App for Cloudflare® vs BitFire Security – Firewall, Malware Scanner, Bot Blocker, Login Protection

Unlock advanced Cloudflare features without being a network administrator or developer. Works with any Cloudflare plan (including Free), no Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) subscription needed. Cache HTML at network edge Preload JavaScript and CSS View/set all Cloudflare settings Fixes Cloudflare Flexible SSL redirect loops Fixes situation when IPs are coming through as Cloudflare IPs rather than user IPs Cloudflare web analytics support Cloudflare analytics on dashboard Purge cache Automatic image transformations (automatically serve AVIF/WebP versions to browsers that support them) Turnstile CAPTCHA system for registrations, logins, password reset, comments and/or third party plugins View Page rules, Cache rules, Firewall rules, IP Address rules, User Agent rules View Zero Trust Network Access setup View DMARC statistics Included tools: HTTP request trace, IP address details, domain details, WHOIS Directly cache HTML App for Cloudflare® can automatically cache your HTML pages at Cloudflare data centers in 330+ cities. “Standard” WordPress caching plugins can’t escape the laws of physics because information can’t travel faster than the speed of light (even if the page is cached, the cache exists on your physical origin server, which can be over 20,000 km from an end user). Caching content in Cloudflare data centers makes your website faster by putting your website cache closer to end-users (95% of the world’s population is within 50ms of a Cloudflare data center). This can be done without Cloudflare Workers or even a Page Rule (done with a single Cache Rule on Cloudflare’s side, and custom code in the plugin). Preload JavaScript and CSS Speed your site up by using the option that instructs browsers to preload JavaScript and CSS used to render the page being viewed. Can be used on its own, or in conjunction with Cloudflare’s Early Hints function. Manage all Cloudflare settings All Cloudflare settings can be changed directly within your WordPress admin area. Includes Easy config function that will optimally set your Cloudflare zone settings for WordPress. Fixes Cloudflare Flexible SSL redirect loops Automatically fixes HTTPS redirect loops when using Cloudflare’s Flexible SSL option (traffic between user and Cloudflare is encrypted, but traffic between Cloudflare and origin server is not). Handles user IP addresses Automatically handles the situation where your web server is passing Cloudflare IP addresses rather than the IP address of the user making the request. Turnstile CAPTCHA Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA support for registration, login, password reset, comment forms, WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, Elementor Pro, HTML Forms, MetForm and/or WPForms. Single-click setup (done transparently via API call). Network analytics View network stats for your website directly within your WordPress admin area with a dashboard widget. View rules & firewall Quickly review your site’s Cloudflare rules and firewall settings from within your WordPress admin area. Includes: Page rules Cache rules Firewall custom rules IP address rules User agent blocking DMARC management Track third parties that are sending email on your behalf (for example an email provider you have authorized like Gmail or Outlook). You can also see unauthorized email senders or spammers sending email on behalf of your domain. Multisite network support You can have a network-wide Cloudflare API token that can be overridden on a per site basis. In the case where a multisite network operator has the site domains in a single Cloudflare account, they can allow the site users to use Cloudflare features for their individual site without disclosing the underlying API token. Additionally, a single Pro license for the main network site allows the media from all sites in the network to be stored in the cloud, within a single Cloudflare R2 bucket. Image Transformations Supports Cloudflare’s Image Transformation service, which allows Media images to automatically be served in the best format that a browser supports (AVIF, WebP, etc). Additionally, smaller images can be automatically served to users on very slow network connections. No web server configuration required. Store media in the cloud [Premium] Easily and seamlessly store your WordPress media in the cloud with Cloudflare R2. This allows you to offload resources (both bandwidth and disk space) from your server. The first 10GB is free, and only costs $0.015 per GB thereafter (ex. if you had 100GB of media, it would cost $1.35 per month to store it in the cloud). Includes the ability to migrate existing media from local filesystem to R2 (or from R2 to local filesystem). Works with individual media, or all media in bulk (includes web-based migration as well as a shell/WP-CLI option). Automatically convert uploaded images to AVIF or WebP This is done with a free companion plugin, Image Shift (includes the ability to apply watermarks). Protect admin area [Premium] Utilize Zero Trust Network Access to authenticate users before they access your WordPress admin area. Manage rules & firewall [Premium] The premium version unlocks the ability to manage (create, delete, suspend and unsuspend) Cloudflare rules and firewall definitions. In addition to defining your own rules, you