---
title: "Top WordPress plugin companies in 2026"
url: "https://plugpress.co/top-wordpress-plugin-companies-2026.md"
canonical: "https://plugpress.co/top-wordpress-plugin-companies-2026/"
published: "2026-07-29"
modified: "2026-07-29"
author: "Fahim"
tags:
  - "Uncategorized"
  - "industry"
  - "list"
  - "wordpress"
---

# Top WordPress plugin companies in 2026

Seven groups dominate the WordPress plugin economy in 2026: Automattic, Awesome Motive, StellarWP, Newfold Digital, WP Engine, Elementor, and Brainstorm Force. Beneath them sits a durable layer of independent shops that outsell the conglomerates inside their own categories, and a Dhaka cluster most English-language roundups leave out entirely.

This is a field guide to all of them, written from inside the industry rather than about it. I have shipped WordPress plugins since 2014 and run a company in this market, which makes me a competitor to several names below. Read it with that in mind — and check the changelogs yourself, which is the advice this article ends on anyway.

## How this list was assembled

Four criteria, in this order: **reach** across the whole catalogue rather than one hit product; **breadth**, meaning products actively maintained rather than parked; **staying power**, measured in years shipping and whether updates still land on a schedule; and **ecosystem pull** — whether other people have built businesses on top of what the company releases.

Nobody is ranked by revenue. Almost every company here is privately held and publishes no financials, so any revenue figure in a competing article is an estimate presented as reporting. Install counts are public; revenue is not. The list is therefore grouped and ordered roughly from largest catalogue to most specialised, not scored one through seventeen.

## The WordPress plugin economy in 2026

Three structural shifts explain most of what follows.

**Consolidation is no longer a wave; it is the default.** Awesome Motive, StellarWP and Newfold Digital have spent four years acquiring plugin shops with disciplined frequency. Easy Digital Downloads, Smash Balloon, The Events Calendar, LearnDash, iThemes, Yoast, Kadence — all changed hands. The catalogue you saw at WordCamp in 2020 now sits inside roughly a dozen parent companies. When you install three plugins, you are often dealing with one or two owners.

**The free-plus-premium model still dominates, but the arithmetic has changed.** The WordPress.org repository remains the single most important discovery surface in this market, and installs there are effectively free customer acquisition. But supporting free users at scale costs real money, and shops that once published generous free plugins now publish thinner "lite" versions with more value pushed into paid tiers. That is rational for a sustainable business. It does change what "free WordPress plugin" means in 2026.

**AI is in every roadmap; it is not yet in every product.** Every company on this list has shipped or announced AI features — content generation, form classification, targeting, image work, support automation. The ones doing it well treat AI as a capability inside an existing tool. The ones doing it badly shipped a chat widget and a press release. "Does the AI feature do work a customer would otherwise do by hand" separates the two reliably.

### The governance question nobody had to ask before 2024

In late 2024 Matt Mullenweg publicly demanded that WP Engine pay Automattic for use of the WordPress trademark, then cut WP Engine off from WordPress.org services. Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin WP Engine owns and a dependency for a large share of custom builds, was forked on WordPress.org into Secure Custom Fields. The dispute ran into 2025 with significant industry pushback and litigation.

By 2026 the practical state is uneasy normalisation. WP Engine remains a major host. Mullenweg remains in charge of Automattic and of WordPress.org. What changed permanently is the risk model: every company below now treats repository access as something that can be withdrawn, and several have built update and delivery infrastructure outside WordPress.org as a hedge. That is the single most consequential shift in this industry since the block editor.

