UpdraftPlus: WP Backup & Migration Plugin vs Backuply – Backup, Restore, Migrate and Clone: Which Is Faster for WordPress?

UpdraftPlus vs Backuply: Which Backup Plugin Won’t Wreck Your Performance?

Backup plugins are insurance you hope you never need — but they run on your server, eating CPU and memory every time they fire. UpdraftPlus dominates the market with 3M+ active installs. Backuply is the newer challenger at 200K+ installs, pitching itself as lighter and cheaper. Here’s how they actually compare when performance matters.

What Each Plugin Does

UpdraftPlus is the default choice for WordPress backups. The free version gives you scheduled backups, one-click restore, and direct uploads to Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace, and FTP. Premium adds incremental backups, migration tools, multisite support, and extra destinations like OneDrive, Azure, and Backblaze B2.

Backuply covers the same core ground — full/partial backups, one-click restore, migration — but bundles more storage destinations in the free tier, including WebDAV and SFTP. It’s built by the Developer team behind developer-focused tools, and it shows: less UI chrome, fewer upsells, faster to configure.

Feature Comparison

• Incremental backups: UpdraftPlus Premium only. Backuply doesn’t offer true incrementals — every backup is a full run. For large sites, this is a dealbreaker.
• Migration: Both handle site migration. UpdraftPlus Migrator (premium) is more battle-tested for complex moves. Backuply’s migration works fine for straightforward host-to-host transfers.
• Multisite: UpdraftPlus Premium supports WordPress multisite. Backuply does not.
• Backup rotation: Backuply Pro includes automatic backup rotation. UpdraftPlus handles this in both free and premium tiers.
• Remote storage in free tier: Backuply free supports Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, S3, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, and WebDAV. UpdraftPlus free covers fewer destinations — you need Premium for OneDrive and SFTP.

Performance Impact During Backup Runs

This is where it gets interesting. Both plugins run backups server-side, meaning your PHP process is doing the heavy lifting — zipping files, dumping the database, uploading to remote storage.

UpdraftPlus full backups spike CPU to around 40% for 2-3 minutes on a typical shared host. However, incremental backups (Premium) finish in under 45 seconds with negligible CPU impact. If you’re on the free tier doing full backups daily, expect noticeable slowdowns during the backup window. The plugin uses roughly 236KB of memory at rest — well below average.

Backuply has a smaller idle footprint at around 8KB additional memory after activation. During backup runs, it’s competitive with UpdraftPlus on small-to-medium sites. But without incremental backups, large sites (10GB+) will feel it every single run. There’s no way to throttle zip chunk sizes like UpdraftPlus’s expert settings allow.

Bottom line: UpdraftPlus Premium with incrementals wins on large sites. For sites under 2GB, Backuply’s full backups complete fast enough that the difference is academic.

Storage Options and Pricing

• UpdraftPlus Free: $0 — Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, Rackspace, FTP. No incrementals, no migration.
• UpdraftPlus Premium: $70/year (Personal) — adds incremental backups, 1GB UpdraftVault storage, migration, multisite, and 10+ additional storage destinations.
• Backuply Free: $0 — More storage destinations than UpdraftPlus free, but no scheduled auto-backups or rotation.
• Backuply Pro: $39/year (Personal, 10GB cloud storage) to $249/year (Business, 50GB cloud storage). Auto-backups and rotation require Pro.

The pricing gap narrows fast. Backuply’s $39/year Personal plan includes 10GB of their own cloud storage, while UpdraftPlus only bundles 1GB. But UpdraftPlus’s incremental backups save far more storage space over time than raw allocation numbers suggest.

When to Use Which

• Small sites under 2GB, budget-conscious: Backuply Pro at $39/year is hard to beat. Included cloud storage, simple UI, gets the job done.
• Sites over 5GB or WooCommerce stores: UpdraftPlus Premium. Incremental backups aren’t optional — full daily backups on a 10GB site will hammer your server and eat storage quotas.
• Multisite networks: UpdraftPlus Premium. Backuply has no multisite support.
• Maximum free tier value: Backuply free gives you more storage destinations, but UpdraftPlus free gives you scheduled backups — which matter more. Go UpdraftPlus free.
• Performance-obsessed sites: Neither. Use a host-level backup (Kinsta, Cloudways, GridPane all handle this) and skip the PHP overhead entirely. If you must use a plugin, UpdraftPlus Premium with incrementals scheduled at 3 AM is the least-bad option.