Best Freemius Alternative for WordPress Plugins

If you distribute plugins to private clients or sell commercial plugins without wanting a revenue-share model, AutomagicWP is the closest direct alternative to Freemius. It handles update delivery, version history, license gating, and GitHub Actions CI/CD without taking a percentage of your revenue. If you need a public storefront with payment processing and upgrade flows, Freemius remains the strongest option in that category.

The longer answer: the best Freemius alternative depends entirely on what you're actually trying to do.

Freemius is the right tool for one specific job: building a public commercial plugin business with a storefront, subscription billing, and upgrade prompts. If that's your situation, Freemius is genuinely hard to beat. But a large portion of WordPress developers aren't running a plugin business. They're agencies pushing custom builds to client sites, or developers distributing a premium plugin without wanting a third party taking a percentage.

For those cases, Freemius is the wrong frame. This post covers what your real options are.

What Freemius actually does

Freemius is a monetization platform for WordPress plugins and themes. It handles payment processing, subscription billing, license management, upgrade prompts inside wp-admin, dunning, cart recovery, and analytics. Update delivery is included, but it's one piece of a larger system built around selling software publicly.

The pricing model is revenue share. Freemius currently charges 4.7% per transaction. That rate drops as you scale. At over $100,000 in monthly revenue, it falls to 0.5% on the excess. Below the $5,000 revenue threshold, the effective fee is higher during the early growth phase.

There are no setup fees and no monthly charges. You pay when you earn.

That's a reasonable deal if you're selling plugins at volume. It's a poor fit if you're distributing custom work to five client sites, because there's no revenue to share and no public storefront to run.

The four real options

1. Freemius

Best for: commercial plugin developers selling publicly to many customers.

Freemius covers the full stack of running a plugin business: billing, refunds, licensing, analytics, and update delivery. The SDK is mature, the documentation is thorough, and the integration surfaces upgrade prompts directly inside wp-admin, which meaningfully improves conversion for freemium plugins.

The tradeoffs: revenue share on every transaction, the update mechanism is tightly coupled to their commercial system, and the entire platform is designed around public sales. Private distribution, where you push a build to a specific client's site, doesn't fit the model cleanly.

2. WordPress.org plugin repository

Best for: free and open-source plugins.

WordPress.org hosts around 60,000 plugins. The update infrastructure is baked into WordPress core. If your plugin qualifies (GPL-licensed, free or freemium, publicly available), you get update delivery, a public listing, download stats, and reviews at no cost.

The constraint is hard: the repository only accepts free, open-source plugins. Commercial-only plugins, private client builds, and internal tools are excluded entirely.

3. wp-update-server (self-hosted)

Best for: developers who want full control and are comfortable running PHP infrastructure.

wp-update-server by Yahnis Elsts is the most widely used open-source update server for private WordPress plugins. You run it on a PHP host, drop your plugin ZIPs in the /packages directory, and connected sites pull updates through WordPress's standard update mechanism via the companion plugin-update-checker library.

The initial setup is genuinely lightweight for a single plugin. The cost grows as you add plugins and clients. You own the server: uptime, security patches, backups, and late-night debugging are your problem. There's no built-in release history, changelog hosting, plugin metadata support, or CI/CD integration. You build those yourself or go without them.

For one or two plugins where you want zero dependencies on external services, this works well. For an agency managing multiple plugins across dozens of client sites, the maintenance overhead compounds.

4. AutomagicWP

Best for: agencies and developers distributing private or premium plugins to a defined set of sites.

AutomagicWP is a managed update delivery service for plugins and themes distributed outside WordPress.org. The scope is deliberately narrow: upload a release, connected sites update automatically.

It doesn't include payment processing, public storefronts, or upgrade prompts. It handles the distribution side: version history, changelog hosting, plugin metadata, GitHub Actions CI/CD, and license key support if you need to gate updates.

Side-by-side comparison

Who should actually look for a Freemius alternative

The common thread among people searching for Freemius alternatives is that they don't have a public plugin business. Their situation looks more like one of these:

Agency developers building custom plugins for client sites. The plugin runs on three to thirty sites, not three thousand. No storefront, no pricing page, no reason to share revenue with a billing platform. The problem is getting new versions onto client sites without manually logging into each wp-admin.