## At a glance

| Company | Based | Best known for | Model |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Automattic | United States | WooCommerce, Jetpack, Akismet | Freemium + hosting |
| Awesome Motive | United States | WPForms, AIOSEO, OptinMonster | Freemium |
| StellarWP | United States | The Events Calendar, LearnDash | Freemium bundle |
| Newfold Digital | US / Netherlands | Yoast SEO, YITH, Bluehost | Hosting + plugins |
| WP Engine | United States | Advanced Custom Fields, Genesis | Hosting + plugins |
| Elementor | Israel | Elementor page builder | Freemium |
| Elegant Themes | United States | Divi | Lifetime licence |
| Brainstorm Force | India | Astra, SureCart, CartFlows | Freemium |
| WPMU DEV | Australia | Smush, Forminator, Defender | Single membership |
| WPDeveloper | Bangladesh | Essential Addons, BetterDocs | Freemium |
| Themeisle | Romania | Otter Blocks, Neve | Freemium |
| PublishPress | Distributed | Editorial workflow, capabilities | Freemium |
| WP Tasty | United States | Tasty Recipes, Tasty Pins | Premium only |
| Themeum | Bangladesh | Tutor LMS, Droip | Freemium |
| weDevs | Bangladesh | Dokan, WP Project Manager | Freemium |
| Ollyo | Bangladesh | Kirki framework | Freemium |
| PlugPress | Bangladesh | Saddle, Waggle, Loggle | Freemium |

## Automattic

Founded in 2005 by Matt Mullenweg, Automattic is the most consequential company in this ecosystem and the only one whose product decisions move the platform itself. It runs WordPress.com and WooCommerce.com commercially and acts as de facto steward of WordPress core.

The catalogue: **WooCommerce** (acquired 2015, and still the dominant ecommerce plugin in WordPress), **Jetpack** (performance, security and content tools under one umbrella), **Akismet** (the spam filter that ships with most installations), **Gravatar**, **VaultPress**, and a long tail of in-house WooCommerce extensions.

Automattic's decisions are structural even when they are not meant to be. When WooCommerce absorbs a feature, the third-party extensions that filled that gap lose their market overnight. When Jetpack consolidates, the same thing happens at smaller scale. Reading Automattic's roadmap is part of reading this industry, and every company below does it.

## Awesome Motive

The largest premium WordPress plugin company that is not Automattic. Syed Balkhi founded WPBeginner in 2009 and built Awesome Motive around it, and the group has spent the last decade acquiring or building the most-used premium plugin in one category after another.

The catalogue: **WPForms** (forms), **OptinMonster** (lead capture), **MonsterInsights** (analytics), **AIOSEO** (SEO), **SeedProd** (landing pages), **Smash Balloon** (social feeds, acquired 2022), **Easy Digital Downloads** and **AffiliateWP** (via the Sandhills Development acquisition announced in late 2021), **TrustPulse**, **RafflePress** and **SearchWP**.

The playbook is consistent: acquire a category leader, professionalise its support and marketing, tier the pricing aggressively. The part competitors underrate is WPBeginner itself — one of the highest-traffic WordPress publications in existence, and a distribution channel that lets Awesome Motive launch a product into an audience it already owns. No other company on this list has that advantage.

## StellarWP (Liquid Web)

Liquid Web's plugin arm, launched as a brand in 2022 to house a growing pile of acquisitions and still the most active acquirer in WordPress.

The catalogue: **The Events Calendar** (from Modern Tribe), **LearnDash** (acquired 2021), **GiveWP** (donations), **Restrict Content Pro** (memberships), **Iconic** (WooCommerce extensions), **Solid Security** and **Solid Backups** (formerly iThemes), and **Kadence** (theme and blocks).

The strategy is coverage, then integration: events, courses, donations, memberships, security, blocks, sold increasingly as one bundle with unified billing and shared support, surfaced inside Liquid Web's hosting base. Acquired plugins gain enterprise reach. Customers get products they knew as independents now framed inside a hosting business — which is either reassuring or not, depending on what you valued about them originally.

## Newfold Digital (Yoast, YITH)

Newfold owns Bluehost, Yoast and YITH, and is the clearest expression of the hosting-plus-plugins model now defining the top of this market.

**Yoast SEO**, founded by Joost de Valk and acquired in 2021, sits in the top install band on WordPress.org alongside a handful of plugins with more than ten million active installations. The product line stayed recognisable through the acquisition: Yoast SEO free and premium, the WooCommerce and video extensions, Duplicate Post, and Yoast Academy. **YITH**, acquired in 2022, brought one of the deepest WooCommerce extension catalogues anywhere.

