Nevermiss a sale just because you couldn't take a certain payment type. Accept Apple Pay, Google Wallet, credit cards, international currencies, direct debit, Cash App, and even buy-now-pay-later.
Over many years of building membership sites for clients, we've built many of them with MemberPress. Not only is the code good & clean but the plugin is easy to set up, the support great and the plugin is easy enough to use that our customers can manage their sites for themselves.
Simple membership plugin is very user-friendly and well-documented. You will be able to protect your content (tutorials, videos, ebooks, courses) behind a membership login and start charging users to access it.
Simple membership lets you selectively protect your articles/posts/pages by creating various membership access levels (example: Free, Silver, Gold etc.) and protect the content (posts, pages) of your site.
You will be able to charge one time fee or recurring subscription fee for your site membership. For example: you can setup a Buy Now button to charge $49 for a 6 month access to your premium membership access. You could also setup a subscription button to charge $19.95 per month (recurring payment) for the access.
A membership site has specific areas for members. Generally members pay some type of fee to join the site and become a member. It could be a one time or a recurring monthly/annually fee to get access to some or all of your content.
PMPro is the best way to protect your content and provide a smooth experience for your users.
We are a yoga video streaming company that offers monthly and annual memberships. Our customer base has grown 10x thanks to the membership power and versatility of PMPro.
It was a breeze to integrate PMPro with the dozens of official and third-party Add Ons.
Our plugin's code is not obfuscated, runs on as many sites as you want and can be customized to fit your project's needs. We just ask that you follow the GPLv2 guidelines by applying the GPLv2 license to any altered or unaltered version of PMPro that you distribute. License Details
We have thoroughly reviewed and tested each plugin in this list on real websites to give you the best recommendation for all kinds of membership site use cases. For more information, you can see our editorial process.
If you are on a budget, then you can start with Bluehost. Their Business Pro plan comes with an SSL certificate, which you need to securely collect payments, a dedicated IP, and a dedicated support line.
It is super easy to set up and can automatically add pricing, login, account, and thank you pages for your users. The plugin also lets you add drip content to your site and create a client portal to manage client resources online.
MemberPress can also act as a WordPress subscription plugin because it supports both recurring and one-time payments and it can offer monthly, yearly, or even lifetime memberships to your users. This also makes it easy to sell courses online.
Why we recommend MemberPress: MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin on the market. It allows unlimited membership levels, comes with a user-friendly interface, integrates with popular gateways, and also offers content restriction, making it a great all-in-one choice.
When we were testing the plugin, we also found out that Thrive Apprentice can track student progress, offer one-time or recurring subscriptions, create landing pages, and build coupons and discount offers for different membership or subscription courses.
Why we recommend Thrive Apprentice: Overall, Thrive Apprentice is a powerful WordPress subscription plugin that comes with a drag-and-drop builder and premade templates. We recommend it if you want to build and sell courses online.
Easy Digital Downloads is easy to use and gives you the ability to accept recurring payments. You can use the plugin to sell any type of digital product in WordPress, including eBooks, PDFs, audio files, videos, and more.
Why we recommend Easy Digital Downloads: It is the best plugin for creating a membership site that sells digital products. It comes with a built-in shopping cart system, recurring payments, and a library of addons to grow your business.
MemberMouse is another powerful, flexible, and scalable WordPress membership plugin. It has many advanced features for protecting your content, selling products, creating courses, and maximizing revenue.
Why we recommend MemberMouse: It is a powerful WordPress membership plugin for businesses that are serious about growth. If you have a coaching business or a growing membership site, then MemberMouse is the perfect choice.
It allows you to create as many membership levels as you want and uses tag-based permission to control access. This makes it easy for members to upgrade or downgrade membership subscriptions on their own.
Why we recommend AccessAlly: AccessAlly is a powerful plugin for building and scaling a coaching, teaching, or training membership website. It comes with all of the features you need to offer 1-1 or group coaching, including dripped content releases, live group cohorts, bulk course enrollment, and more.
The tool offers a drag-and-drop builder, course templates, and certificates, and also lets you build quizzes and assessments for students. The students can then submit their work and receive feedback on the same platform.
You can use the plugin to restrict content to registered users, membership levels, and access levels, as well as target individual pages, posts, custom post types, tags, or categories for restriction.
Why we recommend Restrict Content Pro: The plugin is a great choice for building a membership website due to its amazing content restriction features, great access control, and seamless integration with WordPress.
It is easy to set up and can be used to create simple subscriptions or complex membership levels with access rules. You can use it to restrict any content on your website including pages, posts, categories, and tags.
It supports recurring and one-time payments, lets you create multiple membership levels, and can integrate with over 200 third-party apps like affiliate programs, email marketing services, and payment processors.
Why we recommend WooCommerce Memberships: If you already have a WooCommerce store and are planning to sell courses, subscriptions, or memberships, then this is the best plugin for you.
Paid Memberships Pro allows you to create personalized content and add drip content. While testing the plugin, we were also impressed that it lets you create a dictionary and profile for all the members on your website.
It lets you create multiple membership levels with different access controls. You can also customize the registration and login forms, add drip content, and password-protect various pages on your website.
In our expert opinion, MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin on the market. It has all the features that you need to create a membership site and sell online courses, along with great documentation and support to help you learn the membership software.
Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.
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Thank you for the excellent comparison of pros and cons. I have been thinking about a community blog for a long time and as I follow your articles, the memeber press plugin still works best for me in terms of functions. However, it is good to look at such a comparison and see all the pros and cons.
It would depend on how you want that process to go, you can see more on allowing users to post on your site in our article below:
-tutorials/how-to-allow-users-to-submit-posts-to-your-wordpress-site/
which plugin will allow a site visitor/user to watch video, if they have come from a specific website. while for direct users video will be locked. for unlock users will needs to visit that site/redirect to that site?
It would depend on the specific plugin and what settings you are looking to optimize. For most plugins, you can normally check with the documentation for the recommended improvements as a starting point.
Thank you for this article! I have a question for you guys, do you know of any membership plugins that allows the subscriber to choose how much they want to pay for their memberships as opposed to having set prices for how much their membership will cost?
Hi, I was just looking through this an I am very new to all this, I have a WordPress site with the divi builder and am looking to set up online courses and an online school that enables people to purchase a course and do payment instalments. Its important for me to be able to do it mostly myself as well as to customize the courses with photos and videos. do you recommend any one for me? just starting out so also needs to be affordable and sustainable long term to expand.
I appreciate and tips you have thanks!
I am running the latest version of WordPress and have just purchased LearnDash and Divi 3.1.
I want to have affiliates selling my courses (both subscription and one-time purchases) and was told by the LearnDash team I would need to use WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads to make that happen. I want to use AffiliateWP (which is compatible with both Woo and EDD). But when I asked about how the subscriptions happened, they said that I would need to get the membership and subscription plugins for Woo, or a membership system like Restrict Content Pro.
I do not understand this as I thought LearnDash was the membership system for my courses. As I have already spoken to them and get why I need the shopping cart to add the affiliate function. Can you tell me why I need an additional, separate Membership system?
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