Sucuri Security vs Wordfence Security

In looking at lists of the best WordPress security plugins recently, the Sucuri Security plugin has been repeatedly listed first. That is not because it is the best security plugin and doesn’t even have anything to do with the plugin. Instead, it is listed as the best because the company behind it offers affiliate revenue for those who get people to sign up for an unrelated service they offer. If you look at reviews of Sucuri’s service, there are a lot of people warning about how bad the service is. That isn’t surprising when the developer keeps admitting that they are failing to protect their customers. But what about the protection their plugin offers versus the most popular security-only plugin for WordPress, Wordfence Security?

Since 2021, we have done 16 tests of a large group of WordPress security plugins to see if they would protect against real vulnerabilities that had existed in other plugins. In those tests, Sucuri Security provided no protection in any of the tests. Wordfence Security did somewhat better, providing protection in six. The reason why Sucuri Security doesn’t provide any protection is that the plugin doesn’t contain a firewall. Recommendations of it would make you think otherwise.

Another method of testing we have is automated testing to see if WordPress firewall plugins will protect against the same attacks our firewall plugin can. The results for both plugins are not good. With Sucuri Security providing no protection and Wordfence Security only stopping 22.4% of the tests, in the most recent run we did of that at the beginning of January.

Better Alternatives

Based on those results, Wordfence Security is the only option of those two for those looking for protection, but there are two much better options.

Those two plugins are our Plugin Vulnerabilities Firewall and NinjaFirewall. NinjaFirewall does significantly better in our automated testing, with protection against 38.8% of the attacks. Our plugin provides protection against 100%.

While NinjaFirewall is a competitor to our plugin, we recommend it for websites where doesn’t make sense to be spending money on security. For the price, free, it provides great protection, much better than Wordfence Security’s, despite being much less popular.

Our firewall plugin is part of our service, which provides a lot beyond just the firewall plugin, so for those who need security better than can be gotten for free, it can provide a lot of additional protection.