The interesting recent work is Yoast's AI: keyword research, content suggestions and meta description generation inside the plugin. It is one of the more disciplined AI integrations in this space — it does work the user would otherwise do by hand, which is the test. For buyers, the acquisition mostly does not show. For anyone selling an SEO plugin, the competitive landscape consolidated considerably.

## WP Engine

A host that became a plugin company by acquiring good ones, and the other party in the dispute described above.

The catalogue: **Advanced Custom Fields**, the **Genesis** framework and StudioPress themes, **Local** (the development environment a large share of WordPress developers run daily), and the former Delicious Brains products — **WP Migrate**, **WP Offload Media** and **SpinupWP**.

ACF is the one that matters. It is load-bearing infrastructure for custom WordPress development in a way few plugins are, which is precisely why its fork into Secure Custom Fields landed as hard as it did on agencies that had built a decade of client work on top of it. Whatever you conclude about the merits, the episode is now the reference case for platform risk in this industry, and every serious plugin company has planned around it since.

## Elementor

Elementor reset expectations for what editing a WordPress site should feel like, and it is one of the very few companies in this market to have raised serious venture funding rather than bootstrapping.

Its real significance is not the builder but the economy around it. Elementor add-ons support dozens of independent businesses — including two on this list — and an Elementor add-on remains one of the few product categories in WordPress where a small team can still reach a million installations. No company here has generated more third-party revenue for other people.

The open question is what full site editing does to that position over the next few years, and whether the developer-end of the builder market — where Bricks and Breakdance have taken real share — comes back.

## Elegant Themes

Founded in 2008 by Nick Roach, privately held, never raised outside capital, and historically one of the most profitable independent companies in WordPress. The catalogue is deliberately small: **Divi** (sold as a theme, functioning as a complete site-building platform), **Bloom** and **Monarch**.

Most of Elegant Themes' influence is indirect, through the hundreds of shops that build Divi-specific products. That sub-economy is substantial and largely invisible from outside the Divi world.

**Divi 5** is the major event: a full rewrite on a React-based architecture that separates design data from rendered HTML. It is the largest release the company has ever shipped, and compatibility work is still moving through the third-party Divi ecosystem. The lifetime licence has held throughout — pay once, use forever — which is now genuinely rare.

## Brainstorm Force

Sujay Pawar's company, based in Pune, and the best case study here for building a portfolio organically instead of buying one. Self-funded and profitable.

The catalogue: **Astra** (among the most-installed WordPress themes), **Spectra** (blocks), **CartFlows** (funnels), **SureCart** (commerce), **SureMembers**, **SureTriggers** (automation) and **SureForms**.

The "Sure" naming is deliberate: these are built to function as one small-business stack, and that cohesion is something most multi-product shops attempt and few achieve. SureCart deserves specific attention as one of the only credible challenges to WooCommerce from inside the WordPress ecosystem in years. It is not displacing WooCommerce, but it has taken a real audience among businesses that find WooCommerce too heavy for what they sell.

## WPMU DEV

One of the oldest continuously independent companies in WordPress, founded in 2004 by James Farmer in Australia, with a business model that has barely changed: a single membership covering the entire plugin and theme catalogue plus managed hosting.

The catalogue: **Smush** (image optimisation), **Defender** (security), **Hummingbird** (performance), **Forminator** (forms), **Hustle** (opt-ins) and **Branda** (white-labelling), each with a free version on WordPress.org that has been the acquisition channel for fifteen years.

WPMU DEV never took the acquisition path. The catalogue is in-house, the support team is in-house, and the company has stayed roughly the same size for years — which in a consolidating market is a strategy, not a stall. For buyers replacing four or five separate licences, the single membership is straightforwardly good value.

## WPDeveloper

Dhaka-based and shipping steadily since 2015. **Essential Addons for Elementor** is the lead product and one of the most-installed add-on plugins in the entire Elementor ecosystem, with more than two million active installations.

Also: **NotificationX** (social proof), **BetterDocs** (knowledge base), **WP Scheduled Posts**, **SchedulePress** and **Flexia**.

