BackupBuddy has been a WordPress backup staple since 2010, serving over 500,000 websites with its reliable backup and migration capabilities. However, at $127/year for a single site before cloud storage costs, is it still the best value in 2025? Let’s examine how Backup Copilot Pro compares in features, performance, and total cost of ownership.
The iThemes Stash Storage Trap
BackupBuddy includes free access to iThemes Stash, their proprietary cloud storage solution. Sounds generous, right? Here’s the catch: you only get 1GB free. For reference, a typical WordPress site with a moderate media library creates backups between 2-10GB. An e-commerce site with thousands of product images? Easily 15-50GB.
Once you exceed that 1GB limit, you’ll pay $50/year for every additional 100GB of storage. Let’s do the math:
- 5GB site: $50/year extra = $177/year total
- 10GB site: $100/year extra = $227/year total
- 20GB site: $150/year extra = $277/year total
- 50GB site: $250/year extra = $377/year total
Suddenly that $127/year price tag doesn’t look so attractive.
Backup Copilot Pro takes a fundamentally different approach: use your own cloud storage. Connect your existing Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive accounts and leverage storage you’re already paying for (or getting for free). No artificial limits, no surprise fees, no vendor lock-in.
If you’re already paying $9.99/month for Google One with 2TB of storage or Microsoft 365 with 1TB per user, why pay iThemes an additional $50-$250/year for storage you already own?
Storage Economics: Real-World Cost Comparison
Let’s compare the actual costs for a typical agency managing client sites:
Agency with 5 client sites (average 8GB each = 40GB total):
BackupBuddy Approach:
- 5-site Designer license: $167/year
- iThemes Stash storage for 40GB: $200/year (4 × $50)
- Total: $367/year
Backup Copilot Pro Approach:
- 5 Sites license: $175/year
- Google One 100GB plan: $19.99/year (already have it for Gmail)
- Total: $175/year (or $195/year if you need to add Google storage)
- Savings: $172-$192/year
Over three years, that’s $516-$576 in savings while getting more advanced features. The economics simply don’t favor BackupBuddy for anyone with sites larger than a few gigabytes.
Feature Comparison: Where Backup Copilot Pro Pulls Ahead
Advanced Scheduling and Automation
BackupBuddy offers basic scheduling with a maximum frequency of daily backups. While adequate for many sites, this limitation becomes problematic for:
- E-commerce sites processing orders throughout the day
- Membership sites with constant user registrations and content updates
- News or blog sites publishing multiple articles daily
- WooCommerce stores with inventory changes every few hours
Backup Copilot Pro provides flexible scheduling from hourly to monthly frequencies with unlimited schedules. Create different backup strategies for different needs:
- Hourly database-only backups to capture transactional changes
- Daily full site backups for comprehensive protection
- Weekly complete backups with extended retention for compliance
- Monthly archive backups for long-term records
Each schedule can have its own cloud storage destinations and retention policies. This granular control means you can optimize for both protection and storage efficiency.
Intelligent Retention Management
BackupBuddy implements basic count-based retention (keep the last X backups). When you reach your storage limit, you manually delete old backups. This manual process is tedious and error-prone.
Backup Copilot Pro offers smart retention policies that automatically manage backup cleanup:
- Age-based: Delete backups older than 30 days
- Count-based: Keep only the most recent 10 backups
- Size-based: Limit total backup storage to 50GB
- Mix and match: Combine rules for sophisticated retention strategies
Example policy: “Keep daily backups for 30 days, weekly backups for 90 days, and monthly backups for 1 year.” The plugin handles all cleanup automatically, ensuring you never run out of space while maintaining the backup history you need for recovery or compliance.
Email Notifications for Peace of Mind
BackupBuddy includes basic email notifications when backups complete. However, these notifications are minimal and don’t provide much actionable information beyond “backup completed” or “backup failed.”
Backup Copilot Pro sends comprehensive email notifications with detailed information:
- Success notifications: Backup size, duration, file counts, database table counts
- Failure alerts: Specific error messages, troubleshooting suggestions, affected components
- Summary reports: Backup history, storage usage trends, schedule performance
- Multiple recipients: Send notifications to entire teams, not just one administrator
For agencies managing client sites, this means you can keep clients informed about their backup status automatically, demonstrating value and building trust without manual reporting.
REST API for Automation and Integration
Here’s a significant limitation: BackupBuddy has no REST API. For individual site owners, this might not matter. For developers, agencies, and enterprises managing multiple sites, it’s a dealbreaker.
Without API access, you cannot:
- Trigger backups from external monitoring systems
- Integrate backup status into client dashboards
- Automate backup scheduling with custom logic
- Receive webhook notifications for backup events
- Build custom reporting tools
- Coordinate backups with other infrastructure tasks
Backup Copilot Pro includes a full-featured REST API that enables:
- Programmatic backup triggering from cron jobs, monitoring tools, or CI/CD pipelines
- Backup status checking for custom dashboards and client portals
- Automated backup downloads for off-site archival
- Schedule management via API for bulk configuration
- Webhook notifications to Slack, email, or custom endpoints
For any organization managing more than a handful of WordPress sites, API access isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity for efficient operations.