Premium plugin developers who control their own sales. They're using Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, WooCommerce, or direct invoicing for payments and want update delivery without routing revenue through Freemius.

Internal tool developers distributing plugins across company-owned WordPress installations. No external customers, just an ops team that needs updates to propagate automatically.

Developers with low transaction volume where a per-transaction revenue share doesn't make sense for what they're actually getting from the platform.

For all of these, the core need is the same: a reliable way to push plugin updates to connected sites without running your own server or manually distributing ZIPs.

The GitHub Actions angle

One real gap with most Freemius alternatives, including wp-update-server, is CI/CD integration. Freemius has a webhook-based system, but triggering it from GitHub Actions requires custom plumbing. wp-update-server has no native CI integration at all.

The workflow that actually fits modern development is the same one the WordPress community already uses for WordPress.org deployments: push a tag, automation handles the rest. For a full setup guide covering both the webhook path and the GitHub Actions path, see WordPress Plugin Releases with GitHub Actions. If you're building plugins with AI tools and hitting the distribution bottleneck, Ship WordPress Plugin Updates Without ZIP Files covers how to close that gap.

	# .github/workflows/release.yml
name: Release
 
on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*'
 
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
 
      - name: Build plugin
        run: |
          composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
          zip -r my-plugin.zip . --exclude="*.git*" --exclude="tests/*"
 
      - name: Deploy to AutomagicWP
        uses: automagicwp/deploy-action@v1
        with:
          api-key: ${{ secrets.AUTOMAGICWP_API_KEY }}
          plugin-id: ${{ secrets.AUTOMAGICWP_PLUGIN_ID }}
          file: my-plugin.zip

Push v1.3.0. The action builds the ZIP, uploads the release, and every connected site pulls the update on its next 12-hour check cycle. No dashboard involvement required.

The honest take

Freemius is genuinely excellent at what it does. If you're building a plugin business (public pricing, subscription tiers, upgrade flows, the whole stack), it's the most complete option available and the revenue share is fair for what you get.

The problem is that "Freemius alternative" is usually being searched by developers whose situation doesn't resemble a plugin business at all. They need update distribution, not a monetization platform.

For that narrower need, the choice is between owning the infrastructure (wp-update-server) or not owning it (AutomagicWP). WordPress.org is off the table for anything non-public. Freemius is built for a different job.

The question worth asking before choosing is: am I trying to sell plugins to the public, or am I trying to get updates onto a specific set of sites reliably? The answer points to the right tool.

Frequently asked questions

Is Freemius free to use?

There are no setup or monthly fees. Freemius takes a percentage of each transaction, currently 4.7% for most developers, dropping to lower tiers as monthly revenue scales past $50,000 and $100,000. You pay nothing until you make a sale.

Can I use Freemius for private client plugins?

Technically yes, but it's a poor fit. Freemius is designed around public storefronts, pricing plans, and freemium upgrade flows. Distributing a private plugin to a single client site means carrying all the SDK overhead with none of the monetization benefit. Most agencies are better served by a distribution-focused tool.

What is wp-update-server and is it still maintained?

wp-update-server is an open-source PHP application by Yahnis Elsts that runs your own plugin update API. It's actively maintained and widely used. The tradeoff: you own and operate the server. Uptime, security, and infrastructure are your responsibility.

Does AutomagicWP handle payments and licensing?

AutomagicWP handles license key generation and update gating; you can restrict updates to sites with a valid license. It does not handle payment processing; you manage sales through whatever payment method you already use. The focus is update distribution, not billing.

Do WordPress.org and Freemius compete for the same plugins?

Not really. WordPress.org only accepts free, GPL-licensed plugins. Freemius is for commercial plugins sold outside the repository. The two platforms target different developer situations and aren't direct substitutes. Some developers use both: a free version on WordPress.org and a premium version sold through Freemius.

How hard is it to switch from Freemius to a self-hosted or managed alternative?

The main work is replacing the Freemius SDK in your plugin with the update client for your new platform, handling any license migration, and updating client sites. The WordPress-side update mechanism is the same regardless of which server you use. For plugins with a small number of active sites, migration is usually a few hours of work.