WPDeveloper stayed profitable and independent through a period when most shops of comparable size were acquired. It has also been notably measured about AI — features ship, but at a deliberate pace rather than a reactive one, which given how much of this list shipped AI features for the announcement is worth noting.

## Themeisle

Founded by Ionut Neagu in Romania, and one of the cleanest independent shops in WordPress — focused on the block editor era rather than the page builder era.

The catalogue: **Otter Blocks** (one of the best-designed block libraries available), **Neve** and **Hestia** (themes), **Sparks for WooCommerce**, **Revive Social** and **WP Full Pay**. Small by 2026 standards, but each product is finished in a way that larger catalogues often are not.

The strategic position is good: as core moves further into block-based site building, Themeisle's block-first investment compounds. Neve was among the first themes designed with full site editing in mind, and that early bet is still paying.

## PublishPress

The editorial workflow specialist: small catalogue, specific audience, nearly a decade of consistent shipping.

The catalogue: **PublishPress Capabilities** (role and permission management, and the modern successor to User Role Editor), **Permissions**, **Series**, **Checklists**, **Revisions** and the **Editorial Calendar**.

The audience is multi-author publications, agencies running content operations, and newsrooms — sites where several humans touch the same post. No other company builds exclusively for that segment at this depth. On any site with more than three contributors, Capabilities alone usually justifies the install.

## WP Tasty

The recipe plugin shop, and the dominant family in food blogging — a segment considerably larger than people outside it assume.

The products: **Tasty Recipes** (recipe schema and presentation), **Tasty Pins** (Pinterest image and metadata optimisation, Pinterest being the largest search referrer for most food sites), **Tasty Links** (affiliate link management) and **Tasty Roundups**.

Food blogging at scale is a real publishing industry running on WordPress, and WP Tasty serves it well enough that few competitors have made meaningful inroads. Niche, and durable precisely because of it.

## Themeum

Bangladesh-based, operating since 2013, and best known for **Tutor LMS** — one of the two products serious course creators actually choose between, the other being LearnDash.

Also: **Qubely** (blocks), **Droip** (a no-code builder) and several themes.

The LMS category consolidated sharply over five years, and Tutor LMS won its position on the strength of the free tier: most course creators can start free and upgrade only when they need the advanced features. Droip is the one to watch — a WordPress-native builder with a genuinely different design philosophy from Divi, Elementor and Beaver Builder. Early in traction, interesting technically.

## weDevs

Another major Bangladesh-based independent, operating since 2012, led by **Dokan** — one of the most-installed multivendor marketplace plugins in WordPress.

Dokan turns a single WooCommerce store into a marketplace with multiple sellers, Etsy-style. Also in the catalogue: **weForms**, **WP Project Manager** and **WP User Frontend**.

Dokan's real credential is that it scales to production marketplaces doing significant volume. That is an unusually demanding workload for a WordPress plugin, and one of the more convincing arguments that WordPress runs serious commerce.

## Ollyo

The umbrella above Themeum, and the maintainer of the **Kirki** customizer framework — originally created by Aristeides Stathopoulos and now one of the most widely used theme customisation toolkits in WordPress.

When you meet a theme with an unusually polished customizer — extensive controls, organised panels, consistent visual language — Kirki is often underneath. That infrastructure role makes Ollyo more influential than the size of any single product suggests, in the same way a widely-adopted library matters more than its download count implies.

## PlugPress

The newest and smallest company on this list, and — disclosure — my own. It is the parent behind **DiviPeople** (2018) and **Divi Torque** (2021), two plugin lines for the Divi ecosystem: ten-plus plugins running on more than 100,000 sites.

I started with WordPress in 2011 and shipped my first plugin in 2014, working alone from Dhaka for most of the decade that followed. PlugPress was formed in 2022 to sit behind both Divi brands, and is part of the [dotyard](https://dotyard.co) family. Since 2026 it ships under its own name, and the entire line is built around the shift this article keeps returning to — that AI now reads, cites and edits websites:

- **Saddle** — lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP client operate a WordPress site directly. 61 tools free on WordPress.org, 108 with Pro. A fresh install starts read-only, three permission tiers decide what AI may touch, and nothing is deleted in one step: every deletion returns a preview and a single-use token that expires in fifteen minutes.
- **Waggle** — the answer-engine side. Every page gets a Markdown copy that AI clients can read, llms.txt is generated and kept current, and 18 AI crawlers across 12 companies are logged by name in your own database. Premium only.
- **Loggle** — revenue attribution. A 1.8 KB script ties each sale to the click that started it, holds first click for 365 days, recognises 15 AI referrer domains, and stores no IP addresses. Premium only.
- **Mailyard** — SMTP across Amazon SES, Postmark, Resend and Brevo with automatic failover when a provider goes down. Free on WordPress.org. **Inbees** is next.

