A WP Umbrella alternative for agencies

WP Umbrella has one plan priced per website: €1.99 per website a month. Add-ons cost extra: Security adds €2, hourly backups add €2.49, and a site audit starts at €30. It offers a 14-day free trial.

digiWatcher sells plans for a number of monitors. Profi costs €32 a month for 30 monitors, and Agency €66 for 100. Fully used, that works out at €1.07 and €0.66 per monitor a month. The smaller Start plan costs €12 for 10 monitors. The free trial gives you a paid plan for 30 days. digiWatcher’s prices on this page come from its current price list: in euros where digiWatcher sells plans in euros, otherwise in Czech koruna (CZK). We don’t convert between currencies.

One important difference: digiWatcher bills monitors, not WordPress sites. The per-monitor price equals a per-website price only when each website uses exactly one monitor. If you watch one site with several monitors, for example the website and a separate API address, each of them counts. A plan is also paid in full even when you don’t use all of it, so with only a handful of websites, WP Umbrella’s per-website pricing can come out cheaper.

digiWatcher has no paid add-ons. Paid plans differ mainly in the number of monitors and status pages; the features below come with every paid plan.

• Uptime checks from outside: HTTP(S), keyword, ping, TCP port, and heartbeat, plus SSL certificate and domain expiry.
• The digiWatcher Agent for WordPress: pending updates, the PHP version, stuck scheduled tasks, known plugin vulnerabilities, and a daily check of core and wordpress.org plugin files against the official checksums.
• A security log of new administrators and changes to the administrator email and site address.
• Updates from digiWatcher, including bulk updates across websites. They run one website at a time, the first failure stops the batch, and plugin or theme files are put back if the site gets worse.
• Alerts by email, Slack, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, and other channels, with quiet hours and maintenance windows.
• Status pages, a read-only client portal, and monthly client reports.
• A team with two roles, the Owner and Operators, with up to 5 users on Profi.

How a team and its clients work with digiWatcher is on the for agencies page, and how updates move from site to site on the bulk WordPress updates page.

Be clear about what you need before you switch. If hourly backups managed by your maintenance tool are a must, WP Umbrella offers them as an add-on, and its pricing page says backups are stored in the EU for 50 days.

For vulnerabilities, WP Umbrella uses Patchstack data, refreshed every 6 hours. digiWatcher checks the plugins and themes the agent reports against the public wpvulnerability.net database. digiWatcher doesn’t include a firewall. If Patchstack’s data is the reason you chose WP Umbrella, that’s a real difference.

WP Umbrella also sells a site audit, from €30. digiWatcher has nothing to buy on top of the plan, so if you want an audit as a service from your tool’s vendor, WP Umbrella offers one.

The digiWatcher Agent only reads by default. Write access for updates stays off until the site’s administrator turns it on, and even then the agent does only what WordPress would do during an automatic update. Each instruction is signed with a key only digiWatcher and that website know, carries no package URL, and updates only to the version WordPress’s own update source offers.

The agent never installs new plugins, never uploads a ZIP file, and has no file editor. Even a stolen write key would allow no more than WordPress does during an automatic update. Details are on the safe WordPress agent page.

There’s no automatic migration from WP Umbrella. You add your websites in digiWatcher; on each WordPress site, its administrator adds the digiWatcher Agent plugin and pastes the connection code from digiWatcher. digiWatcher doesn’t do that step for them. The steps are in the manual chapter on connecting WordPress.

You can run both tools side by side while you check that digiWatcher measures and alerts the way you need, and then cancel what you no longer use in WP Umbrella. Updates from digiWatcher work only where WordPress can write files directly and not on multisite networks, so check that before you rely on them.