10 Best WordPress Membership Plugins

In search for the most neat, flexible, and powerful WordPress membership plugin?

It’s not an easy task to find one that would meet your needs perfectly, but to help you narrow down your options, we’ve compiled the most trusted and valuable solutions in this round-up.

We’ll briefly share the background of each plugin, additionally describing their key benefits and cost to help you compare the features.

So let’s highlight our list of the best WordPress membership plugins.

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Features to Consider while Choosing a Membership Plugin

1. Easy to Use: The Plugin must have an easy-to-use interface that even non-tech-savvy people can explore and set up. Easy configuration is a very crucial feature so that everyone on your team can work with the WordPress membership plugin. 
2. Seamless Member Management: You should be easily able to access, add, and edit member information from the plugin dashboard.
3. Manage Multiple Plans: You should be able to create and manage multiple types of membership plans to cater to a wide range of audiences with different requirements and budgets.
4. Content Restriction: A robust content restriction functionality is required so that you can define who can get access to what content. This is the main base of your membership plan, providing gated content for a price. Thus, restriction and drip rules are of utmost importance. 
5. Member Communication: Check whether you have a facility to set up communication among your members to increase internal engagement. This builds a sense of community that boosts member experience. 
6. Payment Gateways: If you want to expand your membership site globally, you would need to implement multiple payment gateways. Based on the region and currency, you can accept payments from anywhere. 
7. Security and Compliance: Your membership Plugin should offer you various security features like email verification, failed login attempts lock, Google reCaptcha, anti-spam, and other such features to keep your site and content safe. Further, being compliant with site rules like GDPR and CCPA would keep you out of hefty legal matters. 
8. Support and Documentation: Check how a plugin offers you support. Further, have a look at their documentation and tutorials. Is it clear enough? Helpful enough? And updated. If yes, then there’s your choice. 

Looking at these basic membership plugin features will help you pick the right Plugin. It should support your future scalability requirements and be updated regularly to meet the industry standards.

List of Top 10 Best WordPress Membership Plugins

ARMember

Are you confused about how a membership site would look? Would you be able to build it or not? Well, ARMember is your knight in shining armor. The pricing and functionality features of the ARMember plugin allow us to highlight it as one of the most affordable and powerful WordPress membership plugins, which means an enormous value for money.

The plugin packs a whole range of features that allow you to Manage forms, enable content access rules, manage members, payments, emails, common messages, and set redirection rules. Thanks to that, it will help you build a membership website exactly as you imagine it. Building a membership business website has never been easier. To expand your horizons, opt for the ARMember Pro’s lifetime license with just a one-time fee.

Pricing: Lite version for Free, Get Pro at $69 for a lifetime license (one-time fee)

Pros:

• Manage four different types of plans viz. Free Plan, Paid Plan (infinite), Paid Plan (finite), and a Recurring Subscription Plan
• Manage members by viewing and editing their information with a facility to add them manually
• Robust membership setup wizard with in-built form builder for simplifying member registrations
• Powerful content access rules for Page, Post, CPT, and Taxonomy to be set plan-wise
• 17+ Payment Gateways for seamless integration across the world
• Support for setting up a Drip Content Schedule for a step-by-step reveal of content.
• Impressive pay-per-post(paid post) feature to sell individual content, digital products, and posts.
• 47+ in-built add ons with a free testing environment for a trial
• 37+ External Addons & Integrations
• Integration with some of the most popular WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WooCommerce, MailChimp, MyCRED, AffiliateWP, Zapier, and many more.

MemberPress

MemberPress, which makes another top in our list, is a rather popular solution that has been on the WordPress market for quite a long time.

Although being relatively expensive, it tries to cover all possible business niches that require a membership platform, offering a powerful core plugin with tons of integrations, including decent subscription and billing options, built-in course creator, support for digital download and more.

Pricing: plans start at $359 a year

Pros:

• Design and functionality capabilities for building a community.
• Smart and easy content dripping and access rules.
• Connects with a wide range of third-party products and apps, such as Zapier, MonsterInsights, AffiliateWP, and multiple payment gateways.
• Multiple case studies and helpful links.

Restrict Content PRO

This premium solution, one of the best WordPress membership plugins, is very easy to understand and use, levels up to others in terms of core features, and is priced fairly for what it provides.

You can employ it for a complex membership site, such as for online staff training, as well as use to only restrict some content with more advanced options.

