A backup plugin only earns its keep on the worst day of your site's life: the day a bad update white-screens it, a host migration corrupts the database, or a compromise forces a clean restore. The three tools in this comparison take three genuinely different routes to that moment of truth. UpdraftPlus is the ubiquitous bring-your-own-storage workhorse. BlogVault runs your backups off your own server entirely. And BackupBuddy — the veteran that started this whole category back in 2010 — is not really called BackupBuddy anymore, which is the first thing you need to know before you buy it.

First, the BackupBuddy elephant in the room

If you go looking for BackupBuddy in 2026, you will not find a product by that name on sale. iThemes rebranded its entire plugin line under the Solid banner a few years back (the company is now SolidWP, under StellarWP/Liquid Web), and BackupBuddy became Solid Backups. More recently the lineup split in two:

Solid Backups — Legacy is the original BackupBuddy codebase, still receiving point releases (a 9.1.x build shipped in early 2026), but explicitly labelled legacy and not where new development is going.
Solid Backups — NextGen is a ground-up, cloud-managed rewrite that moves configuration and storage into a web dashboard rather than living entirely inside your wp-admin.

Why this matters for a buying decision: the thing people remember fondly as BackupBuddy — a self-contained, server-side plugin that bundled backups, the iThemes Sync dashboard, and the legendary ImportBuddy migration script into one zip — is on a maintenance footing, not an innovation footing. If you are choosing a backup tool today, you are really choosing between UpdraftPlus, BlogVault, and Solid Backups NextGen. Buying the old BackupBuddy in 2026 means buying a product the vendor itself has flagged as legacy.

The axis that actually separates these tools: where the backup runs

Forget feature checklists for a second. The single most consequential difference is where the heavy lifting happens.

UpdraftPlus and BackupBuddy/Solid Backups Legacy run on your server. When a backup fires, your PHP process zips up files and dumps the database using your host's CPU, memory, and disk I/O. On a generous VPS that is a non-event. On budget shared hosting, a large site's backup can bump into the host's max_execution_time or memory limits, drag down response times mid-run, or simply fail halfway and leave you with a partial archive. UpdraftPlus mitigates this by chunking the job across multiple PHP runs, but the work is still yours to pay for.

BlogVault runs the backup on its own infrastructure. A lightweight connector pulls your changes to BlogVault's servers, where the archive is assembled and stored. Your host barely notices. For a 5 GB WooCommerce store on shared hosting, that architectural difference is the whole ballgame — it is the difference between a backup that reliably completes overnight and one that times out and pages you.

Backup method and storage

This follows directly from the architecture above.

UpdraftPlus

Free tier: scheduled and one-click manual full backups, with restore, sending archives to a remote you control — Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, OneDrive, FTP, and more. You supply the storage, which means storage cost and retention are entirely on your terms (cheap if you already have a Drive or S3 bucket). Incremental backups are a Premium-only feature — the free version always takes full backups, which gets heavy as a site grows. Premium also unlocks more destinations, scheduled-with-retention controls, and the Migrator add-on for clone/move.

BlogVault

Every backup is incremental by default — only changed files and database rows are transferred after the first full sync, which keeps both transfer time and server load low. Storage is included on BlogVault's servers (with generous retention, typically 90 days even on entry plans), so there is no separate cloud bill and no remote to configure. The trade-off is that there is no meaningful free tier — it is a paid service from day one.

Solid Backups

The Legacy plugin does full and incremental (database) backups to your choice of remote destination — Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, Stash (its own storage), and others — in classic server-side fashion. NextGen shifts storage and scheduling into the SolidWP cloud dashboard. Either way you are buying into the Solid/StellarWP ecosystem rather than a standalone plugin.

Restore, migration, and staging

A backup you cannot restore cleanly is just disk usage. This is where the products diverge in personality.

BlogVault is built around restore and migration confidence. One-click restore, a free built-in staging environment, and host-agnostic, zero-downtime migration are core features — and the same company makes Migrate Guru and the MalCare security plugin, so the migration engine is battle-tested across millions of moves. For agencies, the central dashboard managing many sites from one screen is the headline.
UpdraftPlus restores files and database directly from the plugin UI, and UpdraftClone / the Migrator add-on handle moves. Restore is reliable but more hands-on; there is no built-in staging in the BlogVault sense.
BackupBuddy/Solid Backups historically made its name on migration via ImportBuddy — drop two files on the new host and rebuild. It still does this well in the Legacy plugin; it just feels increasingly dated next to dashboard-driven, zero-downtime flows.

WooCommerce and real-time backups

If you run a store, a nightly snapshot is not enough — an order placed at 2 a.m. that vanishes in a 9 a.m. crash is lost revenue and an unhappy customer. BlogVault offers real-time / near-continuous backups that capture orders as they come in, which is its strongest argument for e-commerce. UpdraftPlus's incremental backups (Premium) can run frequently but are not truly real-time. For a high-volume WooCommerce site, this gap is decisive.

Pricing reality

Pricing shifts, so confirm current numbers, but the shape is stable: UpdraftPlus has a capable free tier and Premium that starts low (around $70/year for a couple of sites) — attractive precisely because you reuse storage you already pay for. BlogVault has no free tier and starts higher (roughly $149/year for one site at the time of writing), but that price includes off-site storage, staging, and the dashboard, so the all-in cost is closer than the sticker suggests. Solid Backups is sold as part of SolidWP's bundle/à-la-carte pricing. Check UpdraftPlus's current pricing and BlogVault's current pricing directly before buying.

Which one should you actually pick?

Most self-hosted sites, especially if you already use Google Drive, Dropbox, or S3: UpdraftPlus. The free tier covers the fundamentals honestly, it is installed on millions of sites so every edge case is already answered somewhere, and Premium is inexpensive when you grow into incrementals.
WooCommerce stores, agencies, or any site on constrained shared hosting: BlogVault. Off-server processing, real-time store backups, free staging, and multi-site management justify the premium-only price for anyone whose downtime has a dollar figure attached.
Existing iThemes/SolidWP customers: Solid Backups is a reasonable in-ecosystem choice — but go in clear-eyed about the Legacy-versus-NextGen split, and do not buy it under the assumption that "BackupBuddy" is still a current, actively-evolving product.

Whatever you choose, the rule that matters more than the plugin: store backups off the server they protect, and actually test a restore once before you need one. A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis, not a safety net.

UpdraftPlus vs BackupBuddy vs BlogVault