5 Best WordPress Membership Plugins (Compared) 2023

Best WordPress Membership Plugins
Best WordPress Membership Plugins

Do you want to find the best WordPress membership plugin for your site?

You have complete control over your money source with a membership site. You don’t have to be concerned about one of your major affiliates leaving their programs or losing a massive advertising value. Nope! You are the only owner of your revenue stream.

Another significant advantage of the membership site boom:

We’re spoiled for selection when it comes to high-quality membership site plugins, and there are plenty of the best WordPress membership plugins available. And I’m going to take you through the best of the best in this article.

What to Look for in a WordPress Membership Plugin?

There are several WordPress membership plugins available. However, not all of them have certain functionality that you may want while developing your membership site.

Some are suitable for selling subscriptions on a single level, while others provide a wider range of membership levels and subscription management tools.

Some plugins have a drip content function that gradually delivers fresh content to users. Others are limited to simply providing concealed stuff.

You’ll also need to decide which payment gateways to utilize. Do you wish to take only credit cards, PayPal payments, or both? Your membership plugin should support your preferred payment gateways, either natively or via an extension.

What Do You Need to Run a WordPress Membership Website?

Membership websites use many resources, and picking the wrong Web hosting might harm your overall performance. As a result, the first step is to pick the best WordPress hosting provider that you can afford.

Hostinger is a good web hosting to start if you’re on a tight budget. Their web hosting package includes an SSL Certificate, which is required to collect payments securely.

If money isn’t a problem and you want the best performance, we suggest a managed WordPress hosting service like BlueHost.

Finally, you must select necessary business plugins such as OptinMonster, which will help you capture leads and increase subscriptions.

Now that we’ve covered everything you need to get started with a WordPress membership site, let’s look at our list of the best WordPress membership plugins.

List Of The Best WordPress Membership plugins

  1. MemberPress

MemberPress is a well-known membership plugin, and it has all of the specific functionality you’d expect and a few awesome tricks.

To begin, you may establish an endless number of membership tiers with various trial durations and payment choices. Furthermore, you may group various membership levels into “Membership Groups” to build specified upgrade routes. That is unquestionably a unique selling factor!

You may limit material in a variety of ways. You may block whole categories or groups of child pages, or you can get granular and restrict only certain elements of a post/page. 

To assist you in managing downloads, you may also block access to certain files. MemberPress, like the other plugins, allows you to dribble out your material on a specified timetable.

MemberPress provides various data to help you understand how your membership site is working. It also offers a useful tool called MemberPress Reminders, which allows you to send emails when specified events occur, such as a membership renewal.

In terms of integrations, MemberPress works with the majority of major email marketing providers and major payment gateways such as PayPal, Authorize.Net, and Stripe. And if you run an online course, you’ll appreciate this integration:

LearnDash, a popular learning management system for developing online courses using WordPress, may be integrated with MemberPress. This enables some quite useful online course capabilities.

Price: MemberPress starts at $179 per year.

  1. Paid Memberships Pro

Paid Memberships Pro is a powerful membership plugin suited for building feature-rich subscription websites.

One feature that I especially appreciate is that it comes with its WordPress theme. This is a wonderful addition because certain themes don’t play well with membership plugins out of the box, especially when it’s free with their plugin.

Paid Memberships Pro also gives you the ability to establish an infinite number of membership levels with various payment options. You may pick a pricing, recurring billing cycle, membership duration, and free or discounted trial periods.

Paid Memberships Pro adds a meta box to your posts/pages that allows you to limit material individually. You may also opt to limit whole categories.

And here’s another wonderful feature of Paid Memberships Pro:

It allows you to show non-members a snippet of your protected material. What is the significance of this? Because it allows you the opportunity to rank in the SERPs even if your material is limited.

Paid Memberships Pro also provides some intriguing advertising possibilities. You can, for example, opt to show adverts to some membership levels while concealing them from others. 

For example, you could only show advertising to free membership levels while hiding them from premium memberships.

Finally, the plugin comes with a slew of connections with email marketing providers and payment gateways. If you need to make changes to the functionality, Paid Membership Pro is 100% GPL, so you can modify the code as much as you like.

Price: There is a free version available and premium plans starting at $297.

  1. MemberMouse

One of the most feature-rich membership plugins available in MemberMouse.

To begin, MemberMouse allows you to establish both membership levels and packages. Membership levels are standard for any membership plugin. However, bundles enable you to sell individual posts/pages (or groups of posts/pages) individually.

For example, you might sell a one-time special offer to customers who are already premium members.

MemberMouse also allows you to trickle out restricted material. They also have a pretty great function that allows you to enjoy your course as if you were a member. 

Essentially, you may modify the “age” of your test account to see things as new subscribers would.

It also has a widget that shows users what material they have access to and what restricted stuff is still on the way.

MemberMouse allows you to restrict content by posts, pages, custom post kinds, and categories.

MemberMouse also comes with a slew of useful optimization options. Prices may be split-tested, as well as upsells and “save-the-sale” downsells. All of this is included in the main plugin.

You may also provide a variety of promo codes and integrate with a plethora of third-party email marketing providers and payment processors. MemberMouse even has an API that allows you to sync in various ways.

Explaining MemberMouse’s features requires its 3,000-word piece.

Just keep in mind that while MemberMouse has all of these great capabilities, you acquire them at the expense of developer friendliness (that is, MemberMouse is not GPL). So, if you wish to make minor code changes to MemberMouse’s functionality, you can’t, although you may start with other GPL membership plugins.

Price: MemberMouse starts at $24.08 per month (paid annually) for up to 5,000 members.

  1. WooCommerce Memberships

WooCommerce Memberships is not a stand-alone plugin based on the WooCommerce platform, and WooCommerce is, of course, free. However, the fact that you’re connecting your site’s functioning to yet another plugin should be taken into account.

Of course, if you’re currently selling things through WooCommerce, that’s a huge plus!

Because of this connection, you now have several interesting membership possibilities. Memberships can be sold as a stand-alone product or as part of a larger package. For example, you might provide everyone who purchases your eBook with access to a membership level that includes supplementary content.

Like the other plugins, you may dribble out your limited material over time, and you may also provide special deals to entice new clients.

Unfortunately, if you want to bill members on a recurrent basis, you’ll need to buy WooCommerce Subscriptions, a $199 addon.

Overall, WooCommerce Memberships is appropriate for a few specific cases. However, it is probably not the greatest match for most standard membership sites.

Price: The Membership Add-on is priced at $199.

  1. WP-Members

Another “free” WordPress membership plugin is WP-Members. Why do quotation marks surround the word “free”? You will almost probably require some premium addons to have the desired functionality. However, paid extensions are still reasonably priced, so don’t worry!

WP-Members operates in the opposite direction of the other plugins by default. WP-Members controls all of your material rather than just some of it. Then you designate the material that you want everyone to have access to. You can change this option. But that’s how it works by default.

Also, read – How to write SEO Friendly Article

WP-Members also lets you easily implement custom registration and login forms for your membership site. You may utilize these tools to generate unique URLs for your registration page, serving as a landing page for your advertisements.

WP-Members is very customizable for developers…if you know how to code. It also comes with various paid addons for adding integrations, subscriptions, and other features.

Overall, WP-Members is not as strong as the other plugins right out of the gate. However, if you’re a developer, you’ll like how configurable it is.

Price: The cost is nothing. All addons are available for a $59/year Rocket Geek membership.

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