Every plugin’s pricing page calls itself “free” for something. The word’s stopped meaning much on its own. Here’s what’s actually included, checked against real current pricing and real plugin documentation, not assumed from memory.
Login security
Wordfence added passkeys and 2FA to its free tier in version 9.0.0, genuinely worth crediting. Country blocking, though, stays locked behind Premium, $149/year. Kadence Security’s free tier covers brute-force protection and basic 2FA, solid, but no passkey support. SecondGate’s free tier includes passkeys, standard 2FA, trusted devices, and brute-force protection together, in one plugin, no second install.
Country blocking
This is where it gets genuinely uneven. Sucuri’s free plugin doesn’t do this at all, no firewall, no blocking, monitoring only. Wordfence gates it behind Premium. And a lot of the free, dedicated geo-blocking plugins in this space work in a way that’s easy to miss until you’ve already installed one: IP2Location Country Blocker, a real, actively listed WordPress.org plugin, ships with what its own FAQ calls “an outdated sample BIN file,” and tells you plainly, “we encourage you to update your BIN file every month.” Manually. Downloading a database file and re-uploading it, monthly, forever, or the country data quietly goes stale.
SecondGate’s country data refreshes automatically, once a day, pulled fresh from a public source with no account or manual download involved, covering 166 countries out of the box, IPv4 and IPv6, free.
File integrity and monitoring
Kadence Security doesn’t run a malware scanner at any tier, hardening only. Wordfence’s real-time signature updates, the actually current ones, are Premium-only, the free version runs 30 days behind. SecondGate’s file integrity checking sits in Pro, so worth being straight about that, it’s not part of the free comparison here, but it’s £19.99/year for the whole suite, not a separate several-hundred-dollar tier.
What SecondGate’s free tier genuinely doesn’t include, said plainly
No malware scanner. No traditional firewall. If your site’s already compromised, none of the plugins in this free-tier comparison, ours included, replace an actual cleanup service. Worth knowing before you assume “free” means “fully covered,” because it doesn’t, for anyone in this space.
The actual point
“Free” is doing wildly different amounts of work depending on which plugin you’re looking at, sometimes it means a genuinely complete tool, sometimes it means a sample file you’re expected to replace by hand every month. Worth checking which one you’re actually getting, for whatever you end up installing, not just this one.
Sources: IP2Location Country Blocker’s official WordPress.org listing, confirming manual monthly BIN file updates; Wordfence and Kadence Security pricing verified against current vendor documentation.
