MaintainHQ vs WP Buffs
WP Buffs does the work for you, by people, per site. MaintainHQ gives your agency the platform and an AI engineer to do it yourself.
Facts checked on 4 November 2026. Prices taken from each vendor's own website.
The short answer
MaintainHQ
MaintainHQ is a cloud maintenance platform for agencies and freelancers. Gus, the AI WordPress engineer, diagnoses problems and fixes them with your approval, on staging or production as you choose, checked against WordPress coding standards, verified, and rolled back automatically if anything goes wrong. Around Gus you get safe updates with pre-update testing, backups, malware scanning, uptime with incident autopilot, team roles, white-label PDF reports and an API with an MCP server.
Choose MaintainHQ if
- You run your own care plans and want to keep the margin
- You want an AI engineer that prepares fixes for you to approve, across every site
- You manage many sites, where per-site service fees add up
WP Buffs
WP Buffs is a WordPress care plan service: their team looks after your site. Plans are Maintain ($89/mo: weekly updates, 24/7 emergency support, uptime monitoring, cloud backups four times a day), Protect ($179/mo, adding unlimited website edits and security), Perform ($239/mo, adding speed optimisation and malware removal) and Custom ($359/mo, adding safe updates on staging). Agencies can resell white-label plans at a discount.
Choose WP Buffs if
- You want people to handle site edits and support for you
- You only have one or two sites and no time to manage them
- You want to resell a fully managed service under your brand
Use both
MaintainHQ is software, not a service. Some agencies use a done-for-you service for content edits on a few sites and MaintainHQ for maintenance and fixes across the rest.
Side by side
| Feature | MaintainHQ | WP Buffs |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A cloud maintenance platform with an AI WordPress engineer (Gus). Works with sites on any host. | Done-for-you care plan service with a human team |
| Updates | Bulk plugin updates, plus safe auto-updates with lanes, soak times, fleet waves and approval for major versions | Weekly updates; safe updates on staging on the Custom plan |
| Backups | Scheduled and on-demand, incremental between full backups, retention you control with pinning, restore with a safety backup and automatic rollback | Cloud backups four times a day |
| Uptime and incidents | Uptime, SSL expiry and PHP error monitoring, public status pages, and incident autopilot: Gus diagnoses an outage and drafts the fix and status update for your approval | Uptime monitoring and 24/7 emergency support |
| Security | Daily read-only malware scan of files and database, vulnerability alerts matched to installed versions, firewall, hardening, login lockout and core file integrity checks | Security on Protect; malware removal on Perform |
| AI that fixes | Gus diagnoses and fixes: your approval for every fix, on staging or production as you choose, WordPress coding-standards checks, a backup, verification and automatic rollback | Human team rather than software |
| Pricing model | Flat plans: Starter $2.99/mo (1 site), Starter Plus $29/mo (5), Pro $79/mo (25), Agency $199/mo (unlimited). 7-day free trial. Gus is on every plan, with an allowance that resets every 6 hours and a weekly allowance, bigger on bigger plans. | $89 to $359 per site per month |
Is MaintainHQ cheaper than WP Buffs?
WP Buffs plans cost $89 to $359 per site per month and include human work. MaintainHQ is software from $29/mo for 5 sites; you or your team do the client work, with Gus doing much of the fixing.
Moving to MaintainHQ
Step 1: Connect your sites to MaintainHQ with the connector plugin (add them one by one or paste a list into the importer).
Step 2: Turn on backups, safe auto-updates and monitoring, and let Gus run a first health check on each site.
Step 3: Keep a care plan service for the sites where you want people to do edits, and run the rest yourself in MaintainHQ.
Questions
Will MaintainHQ make content edits for my clients?
No. MaintainHQ and Gus handle maintenance: updates, backups, security, monitoring and fixing problems. Content edits and design changes are still your team's work. If you want people to do edits, a care plan service like WP Buffs does that.
What does Gus actually do?
Gus is the AI WordPress engineer built into MaintainHQ. It inspects a site, finds the cause of a problem and prepares a fix. Code changes are checked against WordPress coding standards and wait for your approval, then go to staging or production as you choose, after a backup. They are verified afterwards and roll back automatically if the site gets worse. Every change has a receipt you can share with the client.
Facts about WP Buffs checked on 4 November 2026 from their public websites. Prices and features change; if something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it. Product names belong to their owners.
Try MaintainHQ free
From $2.99 a month for 1 site, with a 7-day trial. Connect your first site in minutes and let Gus run a health check.