can deploy useful rules with a single click: Block traffic from certain countries (or Tor exit nodes widely used by spammers and hackers) Block AI scrapers & crawlers (block bots from scraping your content for AI applications like model training) Force a challenge before users can register (bot/spammer mitigation) Cache static content Automatically block the IP address(es) of spammers for a period of time Backup & restore [Premium] You can backup and restore some of your most important Cloudflare configuration settings: Zero Trust Access Policies Firewall Rules Firewall IP Access Rules Firewall User Agent Blocking Page Rules Cache Rules Backups can be restored to different zones (for example if you had extensive configuration for a zone, you could give another zone the same configuration through a backup restore). Other features API calls are done exclusively through API Tokens (with the minimum required permissions) and not a Global API Key. Global API Keys are an incredibly bad idea from a security standpoint. Ability to purge Cloudflare cache from WordPress admin (or via WP-CLI). Ability to copy Cloudflare zone settings from a different zone on the same Cloudflare account. Cached pages are automatically purged when a post/page is edited (just the necessary pages, not all pages). Stale content is not served to users. Ability to designate an individual admin user to manage settings (maybe you don’t want all admins to have the ability to change things in Cloudflare). Ability to use WordPress filters to add your own logic to things (for example, maybe you don’t want to cache a certain page or post for whatever reason). All JavaScript is native (no dependencies on jQuery or anything else). No third-party PHP libraries used (no dependencies on other libs).

Your Site Deserves Real Protection You built your WordPress site to grow your business, share your ideas, or connect with your community. You shouldn’t have to become a security expert to keep it safe. BitFire stops hackers, bots, and malware automatically so you can focus on what matters: running your site. And when you have a question, a real person on our US-based support team is here to help, 12 hours a day. How BitFire Keeps You Safe Most security plugins wait until something goes wrong and then try to clean up the mess. BitFire works the other way around: it stops threats before they ever reach your site. Think of it like a lock on your front door versus a camera that records a break-in. BitFire is the lock. Our AI-powered scanner watches your files and traffic in real time, catching new threats that other plugins miss because they are still waiting for someone to write a rule for it. “Traditional firewalls allow everything by default and react to known threats. BitFire flips that: it verifies traffic first and only lets the good stuff through.” Key Features What BitFire Does For You (Free) Stops Bots Automatically Spam bots, scrapers, and scanners get blocked before they waste your server resources or fill your forms with junk. No CAPTCHAs, no puzzles for your visitors. Scans for Malware BitFire checks every file on your site against a database of over 20 million known-good files. If something does not belong, you will know about it. Shows You Who is Visiting See every request to your site in real time: where visitors are from, what browser they are using, and whether they are a real person or a bot. No more guessing. Protects Your Login Page Brute-force attacks, password stuffing, and login bots are stopped cold. Your admin area stays locked down. Tells Real People from Fake Browsers BitFire verifies visitors with 99.7% accuracy, 50 times faster than Cloudflare’s challenge pages. Real visitors never notice. Bots get stopped instantly. Blocks Known Bad Actors Over 300,000 known malicious IPs are blocked before they can even connect to your site. What You Get with BitFire Pro Everything in Free, plus the protections that stop even zero-day attacks on vulnerable plugins and themes: Runtime Protection (RASP) BitFire is the only WordPress security plugin with Runtime Application Self Protection. It watches what your plugins and themes are actually doing and stops anything suspicious: A plugin tries to create a secret admin account? Blocked. Malware tries to edit your PHP files? Blocked. A hacked plugin tries to phone home to a malware server? Blocked. Code tries to redirect your visitors to a scam site? Blocked. BitFire has blocked 100% of critical WordPress zero-day vulnerabilities since 2022, with zero new rules required. A+ Rated Web Application Firewall Independent testing by Cloudbric rated BitFire’s WAF at 94% (A+). See how that compares: BitFire [PRO]: 94% (A+) Ninja Firewall [PRO]: 67% (D) WordFence [PRO]: 41% (D) MalCare [PRO]: 34% (F) iThemes Security: 2% (F) Shield Security [PRO]: 2% (F) SiteGround Security: 2% (F) View the full independent test results at Cloudbric Labs AI-Powered Malware Analysis When the scanner finds something suspicious, BitFire’s AI analyzes it in real time to determine if it is actually malicious or just unusual code. Pro users get results in about 2 minutes. Free users can submit files for batch analysis. Automatic Security Headers BitFire learns which domains your site uses (Google Fonts, your CDN, analytics, etc.) and automatically sets up Content Security Policy headers that earn an A+ rating. This protects your visitors from cross-site scripting and redirect attacks without you having to configure a thing. 