64
Action Scheduler
A powerful engine for developers that might accidentally eat your entire database.
GrowingPoor rating
64/100
Developers love the scheduling power while site owners often suffer from massive database bloat.
Active installs
~25,000
our estimate · wp.org shows 20k+
Rating
3.5★
13 ratings
Trend · vs a year ago
+255%
Growing fast
127 → 451 installs/day
What to watch out for
- MINORverified rating is 3.75★
- MINORnot updated in 11 months
Downloads over time
real new installs per day · release spikes shown separately from the trend2025-04-302025-08-082025-11-162026-02-232026-06-03
organicrelease spikerelease tailorganic trend · 14d rolling median
Growing fast · +255% in the last year
127/day a year ago→451/day today
Reviews
what people actually sayAction Scheduler is valued by developers as a powerful and reliable alternative to WordPress's native wp-cron for scheduling tasks, but non-developer site owners frequently encounter serious problems with uncontrolled resource consumption, database bloat, and an inability to remove or manage the plugin once it's installed.
What people like
- +Considered a significant improvement over WordPress's native wp-cron for scheduling recurring or intensive tasks×3
- +Enables asynchronous execution of actions, giving developers powerful scheduling capabilities×2
- +Can be embedded as a library within other plugins, making it flexible for developers×2
- +Provides useful reporting on whether scheduled events are running
- +Documentation is considered good by at least one developer user
Common complaints
- −Can cause severe database bloat and excessive server/network resource consumption, with reports of multi-GB databases and terabytes of internal traffic×2
- −Difficult or impossible to fully remove — manually deleting tables can crash the site, and the plugin re-adds deleted or paused tasks×3
- −Often installed silently as a dependency of other plugins (e.g. WooCommerce) without the site owner's knowledge or consent×2
- −Provides no meaningful management UI for non-developers; third-party plugins are required to view or manage scheduled actions×2
- −Runs background processes continuously (reportedly every minute), which can significantly slow down sites and displace user-facing server resources×2
- −Developer support reported as unresponsive or unhelpful
- −Documentation does not clearly explain where API calls should be placed for developers building integrations
Review trustMostly organic
- 3.75★Verified rating — holds steady vs the raw 3.50★
- 8%One-shot reviewers — most reviewers are active community members
- past spikeReview timing — up to 29% of all reviews landed in a single month
Reviews per month · 5★ vs lower
2023-07-202025-01-102026-06-04
5★ reviews1–4★ reviews
All-time ratings · 13 total
Latest reviews · 13 analyzed
- 2025-11-24★★★★★Did the job !pol
- 2025-11-05★★★★★This plugin is broken and almost malicious in nature.smokex3651-shot
- 2025-03-10★★★★★It's great.mfwriter
- 2024-09-25★★★★★This is malwareAlexander Guskov
- 2024-07-04★★★★★Incredibly powerfulAuke Piersma
- 2024-07-03★★★★★Like a Leechtraqbar
- 2023-06-28★★★★★Great time savior pluginunapersona
- 2023-03-24★★★★★Refuses to SupportKevin Pirnie
- 2022-11-11★★★★★Needs code placement instructionswelcomeblack
- 2022-01-06★★★★★Wonderful – a Project saverKeithRowley
Releases
recent versions from WordPress.org SVNFor developers & the curious
the raw signals behind the grade — none of this is on the friendly summary aboveDownload signals
Baselines are computed on organic days only — release spikes and their tails are excluded, so they're not inflated by the auto-update wave.
202
Baseline · median of last 7 organic days
566
Prior 7-day baseline
254
Floor · 25th percentile over 14 days
692
Mean release-day peak (30d)
572
Latest day · 2026-06-03(spike)
-64.3%
Week-over-week organic trend
Review signals
Concentration and drive-by metrics drive the review-burst and fake-review flags. 30–40% solo reviewers is normal; we only flag the extremes.
29%
Max month share · biggest single 30-day window
2.37
Distribution CV · <0.6 even, >1.5 bursty
62%
5★ share in analyzed sample
8%
Solo reviewers · only this one wp.org activity
—
Volume velocity · last 6mo vs prior 6mo
3.54 → 3.75★
Sample avg · raw → solo-filtered