Guardian Gaze compared.

It depends which job you need done, which is why the four questions above matter more than a feature table. If you need hardening above all, Solid Security is excellent. If you want a mature signature set and the largest install base, Wordfence. If you want perimeter filtering, Sucuri. We are the strongest choice if you want a complete scanner, including the database, at no cost, with AI reasoning and removal included rather than billed per incident.

A scanner running inside WordPress is trusting the thing it is inspecting. Malware that has already compromised a site can deactivate the plugin, exclude directories, or filter its output. Off-site scanning also means a shared host's resource limit cannot kill a scan halfway and report it as complete.

Generally no, overlapping firewalls conflict, two scanners double the cost, and duplicate login protection produces lockouts nobody can diagnose. The reasonable exception is a hardening toolkit alongside a scanner, since they do different jobs and do not compete for the same hooks.

They are ours, so treat them accordingly. What we can commit to is that every page states what the competitor does better than us, prices are dated and sourced from the vendor's own published pricing, and we correct claims when we get them wrong. We have already removed one claim about a competitor's database scanning that research showed was inaccurate.

For detection, often yes. Our free tier runs all four detection layers including the database scanner, permanently, with no account. What free tiers generally do not include across this market is prevention and removal, so the honest answer is that free is usually enough to know, and not enough to fix.

Most established ones do, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise. The usual approach is matching known signatures and known-bad URLs, which works well on catalogued campaigns and less well on novel ones. What differs is whether it costs extra and whether the scanner deserialises PHP-serialised values rather than treating them as opaque strings.

Professional cleanup is typically $200 to $500 per incident, and several plugins sell it separately from detection. Our Pro tier includes removal at $99 a year, which is the core of the commercial argument for it, one incident pays for several years.