30 Days of Traffic History Look back through a full month of traffic data to investigate issues, spot patterns, or just understand how your site is being used. Real Human Support This is what makes BitFire different from the big-name security plugins: when you need help, you talk to a real person. Our US-based support team is available 12 hours a day. No ticket queues that take days. No chatbots. No copy-paste answers. Just experienced people who will make sure your site is secure. Whether you need help with setup, have a question about a block, or want someone to look at a suspicious file, we are here. Pricing Free $0 forever. Bot blocking, malware scanning, login protection, and real-time traffic monitoring. Everything you need to stop the vast majority of automated attacks. Pro – Single Site $60/year. Full RASP protection, A+ rated WAF, AI malware analysis, 30-day logs, and priority human support. Pro – Multi-Site Volume Pricing Managing multiple sites? The more you protect, the less you pay: 2-4 sites: $50/site per year 5-9 sites: $45/site per year 10-24 sites: $35/site per year 25-49 sites: $25/site per year 50+ sites: $20/site per year Volume pricing is perfect for freelancers, agencies, and anyone managing WordPress sites for clients. Contact us for volume licensing. How BitFire Compares BitFire vs WordFence WordFence is a solid product with a large team writing custom rules for known vulnerabilities. But there are two things you should know: Free WordFence delays protection by 30 days. When a new vulnerability is found, paying WordFence customers get the fix immediately. Free users wait a full month. If your site is vulnerable, it will almost certainly be attacked before the free patch arrives. WordFence relies on knowing about attacks in advance. With over 10,000 known WordPress vulnerabilities and fewer than 200 signatures, they simply cannot cover everything. BitFire’s RASP does not need to know about an attack in advance. It watches what code is actually doing and stops anything malicious, even brand-new attacks nobody has seen before. Whatever security solution you use – we strongly recommend only using the paid version for all important work. Read the detailed BitFire vs WordFence comparison Why Do Other Plugins Focus So Much on Cleaning Up Malware? Good question. Notice how much other security plugins charge for malware removal and how much of their marketing is about finding infections? A security plugin that does its job well should not need to clean malware off your site very often. If a plugin spends most of its energy on cleanup, that tells you something about how well it prevents attacks in the first place. BitFire focuses on keeping malware off your site so you do not need to pay someone to remove it. Privacy / Monitoring / Data Collection We take your privacy seriously. Here is exactly what BitFire does with data: Traffic inspection. BitFire inspects web traffic to your site to identify threats. Sensitive data like passwords and credit card numbers is automatically replaced with redacted in logs. You can add additional fields to filter in the settings. Error reporting. If BitFire encounters a software error, it can send a report to our development team so we can fix it in the next release. No visitor data is included in these reports. Malware hash checking. BitFire sends tiny numeric fingerprints (64-bit hashes) of your files to our hash server to check them against our database of known-good files. For example, a file might hash to the number 812612388126487. We never see your actual file contents, and your hashes are never stored on our servers. Local data storage. All log data and configuration files are stored locally on your server in a hidden, randomly-named directory under wp-content/uploads/. This directory is protected by an .htaccess file and is not accessible from the web. =trunk/views/hashes_v2.html= Changelog == 5.1.5 Bots impersonating crawlers (bing, meta, google, etc) are not blocked for simple unrestricted GET requests Added daily fetch data for supplemental crawler dns / cidr lists Improved server IP address detection for allowing local server loop back calls Added plugin inventory hiding to malware detection capabilities Malware detections for plugins missing valid headers / plugin scripts Malware detections for plugins with random identifiers in them Improved logging of xmlrpc requests – now records list of method names – not raw xml Added ability to allow users to delete / restore entire plugins if they are only malware (not official plugins with strong malware signals) Binary files are excluded from malware diffs now Reduced false positives for SQL injection Bot Control panel links to dashboard filter user agents better AI verdict results are now stored for future reference Fix deprecation warning for http response headers on PHP 8.5 Removed dependency on filter_var extension Added expert opinion check allowing admins to request a review of potential malware samples by BitFire staff 5.1.4 Fixed an issue that could allow some admin-ajax requests to recieve a browser challenge for the logged in admin on first install Added additional filtering to cover unknown authorization values, provider keys, and hexadecimal tokens in log storage Added daily updated list of allowed network ranges for core web and AI crawers