugin includes two security entries this year. Version 0.8.33, dated 10 August 2026, fixes an improper sanitisation of a parameter that let a logged-in hostile user run an SQL query to test database contents. Version 0.8.32, dated 5 June 2026, says earlier versions let sites with an active key have unauthorised operations carried out on them, and tells users to update both UpdraftCentral and UpdraftPlus.
Both are fixed in the versions named. They are a reason to keep the plugin updated, not evidence that the product is unsafe. I did not audit the code or check which version your sites run.
Who I think it suits (opinion)
If you already use UpdraftPlus for backups, the dashboard is the obvious next step, because every site needs UpdraftPlus installed anyway. If you do not use it, you would be adopting two tools to get one dashboard.
Five sites or fewer is the easiest case on paper, since the cloud version is free. Past five sites, the 15-site tier works out to $7.53 per site per year if you fill it. For comparisons, I wrote WP Umbrella versus UpdraftCentral, InfiniteWP versus UpdraftCentral and UpdraftCentral versus WPMU DEV Hub. The wider field is in best 8 WordPress management tools.
Whichever dashboard you choose, a backup is only useful if it restores. I listed what one has to contain in what a WordPress backup must contain.
What I could not verify
- How it behaves on real sites: speed, failed updates, restore time. I did not install it.
- Prices without Finnish VAT. The page showed one country’s prices, and I did not convert them. I have not worked out an ex-VAT figure.
- Whether the self-hosted premium licence renews. The page says pay once and also carries a generic renewal line.
- Claims on the vendor pages that UpdraftPlus is active on over a million sites, and the testimonials. I did not check either.
- An older UpdraftCentral FAQ URL I tried returned only a documentation stub, so I used the setup guide and the readme instead.
Do this today
Count your sites and check whether each one already runs UpdraftPlus. If you have five or fewer, connect one low-risk site to the free cloud version and look at what the updates and backups screens show before connecting the rest.
Then open the live pricing page for your own country and compare the price shown against the table above, because VAT and currency change what you pay.
Resources
- TeamUpdraft, UpdraftCentral Cloud features and pricing, read 11 October 2026
- TeamUpdraft, UpdraftCentral Premium (self-hosted), read 11 October 2026
- WordPress.org, UpdraftCentral Dashboard readme and changelog, read 11 October 2026
- TeamUpdraft docs, add a site to UpdraftCentral, read 11 October 2026