Update Brief generates concise WordPress plugin and core update summaries via API, helping agencies and hosts show clients the value of their maintenance plans.
Category
API Tools
Pricing
Paid subscription with a 14-day free trial (no payment required to start); four monthly plans billed by unique updated plugins per month: Developer $19/mo, Agency $29/mo, Business $49/mo, Managed $149/mo.
Update Brief is a subscription API service built for WordPress developers, agencies, and managed hosting providers who run ongoing care and maintenance plans. Instead of a bare list of updated plugin version numbers, Update Brief generates a concise, easy-to-read summary for each WordPress Core or plugin update, covering the update's key new features, bug fixes, and any security-relevant changes. Summaries are available for the most recent versions of over 60,000 WordPress plugins, and multi-version jumps (e.g. updating a plugin from 1.0.4 to 1.0.8 in one go) are combined into a single summary. Teams pull these summaries with a simple REST API call, specifying the plugin (or core) and the start/end version, and can insert them directly into client maintenance reports or use them as a pre-update safety check to see what is about to change before applying an update across managed sites. The product also ships a purpose-built integration for MainWP, adding Update Brief summaries directly into MainWP Pro Reports templates. The stated goal is to help agencies and hosts demonstrate the ongoing value of their WordPress maintenance services to clients, and summaries are available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch.
Key Features
Plugin update summaries — Concise, plain-English summaries for updates across 60,000+ WordPress plugins, covering the most recent versions with multi-version jumps merged into one summary.
WordPress Core update summaries — Summaries for WordPress Core major and minor version updates, highlighting new features, bug fixes, and security-relevant changes.
Simple REST API — Fetch any summary with a single API call by specifying the plugin (or core) and start/end version, for use in client reports or pre-update checks.
MainWP integration — A dedicated MainWP extension inserts Update Brief summaries directly into MainWP Pro Reports templates for client-facing maintenance reports.
Multi-language summaries — Update summaries are available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch.
Pros & Cons
Pros
Turns raw plugin/core version bumps into client-readable summaries, making maintenance-plan value visible in reports
Covers WordPress Core plus more than 60,000 plugins, with multi-version jumps combined into one summary
Simple REST API makes it easy to pull summaries programmatically or embed them in existing reporting tools
Native MainWP Pro Reports integration for agencies already standardized on MainWP
Summaries available in six languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch)
14-day free trial with no payment required to start, across all plans
Cons
Pricing scales by 'unique updated plugins per month', which can be hard to estimate in advance for agencies managing many client sites
No free tier beyond the 14-day trial — a paid subscription ($19/mo and up) is required to keep using it
Narrowly focused on WordPress update summaries rather than broader site maintenance or reporting features