Improved chaching of DNS lookups for core web bots Added additional bot telemetry gating for bitfire core enable flag 5.1.3 fixed an issue with bot triage recomendations that could generate fatal errors on some host in a background task 5.1.1 Added traffic percent blocking for large sites to sample blocking behavior before fully commiting Increased free AI usage credits from 10 to 12 Improved bot/browser verification compatibility with ModSecurity Added buttons for allowing traffic on the dashboard Fixed an issue that was blocking obviously malicious bots even when bot whitelist setting was not enabled Added reasonable limit for max malware file size to prevent resource exchaustion on servers with very large files Expanded bot source and threat intel data Older versions could label some woocommerce user-agents that were completely random as Improved detection of when to load wordpress vs when to inspect early Bots can be configured directly from the dahboard by clicking on their link to the bot control page False positives can now have execptions added on the dashboard with a single button click AI Malware change for OpenAI compliance – previous versions will no longer support AI analysis Threat hunter content scanner reduced false positiveso Basic harending (size limits, shape constraints) for inputs, moved some requests to POST Expanded learning to support sites that accept POSTs from off site for validated web browsers Bot triage moves from hourly to every 3 hours Expanded runtime protection to ensure environemnt loaded successfull before registering wordpress hooks Improved malware input tainting tracing which detects additional potential malware, reduced false positives Added an exclude list of allowed files in the root for the malware scanner Bots who have been repeat visitors with an AI recomendation different different than current mode now show up on to_review tab 5.1.0 Reduced false positvies for malware scan Improved AI scan results with greatly reduced false positives Implemented quarantine restore for deleted malware files in case of site breakage with Add quarantine restore in case core files are deleted from malware cleanup using new mu-plugin error handler bitfire.php Improved RASP compatibility with fewer exceptions UI improvements Add quick links to wafer firewall scan and securityheaders.com tests Hardening for bot domain verification Improved UI browser and bot icons Support auto-updating BitFire PRO plugin Improved fallbacks for caching Minor refactoring to improve AI analysis of codebase Added special handling for servers with low available memory (< 10MB) Added support for servers that have getmypid() disabled 5.0.9 Add security posture to settings page Improved bot identification Improved loading order decreases block time Multi-Site support! Few bug fixes Fixed an issue with support for PHP 7.4 Links to header and WAF 3rd party verification checks on settings page Display hardening for malformed malware Fix for header signatures on 32bit systems 5.0.0 New AI-powered malware analysis for suspicious files Reduced Pro pricing to $60/year with volume discounts Improved malware scanner performance and accuracy Updated bot and browser fingerprint databases Improved dashboard and settings UI 4.8.3 Fix an issue that could reset the configuration on upgrade 4.8.2 Improvements to the malware scanning UI Fixes for downloading non-PHP files Additional guards to handle corner cases 4.8.0 Improved malware detection and reduced false positives Added 3 new file hash servers in US, DE, and KR Added support for checking for backups and files that could contain sensitive data New daily/weekly status emails Added daily malware scan scheduling Various stability and configuration improvements 4.7.4 Improved dashboard messaging for IP and user-agent blocking Fixed toggle behavior on the exceptions page Fixed deprecation warnings Fixed an issue that could prevent uploading plugins when bot blocking was enabled 4.7.3 Initial WP-CLI support: review logs, check metrics, manage blocks Configuration file reliability improvements PHP 8.3 compatibility fix 4.7.2 Improved traffic monitoring and logging Added “Fake Browser” detection badges Added DoS protection for rate-limited IPs New traffic filter keywords: BLOCKED, RESTRICTED, ADMIN, LOGINS, and more Added email notifications for server health Performance improvements across the board 4.7.0 Added AI verification framework for block accuracy Reduced server communication timeout for faster responses Additional blocking class types for exclusions PHP 8.4 compatibility Updated Google, Bing, and Cloudflare IP lists 4.6.1 Improved dashboard log searching Fixed a rare memory issue with log writing 4.6 Moved configuration and log storage to a more secure location Added .htaccess protection for data directories Resolved several minor PHP warnings 4.5 Fixed filtering on blocked requests Fixed handling of malformed file uploads Added additional browser support 4.4.9 Major quality and performance improvements Daily report emails Complete rewrite of caching and statistics Full support for cached websites (Cloudflare, etc.) Log up to 30 days and 2 million requests per month 4.0.1 Major overhaul of browser and bot detection Added 180+ browsers and 300+ browser icons Switched to high-performance binary log format Added commercial IP reputation database with 300K+ abusive IPs Simplified user interface