Two plugins clean WordPress databases well enough to be worth paying for: Advanced Database Cleaner, which has been around for a decade and sits on 100,000 sites, and our own Database Cleaner, which is newer and sits on about 10,000. We make one of them, so read this with that in mind. We have tried to be fair, and there are things the other one does better. They are listed first.
What both of them do
The core job is the same. Delete old revisions, auto-drafts, trashed and spam comments, expired transients, orphaned post, user, comment and term meta, oEmbed caches. Optimize and repair tables. Show you what will be deleted before it is deleted, with sizes. Run the cleanup on a schedule so you stop thinking about it. Both free versions do most of that, and both Pro versions go further in the same two directions: understanding what is orphaned, and understanding who left it there.
Both also tell you, correctly, to back up first. Neither can undo a deleted table.
Where Advanced Database Cleaner is ahead
- Track record. Ten years, 100,000 active installs, about two thousand reviews at 4.9 stars. Our plugin has 150 reviews. That difference is real, and if it matters to you, it should.
- Scheduling depth. You can create several scheduled tasks, each cleaning its own list of items at its own frequency (hourly to monthly), each with its own “keep the last X days” rule, and pause them individually. Database Cleaner has one scheduled sweeper with one list of tasks. For most sites that is enough; for an agency with strict retention rules it is not the same thing.
- Free version scope. Scheduling, table optimization and repair, and the “keep the last X days” rule are all in the free version. In Database Cleaner the automatic sweeper is a Pro feature.
- Price on many sites, and lifetime. Their unlimited-sites licence is $119 a year; ours tops out at $99 a year for the Professional tier, so per site they are cheaper at scale. On lifetime licences it is not close: theirs start at $78, ours at $249.
Where Database Cleaner is ahead
- Large databases. This is the reason the plugin exists. 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.
- Who owns what, in the free version. The free version already labels tables, options, cron jobs and post types with the plugin or theme that created them, and flags what was left behind by plugins that are no longer installed. Advanced Database Cleaner puts that kind of orphan detection in its Premium version. Our Pro version goes deeper still, but you get the map for free.
- Easy Mode and Expert Mode. The same plugin shows a one-button cleanup to someone who just wants a lighter site, and a full table, options and cron browser with custom queries and bulk reassignment to someone who knows what they are looking at.
- Size history. It records the database size over time, so you can see whether a plugin is growing your database by 40 MB a week, rather than 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. We wrote about what that looks like in practice in MCP for site owners. Advanced Database Cleaner has no equivalent as of this writing.
Pricing, side by side
| Advanced Database Cleaner | Database Cleaner | |
|---|---|---|
| Free version | Yes, includes scheduling | Yes, includes ownership map |
| 1 site, yearly | $39 | $39 |
| 5 sites, yearly | $59 | $59 |
| Top yearly tier | $119, unlimited sites | $99, Professional |
| Lifetime | from $78 | from $249 |
Prices checked on 7 September 2026 on each vendor’s site; the current ones are on our product page and theirs.
Which one should you pick
Pick Advanced Database Cleaner if you manage many small client sites, want several set-and-forget schedules with different retention rules, or want the cheapest lifetime licence. It is a mature, well-supported plugin and there is nothing wrong with choosing it.
Pick Database Cleaner if you have one large or old site, if another cleaner has ever timed out on it, if you want to know which plugin left which tables behind before you delete anything, or if you would rather ask an AI assistant to do the tidying and just approve the result.
Both free versions cost nothing, and they do not conflict with each other. The honest test is to install ours on the site that gave the other one trouble and see whether the scan finishes 🙂
