Advanced Database Cleaner has been around for ten years and sits on 100,000 sites. We built Database Cleaner anyway. Here is why, in the terms that matter when you compare them.
We make one of these two plugins, so read this knowing that. Every claim below is something you can check in five minutes with both free versions installed, and we would rather you did.
What the free versions actually let you do
Both free versions delete the obvious: old revisions, auto-drafts, spam and trashed comments, expired transients, orphaned metadata. Both optimize tables. That is the easy half of the job, and it is where most comparisons stop.
The hard half is everything else in the database: tables, options, cron jobs and post types that were left behind by plugins and themes you no longer use. That is where the bloat actually lives, and it is where the two free versions part ways. In Advanced Database Cleaner, detecting orphaned tables, options, cron jobs and metadata is a Premium feature; the free version does not show you who owns what. In Database Cleaner, the free version lists every table with its size and owner, every option with its autoload flag, every registered post type and every scheduled cron job, tells you which are WordPress core, which belong to an installed plugin, and which belong to nothing that is still running, and lets you remove them. Expert Mode is free too, and so is Easy Mode, which turns all of it into one button for people who do not want to know what a transient is.
We did not make that split by accident. The map of what is in your database is the whole point of a database cleaner. Charging for it means the free version can only clean what it does not need to understand.
Knowing which plugin left what
“Unused” is a judgement call. A table with no active plugin behind it might be junk from a slider you tried in 2019, or the only copy of five years of form submissions. The difference is knowing who created it. Database Cleaner ships with that knowledge built in: the free version recognises WordPress core and the common plugins, and the Pro version carries a curated map of about 5,300 tables, 59,000 options, 1,800 cron jobs and 1,500 post types, each attributed to the plugin or theme that registers it, with a status that says whether that owner is still installed and active. Every item on the screen says what it is and where it came from before you decide, and the ones nobody claims are flagged rather than silently offered for deletion.
Advanced Database Cleaner Premium attributes orphans too, by scanning your plugin files for the strings they register. It works, and it is honest work. It is also the reason the plugin needs a scan that takes a while and that has to be rerun, while Database Cleaner already knows.
Large databases
This is the reason the plugin exists at all. On a big, old install (a WooCommerce shop with years of orders, a site that has been through thirty plugins) the older cleaners scanned everything in one request and hit the PHP time limit. Database Cleaner splits every heavy job into small asynchronous requests, so a 5 GB database gets analysed and cleaned without a timeout, on shared hosting, from a browser tab. It also records the database size over time, so you see which plugin is growing it by 40 MB a week instead of discovering it a year later.
An AI assistant can run it
Database Cleaner registers its tools with AI Engine‘s MCP server, so Claude or ChatGPT can inspect the database, explain what a table is, and clean up, with your confirmation before anything is deleted. MCP for site owners shows what that looks like. Advanced Database Cleaner has no equivalent.
Where Advanced Database Cleaner is fine
Two things, so this is not a hatchet job. Its free version includes scheduled cleanups, with several tasks at different frequencies and a “keep the last X days” rule per item; in Database Cleaner the automatic sweeper is a Pro feature. And its lifetime licences are cheaper. If all you want is a revision sweep every Sunday on a small site, both plugins will do it and you will not notice a difference.
Pricing, side by side
| Database Cleaner | Advanced Database Cleaner | |
|---|---|---|
| Free version shows who owns each table, option, cron job | Yes | No, Premium |
| Free version | Yes | Yes |
| 1 site, yearly | $39 | $39 |
| 5 sites, yearly | $59 | $59 |
| Top yearly tier | $99, Professional | $119, unlimited sites |
| Lifetime | from $249 | from $78 |
Prices checked on 7 September 2026 on both vendors’ sites; the current ones are on our product page.
The honest test
Install the free Database Cleaner next to whatever you use today and open the Tables tab. If it shows you tables with an owner you deleted in 2021 that your current cleaner never mentioned, you have your answer. If your database is big enough that the other one times out, you have it twice 🙂