None of these has the install base of anything else on this page and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. The small-studio segment is here because it is a real part of this economy and the part lists like this one usually skip: for buyers who value emailing the maintainer and getting a real answer back, company size is the wrong axis to sort on. Read the entry with the obvious bias in mind.

Dhaka-based, like WPDeveloper, weDevs and Themeum — another data point on how concentrated WordPress plugin development has become in Bangladesh, and how rarely that shows up in English-language coverage of this industry.

## How to judge a plugin company before you buy

Four signals predict outcomes better than catalogue size or install count.

**Check maintenance across the catalogue, not the flagship.** A shop with five plugins all updated this quarter is healthier than one with thirty where half have not been touched in a year. Both numbers are on the WordPress.org listing pages, and a gap of more than a few months on a paid product is the most reliable warning sign available to a buyer.

**Test support before you commit, not after.** The difference between a plugin shop and a software company is whether someone is reading the support queue. This is harder to assess in 2026 because many shops now layer AI or templated responses in front of human agents. Ask a real question and see what comes back.

**Look for focus.** The strongest shops here, large and small, specialise. A catalogue that reads as "everything for WordPress" usually signals a strategy problem. When a company can say "we are the X company" and the products back it up, that is internal discipline made visible.

**Ask how they have handled platform risk.** This is the 2026-specific one. The events of 2024 taught this industry that the platform is not neutral. Companies that built delivery infrastructure outside WordPress.org, that hold direct customer relationships rather than only repository installs, and that discuss governance openly are signalling resilience. Companies that have not engaged with the question at all are signalling something else.

## Frequently asked questions

### Which company makes the most WordPress plugins?

Awesome Motive maintains the largest catalogue of distinct plugin brands — more than a dozen across forms, SEO, analytics, marketing and ecommerce. StellarWP is second by product count. Automattic has far fewer products but vastly more installations per product.

### What is the most installed WordPress plugin?

Among third-party plugins, Yoast SEO, Elementor, WooCommerce, Contact Form 7 and Classic Editor sit in the top band on WordPress.org, each above ten million active installations. Akismet ships with WordPress itself, which puts it in its own category.

### Are WordPress plugin companies profitable?

The established ones generally are. Annual licence renewals against a large install base produce predictable revenue at low marginal cost. Precise figures are not public — nearly every company here is privately held and publishes no financials — so treat any specific revenue claim about them, including in other roundups, as an estimate.

### Which WordPress plugin companies are based outside the United States?

Elementor is Israeli. Themeisle is Romanian. Brainstorm Force is Indian. WPMU DEV is Australian. Yoast operates from the Netherlands under Newfold Digital. And WPDeveloper, weDevs, Themeum, Ollyo and PlugPress are all based in Dhaka, Bangladesh — a concentration that rarely appears in English-language coverage of this market.

### Is it safer to buy from a large plugin company or a small one?

Neither reliably. Large companies have resources but also retire products after acquisitions. Small ones carry concentrated risk but usually offer faster support and a shorter distance between you and the person who wrote the code. Release cadence and support responsiveness predict the outcome far better than company size does.

### How did the Automattic and WP Engine dispute change the plugin market?

It established that WordPress.org access can be withdrawn and that a widely-used plugin can be forked away from its owner. Practically, plugin companies now treat repository access as a dependency to hedge rather than a guarantee, and many have built their own update and delivery infrastructure as a result.

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If you are shopping this ecosystem in 2026, those four signals matter more than the install-count badge on a repository page — including for the entry I wrote about my own company.

— Fahim