Wordfence vs Sucuri: endpoint firewall or cloud firewall, and what each leaves to you

Wordfence vs Sucuri: the short answer

Both are security products for websites, but they protect at different points. Wordfence is a WordPress plugin: its firewall and malware scanner run on your server, inside WordPress, and look at every request after it has arrived. Sucuri's paid platform is a service you put in front of your site by changing your DNS records: visitors' traffic goes through Sucuri's network first, and only the requests it lets through reach your server.

That one difference explains most of the rest: what each can see, what it costs, and what you still have to do yourself. The table below sums it up; the sections after it explain how each one works.

How Wordfence works

Wordfence describes its firewall as an endpoint firewall: it runs on the server, integrated with WordPress, and Wordfence notes that unlike cloud alternatives it doesn't break encryption and can't be bypassed. The same plugin includes a malware scanner that compares WordPress core, themes and plugins with the copies on WordPress.org and looks for malware, backdoors, SEO spam, malicious redirects and code injections. It also adds login security (two-factor authentication and passkeys), brute-force protection, and alerts for vulnerable plugins and themes, including ones that were closed or abandoned on WordPress.org.

The free plugin has all of that, with one catch: new firewall rules and malware signatures reach free sites 30 days after paying customers get them, and scheduled scans run every 3 days. Premium removes the delay, adds a real-time IP blocklist of known attackers and country blocking. Care and Response add people: Wordfence's team installs and configures the plugin, monitors the site and, after an incident, cleans and restores it. Wordfence Central, a dashboard for many sites, is free for unlimited sites.

Each plugin installation needs its own licence. A Premium licence also covers that site's staging and development copies.

How Sucuri works

Sucuri's firewall is a cloud service. You activate it by changing your DNS records, so visitors reach Sucuri's servers first. Sucuri inspects the HTTP and HTTPS traffic there, blocks malicious requests before they reach your server, mitigates DDoS attacks at layers 3, 4 and 7, and can cache your pages on its CDN. It also uses virtual patching to shield outdated software until you update it. Because it works in front of the server, it doesn't depend on WordPress: Sucuri supports any CMS and hosting.

The Website Security Platform plans combine that firewall and CDN with malware scans (every 12 hours, 6 hours or 30 minutes depending on the plan), blocklist monitoring and removal, and unlimited malware and hack cleanups by Sucuri's team, with a promised response time of 30, 12 or 6 hours.

There is also a free Sucuri plugin for WordPress, with a security audit log, file integrity monitoring, blocklist monitoring, hardening and a remote malware scan. The firewall isn't part of it. The remote scan uses SiteCheck, Sucuri's free scanner, which looks at what a browser can see: Sucuri states that it will not detect anything on the server side.

What each catches, and what it leaves to you

Wordfence sees inside WordPress. Its scanner reads the files on the server, so it can find a modified core file or a backdoor that never shows on a public page, and its firewall knows which user is logged in. The other side of the same design: every request, including attack traffic, still reaches your server and is handled there. The free plugin also defends against new attacks with rules that are 30 days old, unless you pay for Premium.

Sucuri stops traffic before your server has to deal with it, which is what you want against floods of requests and DDoS attacks, and its CDN can make the site faster. If you only use the free plugin, though, there is no firewall, and its malware scan sees only what SiteCheck sees from the outside. The server-side protection comes with the paid platform.

Two things are outside both products' job. A security plugin can't vouch for itself: if it's switched off or breaks, the alerts it would have sent stop with it. And neither is built to tell you whether checkout, a login or a contact form still works for visitors. That's where a separate monitor fits, covered at the end.

Pricing as of October 2026

Wordfence (per site, per year): Free $0, Premium $149, Care $590, Response $1,250. Premium is self-service: you get real-time rules and signatures and ticket support, but no cleanup. Care and Response include cleaning your site after an incident; Response adds 24/7/365 incident response with a 1-hour response time.

Sucuri (per site, per year): Basic Platform $229, Pro Platform $339, Business Platform $549, each with the firewall, CDN and unlimited cleanups. Junior Dev covers 5 sites for $999.98 a year. If you only want the firewall and CDN, Sucuri sells it per month: $9.99 (Basic) or $19.98 (Pro) per site.

Like for like: the cheapest paid plan of each is Wordfence Premium at $149 a year against Sucuri Basic Platform at $229 a year, but Sucuri's price includes cleanup and Wordfence Premium's doesn't. With cleanup included on both sides, the comparison is Wordfence Care at $590 against Sucuri Basic at $229, and Care also includes installation, configuration and a yearly security audit by Wordfence's team. Prices are from each vendor's pricing page in October 2026; check them before you buy.

When to pick which

Pick Wordfence Free if your site is small, you look after it yourself and you keep plugins updated quickly: of the two, it's the more complete free plugin. Pick Wordfence Premium when you want new rules and signatures the day they're released. Pick Wordfence Care or Response when you'd rather have Wordfence's team configure, watch and clean the site for you.

Pick Sucuri when you want attacks and DDoS stopped before they reach your server, you'd like a CDN in the same product, your site doesn't run on WordPress, or you want unlimited cleanups for less than Wordfence Care costs. Setting it up means changing your DNS records, so make sure you can.

Don't pick Relvato for this job. If you need attacks blocked or a hacked site cleaned, choose one of these two first: Relvato doesn't block traffic or remove malware.

Running them together

Because they protect at different layers, the two can be combined: Sucuri's firewall in front of the server and Wordfence inside WordPress. If you do, decide which product does which job, so you don't pay twice for the same scan or harden the same setting from two plugins.

Whatever you choose, the basics still do most of the work: update plugins and themes quickly, remove the ones you don't use, protect admin accounts with two-factor authentication, and keep a recent backup off the server. Our WordPress hacked checklist covers what to do if something gets through anyway.

How Relvato fits in

Relvato is a monitoring platform, not a firewall. It watches your live site from outside and, with the free Relvato plugin, from inside WordPress, and alerts you when something changes that shouldn't have. From outside, without the plugin, it looks for signs of a hack (spam pages, redirects shown only to Google or to visitors from Google, and Google's list of unsafe sites), new third-party scripts on your pages, and doors left open such as exposed backup files or an open XML-RPC (exposure scan). With the plugin it adds file integrity against official checksums, changes to theme files, new or hidden administrators, and the vulnerability monitor.

Disclosure: the vulnerability monitor uses vulnerability data from Wordfence Intelligence, which Wordfence offers free for personal and commercial use, optionally combined with WPScan. That's also why it agrees with Wordfence on which plugin versions are vulnerable.

On the Free plan you get every one of these monitors for one site: you press Run, or they run on a weekly schedule, with alerts in the app and one email a month when a monitor first finds a problem. Pro ($29 a month) re-runs them after every plugin, theme or core update, runs them daily, sends alerts by email, Slack, Teams, Discord and webhook, and adds Quarantine mode, 48 hours of close watching after a cleanup. Business adds hourly runs. Relvato tells you something changed; you, your host, or a cleanup service like Wordfence Care or Sucuri fixes it.