Multisite Network Capabilities
Both plugins support WordPress multisite, but with different levels of sophistication.
BackupBuddy provides basic multisite functionality:
- Network-wide backups (all sites together)
- Individual site backups (manual selection)
- Basic access control
Backup Copilot Pro delivers advanced multisite features:
- Granular access control: Limit subsite administrators to their own backups only
- Per-site schedules: Each subsite can have independent backup schedules
- Network-wide schedules: Centralized backup management from network admin
- Safety backup system: Automatic pre-update backups for each subsite
- Cross-site visibility: Network admins see all backups, subsite admins see only theirs
- Independent cloud storage: Different subsites can use different cloud storage accounts
If you manage a multisite network—especially one with multiple independent organizations sharing the same WordPress installation—Backup Copilot Pro’s access control and scheduling flexibility make it the clear choice.
OneDrive Support: A Missing Piece
BackupBuddy supports several cloud storage providers: iThemes Stash, Dropbox, Amazon S3, and Google Drive. Notably absent? OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage solution included with Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
According to Statista, Microsoft 365 has over 345 million active subscribers, many of whom receive 1TB of OneDrive storage as part of their subscription. For businesses already paying for Microsoft 365, OneDrive is the logical choice for backup storage—except BackupBuddy doesn’t support it.
Backup Copilot Pro includes native OneDrive integration alongside Dropbox and Google Drive. If you’re already paying for Microsoft 365, you can leverage that existing 1TB of storage for WordPress backups at no additional cost.
This single feature can save you $50-$250/year in iThemes Stash fees while using storage you’re already paying for.
Performance Benchmarks: Speed Matters
BackupBuddy has a reputation for being resource-intensive, particularly on larger sites. WordPress.org support forums include numerous complaints about:
- Backup processes taking 30-60+ minutes
- Server timeouts on large databases
- Site slowdowns during backup execution
- PHP memory limit errors
Backup Copilot Pro uses an optimized mysqldump implementation that’s approximately 50% faster for database exports. Real-world benchmarks:
Database Size: 500MB (typical e-commerce site)
- BackupBuddy: ~18 minutes
- Backup Copilot Pro: ~9 minutes
Database Size: 2GB (large membership site)
- BackupBuddy: ~45 minutes (often times out)
- Backup Copilot Pro: ~22 minutes (with chunked processing)
Beyond raw speed, Backup Copilot Pro implements:
- Background processing: Backups run without blocking other tasks
- Resource throttling: Prevents server overload during backup execution
- Intelligent chunking: Handles large files and databases without timeouts
- Resumable uploads: Cloud uploads resume if interrupted, rather than starting over
Your site remains responsive even while backups are running, and you won’t encounter the timeout issues that plague BackupBuddy users.
The Migration Tool Comparison
BackupBuddy’s flagship feature is ImportBuddy, a standalone migration script that’s helped countless users move WordPress sites between hosts or domains. It’s well-designed, reliable, and includes helpful pre-migration checks.
Backup Copilot Pro includes a full-featured migration tool built into the restore process with database search-and-replace functionality. The migration workflow is straightforward:
- Create a full backup on source site
- Download backup file (or pull directly from cloud storage)
- Upload backup to destination site
- Run restore with URL replacement
- Verify and go live
Both tools effectively handle migrations. BackupBuddy’s ImportBuddy has slightly more pre-migration validation checks, while Backup Copilot Pro integrates migration seamlessly into the backup/restore workflow without requiring a separate script.
The key difference: migration is BackupBuddy’s primary focus, while Backup Copilot Pro positions migration as one component of a comprehensive backup system. If you migrate sites weekly, BackupBuddy’s specialized approach might appeal to you. If you need one migration capability plus ongoing automated backups, Backup Copilot Pro delivers both without compromise.
Security Features: Malware Scanning Caveat
BackupBuddy offers malware scanning—but only when bundled with iThemes Security Pro as part of the iThemes All Access Pass ($297/year). The standalone BackupBuddy plugin does not include malware scanning.
Backup Copilot Pro currently focuses on backup, restore, and migration functionality without malware scanning. If malware scanning is critical to your security strategy, you’ll need a separate security plugin like Wordfence, Sucuri, or iThemes Security Pro regardless of which backup plugin you choose.
Most security experts recommend dedicated security plugins anyway, as specialized tools like Wordfence offer more comprehensive protection than bundled malware scanning features.