Pricing: plans start at $99 per year

Pros:

• The cheapest premium plan includes 34 PRO add-ons.
• A good choice of pre-built payment integrations: Stripe.com, 2Checkout, Braintree, PayPal Standard, PayPal Express, and PayPal Website Payments Pro.
• You can set up and customize individual pages in the block editor.
• Multiple options for developers who build client websites.

MemberMouse

This premium WordPress membership plugin, which allows for a 14-day free trial before you decide to pay for it, is another top choice for currently 18K+ businesses.

It’s free to use for creating a complete solution or just integrating a few membership pages on your website.

Pricing: plans start at 89 per year

Pros:

• A lot of automation and payment/content usage protection features.
• Free and paid trials for your members.
• Recurring subscriptions and one-time purchases.
• Sell gifts and integrate social networks.
• Insightful analytics focused on monetization.

SureMembers

SureMembers is a complete membership plugin with all the features you need to create online communities. It has been designed to be as easy to use as possible and works with most WordPress plugins.

SureMembers makes it easy to create membership tiers, charge subscriptions, offer free access to content, drip feed content and manage every aspect of your membership website. It’s a great option for building communities.

Pricing: Plans start at $69 per year

Pros:

• Full WordPress membership plugin with tons of features
• Full control over memberships and pricing
• Unlimited membership tiers
• Works with popular payment gateways for paid subscriptions
• Compatible with WooCommerce, SureCart and other plugins

Ultimate Member

The Ultimate Member WordPress membership plugin, additionally to providing all the range of tools for constructing the fully-fledged member website, makes a good focus on design.

It natively integrated with your WordPress theme, delivering smooth user experiences. Of course, it has all the core tools in the core plugin pack, with extensions offered as extra optional choices (e.g. User Reviews, Followers).

Pricing: from free to $249 a year

Pros:

• Natively integrated with WordPress, with flawless admin settings.
• Beautiful member directory and user profile designs.
• Any type of content restriction and billing cycles.

WP-Members

At its core, WP-Members is a free WordPress membership plugin, but it offers extensions and support as premium options you can choose to pay for.

It can be a really nice option for small or one-person businesses that are looking to start small, with the basics. And we can’t say that only low-demand tools are paid; for example, if you need to restrict access to specific files, a paid add-on is required. 

Pricing: free with paid addons (the average cost of an addon is $49)

Pros:

• The core plugin can be used for free.
• Restrict content based on regular WP post types (pages, posts, etc.)
• Set up and customize user login, registration and profile pages.
• A decent level of user management options.

Paid Membership Pro

This is one of the best WordPress membership plugins for a range of business cases, which has been building its reputation for more than 10 years now.

It easily integrates with external products and apps, including 6 popular payment gateways, and delivers up to 60 premium addons (based on your plan).

Pricing: from free to $247 a year

Pros:

• Experienced provider and trustworthy solution that serves thousands of websites.
• All range of tools for directory and listing, billing, and content restriction.
• Powerful community options for your clients.

s2Member

The s2Member membership plugin for WordPress is an attractive option since it’s free and robust, with the premium version being a one-time fee.

It supports all the basic features you’d expect, such as recurring and non-recurring billing models, advanced content restriction and protection tools, etc. At the same time, the plugin sounds rather limited for more complex needs, such as social login integration, gamification and design modification, to name a few. 

Pricing: from free to $89 once

Pros:

• A decent free plugin version.
• Payments via Stripe, PayPal Pro, Authorize.Net, and ClickBank.
• Gift and coupon codes.

ProfilePress

ProfilePress conveys itself as a tech-first and client-oriented membership WordPress plugin, which makes it another great option. The range of addons you can get in a package varies based on the plan you use.

Pricing: plans start at $99 per year

Pros:

• All packs of instruments for a modern members website.
• PayPal, Mollie and other payment methods.
• Multiple integrations, e.g. Polylang, BuddyPress, WooCommerce, Mailchimp, etc.

WooCommerce Memberships

As its name suggests, this membership WordPress plugin perfectly integrates with WooCommerce, making it a great choice, if you are looking for a big number of payment options on your website, integrated easily.

Pricing: $199 a year

Pros:

• Smooth and native WordPress experiences, hence the flexibility of the membership site options.
• Powerful content dripping options.
• Great member management options.

Conclusion: What is the best WordPress membership plugin?

It would not be fair to select just one since all these tools deserve to be listed as the best WordPress membership plugins. Some of them are more feature-rich but can get rather expensive while the other ones are perfectly affordable while lacking essentials. Your task is to compare the features we highlighted and to apply them to your membership business. And perhaps you’d want to share your choice with us?