What is the difference between the Wordfence Plugin and Wordfence CLI?

The Wordfence Plugin is an excellent overall security solution for WordPress and includes a firewall, two-factor authentication, brute force protection, and IP blocklist with many other features in addition to a malware scanner. Wordfence CLI provides more technical server administrators and operations teams with high performance malware scanning capability.

CLI is parallelizable, meaning that it can take advantage of all your CPU cores when scanning, providing very high performance. CLI is also able to execute at a higher permissions level than your web server and website, giving it an additional layer of protection against compromise. CLI is also incredibly flexible and can be scheduled using cron and combined with other command line tools.

Free vs Paid CLI Licenses

The free version of CLI is available for non-commercial use only. The free version of Wordfence CLI uses our Free Signature Set, which is also used by the free version of the Wordfence plugin. This is a smaller malware detection signature set that does a great job of detecting many malware variants. It does not include the newest malware detection capability, or the broader signature set that our commercial set includes.

Our Commercial Signature Set is used by the paid version of the Wordfence Plugin along with the paid version of Wordfence CLI. Our commercial signature set includes the newest malware detection capability. We add approximately 30 to 70 new signatures every month. The Commercial Signature Set is our complete malware signature set. It is a significantly larger set of malware signatures than our free set, and also contains detection for the newest threats.

How Licensing Works

The free version of Wordfence CLI uses our free signature set and is available to use at no cost to anyone. We do not provide support for the free version of Wordfence CLI.

The paid version of Wordfence CLI is licensed to customers based on how many websites a customer is scanning and includes support from our team. We rely on customers to self-report how many sites they’re scanning with Wordfence CLI, rather than building in auditing or a SAAS or API model into CLI. We have designed Wordfence CLI to be extremely performant, and auditing your use of CLI would limit performance.

Wordfence CLI has four pricing tiers, shown on this page, based on how many sites you intend to scan. Our pricing is incredibly generous and we trust our customers to self-select the appropriate license. For example, if you are a web host scanning over between 1000 and 10,000 sites, we expect you to purchase a CLI-10000 license from us. This allows you to scan up to 10,000 customer websites for malware as many times as you like, with no latency, for just $2950 per year. That is industry leading malware detection, for less than 30 cents annually per website.

Our enterprise pricing is generous and designed for very large hosts with more than 10,000 customers. For example, if you are hosting several million WordPress sites and would like to conduct daily or even hourly high performance scans across your entire fleet, we’d love to chat with you. Please contact our team for a quote.