The protocol behind every claim we make about someone else’s product.
Our comparison pages make factual claims about other people’s products. This page is the protocol behind those claims — what we install, what we check, and what the latest run found — so you can judge the evidence instead of taking a vendor’s word.
- Monthly
- Prices and published claims
- Every externally-checkable claim we publish about another product is re-verified against the vendor’s own pages. Last full re-verification 13 August 2026.
- 3 Sep
- Bench installs
- Dated, not scheduled — we say when a plugin was actually installed. Last bench run 3 September 2026, on WordPress 7.1.
- Zero
- Affiliate links
- There are no affiliate links anywhere on this site, so no ranking here is shaped by a commission.
01Protocol
The protocol
- Spin up a fresh WordPress sandbox (currently WordPress 7.1 on PHP 8.2, via WordPress Playground) — no other plugins, no leftover data.
- Install the current free version from wordpress.org and note the exact version.
- Seed sample documents, then work the five jobs we judge every plugin on: find (search, filters, the words inside a file), organise (categories/folders, sorting), restrict (access enforced on the file, not just the page), deliver (download UX, large files, share links) and keep current (does anything tell you a document is due for review).
- Check price honesty: what the free tier actually includes, the real entry price, and renewal behaviour — against the vendor’s own site, on the run date.
- Where a product has no free version to install, we rely on the vendor’s public documentation and mark it as such.
02Cadence
How often we re-check
The two things that go stale at different speeds are handled differently.
- Prices and published claims — monthly. Every externally-checkable claim we publish about another product is registered and re-verified against the vendor’s own live pages and their wordpress.org listing. Anything that no longer matches becomes a correction, not a footnote. Last full re-verification: 13 August 2026.
- Bench installs — dated, not scheduled. Installing each plugin fresh and working the four jobs above is slower work, so we re-bench when a vendor ships something that would change a comparison row — and we publish the date it last happened rather than a rhythm we might not keep. Last bench run: 3 September 2026.
03Latest run
Latest bench run — 3 September 2026
The version column records what was actually installed on the bench that day; prices and claims are re-verified on the monthly cadence above, so a plugin may have shipped a newer release since.
| Plugin | Version | Basis | What we verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| FileDeck (ours) | 2.90.0 | Fresh install | Put through the identical probe so every column is like-for-like. The free build registers six shortcodes and three blocks, and carries no upgrade prompts: across its 679 translatable strings the count of upsell copy is zero. |
| Document Library Lite | 1.3.0 | Fresh install | The [doc_library] shortcode renders a table with a search box and no <select> elements at all — filter dropdowns remain premium. Registers one shortcode and no blocks. |
| FileBird Lite | 6.5.8 | Fresh install | Registers no post type, no taxonomy and no shortcode — one gallery block. It organises the Media Library; on its own it is not a front-end document library. |
| Download Monitor | 5.2.8 | Fresh install | The free build writes a deny-all rule into its own upload folder on activation, with no configuration, and ships X-Sendfile and X-Accel-Redirect delivery paths. File-level protection is genuinely part of its free version. It protects files placed in that folder rather than relocating existing Media Library files. |
| WordPress Download Manager | 3.3.68 | Fresh install | Also writes a deny rule for its own folder. Registers 24 shortcodes — the widest shortcode surface in the set. |
| Shared Files | 1.7.70 | Fresh install | Creates four of its own database tables, including a download log and a search log. Registers eight shortcodes and one block. |
One result from this run is worth stating plainly: none of the six free builds ships any file-content extraction. We looked for the common libraries across every PHP file in each plugin and found none in any free version, ours included — searching inside file contents is a paid capability throughout this category. And two of the five competitors protect files at the web-server level in their free build, so that is not a free-tier differentiator either.
Upgrade prompts inside the free plugin, counted as user-facing copy — every string passed to a WordPress translation function, with vendor SDKs excluded since those are not the vendor’s own writing. Document Library Lite 19, Download Monitor 15, WordPress Download Manager 7, FileBird 6, Shared Files 5, FileDeck 0.
04Corrections
Corrections
When a test contradicts something we’ve published, we fix the page and record it here.
- 3 September 2026: the first version of this bench run said FileDeck’s own free build carried more upgrade prompts than any competitor’s. That was wrong, and it was our measurement that was wrong: the count matched substrings anywhere in the code, so it swept up the word “unlock” from our category-password feature and “Pro feature” out of code comments, and it counted the bundled Freemius SDK as though we had written it. Re-measured against user-facing copy only, FileDeck free contains no upgrade prompts at all. Corrected the same day.
- 13 August 2026: a full re-verification of every competitor claim on this site found our comparison copy understated Document Library Pro — its paid Advanced plan does search inside file contents, though not inside scanned or image-only files. Every page carrying that claim was corrected, and the claim register that produced the fix is what now runs monthly.
- 24 July 2026: our plugins roundup implied Filr’s link-expiry features were part of its free version. The fresh install showed they’re premium; the roundup was corrected the same day.
05Ourselves
And FileDeck itself?
Same standard, in public: the live demo is the actual plugin with 81 documents and no signup, and every tier claim on this site is checked against the same feature registry that gates the shipped code. If you find a claim the product doesn’t back, tell us and we’ll fix it — on this page.
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