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Free vs Pro - Plugixa Activity Log
The free edition of Plugixa Activity Log is not a trial. It records everything WordPress itself does, keeps it for as long as you say, and lets you search it, with no event limit, no expiry and no feature that stops working after thirty days.
Pro adds what a larger site needs around that log: getting data out, telling people, watching other plugins, and keeping history somewhere else.
Features are decided by which code is installed
Free and Pro are the same plugin. The Pro features are additional code that exists only in the Pro download. Nothing in the free edition is a locked copy of a Pro feature, and no check at run time decides what is allowed to work.
On a free site the Pro code is simply not there. Its screens are not in the menu, its REST routes are not registered and its settings do not exist. You get the free behaviour: not a greyed-out page, not a nag, and not a feature that exists and refuses.
That is the difference between a free tier and trialware.
The matrix
Recording
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Sign-ins, failed sign-ins and sign-outs | Yes | Yes |
| User accounts, roles and passwords | Yes | Yes |
| Posts, pages, media and comments | Yes | Yes |
| Menus, widgets and terms | Yes | Yes |
| Plugins, themes and site settings | Yes | Yes |
| PHP errors and 404s (off until switched on) | Yes | Yes |
| Switch monitors and single events on and off | Yes | Yes |
| Exclude users, roles, IP ranges and post types | Yes | Yes |
| Integration monitors for 13 other plugins | - | Yes |
| File integrity scan of core, plugins, themes and uploads | - | Yes |
The thirteen are WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, Redirection, Gravity Forms, WPForms, Advanced Custom Fields, bbPress, LearnDash, MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, TablePress and WP 2FA.
Reading the log
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Log viewer with filters and full-text search | Yes | Yes |
| Live view | Yes | Yes |
| Event inspector with old and new values | Yes | Yes |
| Saved views | Yes | Yes |
| Dashboard, and a panel on the WordPress dashboard | Yes | Yes |
| IP location: flag, region and city beside each address | - | Yes |
| Sessions: who is signed in right now | - | Yes |
Being told
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Email for medium, high or critical events | Yes | Yes |
| Bundled delivery, hourly cap and test email | Yes | Yes |
| Background delivery with retries | Yes | Yes |
| Alert rules by area, event, role, IP address, object or text | - | Yes |
| Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams and signed webhook channels | - | Yes |
Getting data out
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Read-only REST API, with Application Passwords | Yes | Yes |
| WP-CLI commands | Yes | Yes |
| GDPR personal data export, through WordPress’s privacy tools | Yes | Yes |
| CSV export of the filtered log | - | Yes |
| Roles allowed to export | - | Yes |
| Reports on demand, as CSV or printable HTML | - | Yes |
| Reports emailed daily, weekly or monthly | - | Yes |
| Mirrors to syslog, an HTTPS endpoint or a JSON-lines file | - | Yes |
Storage and history
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Retention by age and by number of events | Yes | Yes |
| Import of history from WP Activity Log | Yes | Yes |
| Health screen and Site Health tests | Yes | Yes |
| Archive to a separate table or an external MySQL database | - | Yes |
| Live / Archive toggle in the log, and archive retention | - | Yes |
Control and privacy
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Roles that can view the log | Yes | Yes |
| IP addresses stored in full, shortened or not at all | Yes | Yes |
| GDPR erasure, which anonymises a person’s events | Yes | Yes |
| Privacy policy text | Yes | Yes |
| Multisite: one network log, site administrators see their own site | Yes | Yes |
| End a session, all of a user’s sessions, or all but this one | - | Yes |
| Concurrent session limit and idle sign-out | - | Yes |
For developers
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
REST API, plugixa-activity-log/v1 |
Yes | Yes |
| Hooks: actions and filters | Yes | Yes |
WP-CLI: wp activity-log |
Yes | Yes |
The line people get backwards
Email notifications are free. Choosing exactly which events, and sending them anywhere but email, is Pro.
The free edition emails you about serious events, with a severity threshold, a digest window and an hourly cap. For most sites that is the alerting they need. See Notifications.
Pro adds rules: this event, by that role, from that address, sent to a Slack channel or a signed webhook. Both use the same background queue, so a rule is an addition to free notifications and not a replacement for them.
What Pro does not change
It does not move your log. Events stay in the same table. Pro adds tables of its own for its features and leaves the events table as it is.
It does not change what the free monitors record. The one exception is deliberate: an integration replaces a generic event with a specific one, so a WooCommerce product edit is told once, as a product edit, and not also as a post update.
It does not make anything editable. No edition has a way to edit or delete an event. Events leave the live log only through retention or, in Pro, by being moved to the archive.
It does not send your log anywhere by itself. Every Pro feature that connects to another server - alert channels, mirrors, the IP location download, the core checksum check, an external archive - is off until an administrator sets it up.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Usual cause |
|---|---|
| A Pro screen is missing after upgrading | Check the Monitors screen: the module exists but may be switched off. |
| A Pro REST route returns “no route” on free | Correct. The code is absent, not refused. |
| An integration says “Plugin not active” | The plugin it watches is not active. That is not a licence message. |
| There is no Export CSV button on Pro | Your role may not export. See Access. |
| Nothing changed after installing Pro | Most Pro features do nothing until configured: rules, mirrors, the archive and IP location all start empty. |
What to do next
- Start here: Getting Started.
- The overview: Plugixa Activity Log.
- Free alerting: Notifications.
- When something does not behave: Troubleshooting.