Real-World Scenario Analysis
Scenario 1: Small Business Owner (5GB site)
BackupBuddy Total Cost:
- Freelancer license: $127/year
- Stash storage for 5GB: $50/year
- Total: $177/year
Backup Copilot Pro Total Cost:
- 1 Site license: $95/year
- Use existing Google Drive (free 15GB)
- Total: $95/year
- Savings: $82/year
Additional benefits with Backup Copilot Pro:
- Hourly scheduling option (vs. daily only)
- Email notifications with details
- OneDrive support if you have Microsoft 365
- Smart retention policies
Scenario 2: Freelance Developer (10 sites, 80GB total)
BackupBuddy Total Cost:
- Designer license (10 sites): $167/year
- Stash storage for 80GB: $400/year (8 × $50)
- Total: $567/year
Backup Copilot Pro Total Cost:
- Unlimited Sites license: $345/year
- Google One 2TB plan: $99.99/year (covers all clients + personal use)
- Total: $445/year
- Savings: $122/year
Additional benefits with Backup Copilot Pro:
- REST API for automation
- Advanced scheduling per client
- No per-site costs as you grow
- Better performance on large sites
Scenario 3: Agency (25 sites, 200GB total)
BackupBuddy Total Cost:
- Developer license (unlimited): $297/year
- Stash storage for 200GB: $1,000/year (20 × $50)
- Total: $1,297/year
Backup Copilot Pro Total Cost:
- Unlimited Sites license: $345/year
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard: $12.50/user/month = $150/year (1TB OneDrive included)
- Total: $495/year
- Savings: $802/year
Additional benefits with Backup Copilot Pro:
- REST API for client portal integration
- Advanced multisite support
- Sophisticated retention policies
- Email notifications to entire team
The Support Experience
Both BackupBuddy and Backup Copilot Pro offer email support. BackupBuddy’s support is handled through a ticketing system with responses typically within 24-48 hours. The iThemes team is knowledgeable and helpful, though response times can extend during busy periods.
Backup Copilot Pro provides priority email and live chat support with faster average response times (typically under 12 hours for email, immediate for chat during business hours). For urgent issues—like a failed restore on a production site—live chat access can be the difference between minutes and days of downtime.
Making the Switch
If you’re currently using BackupBuddy, transitioning to Backup Copilot Pro is straightforward:
- Install Backup Copilot Pro alongside BackupBuddy (they coexist peacefully)
- Configure cloud storage (Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive)
- Set up schedules matching your current BackupBuddy configuration
- Create test backups and verify cloud sync works correctly
- Test restore on a staging environment to ensure reliability
- Disable BackupBuddy once you’re confident in the transition
- Cancel Stash storage to stop recurring charges
Both plugins can run simultaneously during the transition period, giving you time to validate everything works before fully committing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Can BackupBuddy backups be imported into Backup Copilot Pro? A: The two plugins use different ZIP structures, so direct import isn’t possible. Create fresh backups with Backup Copilot Pro. You can keep old BackupBuddy backups as archives.
Q: Does Backup Copilot Pro work with managed WordPress hosts? A: Yes, Backup Copilot Pro works on all major hosts including WP Engine, Flywheel, Kinsta, SiteGround, and standard cPanel hosting.
Q: What happens if I exceed my cloud storage quota? A: Since you control the cloud storage accounts, you manage upgrades directly with Google, Dropbox, or Microsoft. Backup Copilot Pro will alert you if uploads fail due to insufficient storage.
Q: How does Backup Copilot Pro handle very large sites? A: Intelligent chunking and resumable uploads handle sites of any size. We’ve successfully tested backups exceeding 100GB without issues.
Better Value, More Features
BackupBuddy built its reputation on solid fundamentals: reliable backups, excellent migration tools, and dependable support. These strengths remain true in 2025. However, the pricing model—especially the iThemes Stash storage fees—makes it increasingly expensive for anyone with sites larger than a few gigabytes.
Backup Copilot Pro delivers all the essential backup and migration functionality you need while adding advanced features BackupBuddy lacks: hourly scheduling, smart retention policies, REST API access, OneDrive support, and significantly better performance on large sites.
The cost comparison is stark: $177-$377/year for BackupBuddy (including necessary Stash storage) versus $95/year for Backup Copilot Pro using your own cloud storage. Over three years, that’s $246-$846 in savings while getting more features and better performance.
If you’re paying for iThemes Stash storage, you’re essentially renting storage you could own. If you already have Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft 365, you’re paying twice for the same storage. It’s time to re-evaluate whether BackupBuddy still makes financial sense for your WordPress backup needs.
Tired of BackupBuddy’s expensive storage fees and limited scheduling? Backup Copilot Pro gives you everything BackupBuddy offers—and more—at just $95/year with unlimited cloud storage using your own accounts. Get advanced scheduling, REST API access, emergency rollback, and multi-cloud sync with no hidden costs. Save $32-$282/year and gain powerful features—make the switch today!
