I didn’t base my review on usernames or reviews, just my little 2 month experience with the plugin and years of experience with wordpress and other plugins.
I did base my initial decision to try this plugin on the reviews here. Like many types of products, plugins, etc… at many different types of websites, reviews are very helpful and usually point us to the right thing. 9 times out of 10 i select well because of the reviews.
I feel a slight duty to contribute to reviews as much and as honestly as i can. I’m in debt to the reviews, so i slowly work on paying that back with reviews. Most of the time i agree with the reviews, this time i honestly didn’t.
After installation of this plugin, i started getting regular hack attempts. This only happened on the 1 of 15 wordpress sites that i installed Wordfence on. I started getting regular ads set to me. It seemed like Wordfence was persistent about letting me know that there is a paid version and that i’m still vulnerable to known problems because i only have the free version. Half a remedy is still only half. The only potential complete security solution Wordfence has is $39 a year.
“A Premium Wordfence license also includes remote scanning with each scan of your site which can detect several additional website infections.”
So I tightened security a bit more but still had these issues. The thing that finally pushed me to remove Wordfence was my hosting provider notifying me that a suspicious upload was detected, trying to upload to the Wordfence folder. My hosting provider blocked it.
All of these problems were solved with the uninstallation of Wordfence.
In theory Wordfence sounds great. I liked what i read about it. Wordfence might work well for many, but from what i’ve experienced, i’m steering clear of it. This is just my honest opinion, i don’t work for any plugin or security companies, i’m just someone who builds and manages websites.