It scans your WordPress site and builds a map of how everything in it depends on everything else — which plugins power which pages, which forms feed which integrations, which templates are actually in use. Before you deactivate a plugin, delete a page or switch a builder, Tangleroot shows you what’s connected to it first, so you’re not finding out the hard way.

Yes. Tangleroot Lite is listed on WordPress.org and stays free with no limit on the number of sites you install it on. It isn’t a trial — it’s a genuinely complete dependency-mapping tool that includes core relationship detection, an Impact Explorer, and change tracking on its own.

Lite gives you complete basic-tier detection — plugins, themes, content, forms, core relationships — and traces impact up to 3 levels deep. Pro adds provider-specific detection for tools like WooCommerce and Elementor, runtime evidence from your live pages, database and cron detection, impact tracing up to 10 levels deep, architecture snapshots you can compare over time, scheduled scans, exports and AI explanations. Safety-relevant warnings — critical and site-wide dependencies — are shown in both plans; those findings are never paywalled.

No. Tangleroot is read-only. It scans and records; it never modifies plugins, themes, posts, pages or settings, and it never activates or deactivates anything on your behalf.

Scans run in the background and only read data that’s already there, so there’s no added runtime overhead for your visitors. Pro’s runtime probe is the one feature that requests live pages, and it’s limited to a small, read-only set of your own URLs with no side effects.

It’s a Pro feature, off by default, and bring-your-own-key: you connect your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Google account, and requests go straight from your server to theirs — we never see it, proxy it, or bill you for it. The AI only explains findings Tangleroot has already detected; it can’t invent a relationship, change a confidence score, or tell you a change is “safe.”

Nothing is deleted. Existing snapshots, scans and history stay exactly as they are and remain fully viewable. Pro-only actions — new snapshots, exports, AI calls, scheduled scans, and impact tracing beyond 3 levels — pause until you renew.

Pro is sold in site-count tiers, so you pick the one that matches how many sites you manage — from a single site up to agency-scale multi-site plans.

Every relationship Tangleroot reports comes with a confidence label and the actual evidence behind it — a shortcode match, a registered hook, a database reference — so you can see why Tangleroot found what it found instead of trusting a black box. Lower-confidence findings are shown as uncertain, never hidden or rounded up to look more definite than they are.

Pro can export any report as JSON, CSV or PDF. Lite shows the same information on-screen — architecture, relationship and change summaries — but doesn’t include file exports.

No signup, no account and no licence key. Install Tangleroot Lite from WordPress.org like any other plugin and start scanning.

Tangleroot detects any plugin generically through its shortcodes, blocks, post types and other standard WordPress integration points. On top of that, Pro includes provider-specific detectors for widely used tools like WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi, Bricks and several major form plugins, which read their actual configuration for more precise relationships.