There are a lot of similarities among WordPress membership plugins. At the same time, each plugin has its unique strengths, focus, and philosophy. You’ll want to select the plugin whose purpose matches your exact requirements—the plugin that’ll help you achieve your membership site goals.
The Top Rated Membership Plugins
Below, I’ve listed all of the known membership plugins and talked about the unique selling points of each one. You can click on the plugin name to read its full review and learn more about it.
s2Member (free) is extremely versatile and powerful. Yet, it’s available for free at WordPress.org, where it has a superb user rating. There’s a Pro add-on for the plugin, which adds a few more advanced features. s2Member is extensible, constantly improved and developed, and it’s just excellent in many ways. Download »»
WishList Member ($97) is by far the most popular premium membership plugin. It currently powers tens of thousands of WordPress based membership sites. Everything about WishList Member reinforces its professional image: the documentation, the support, the user interface, and the entire experience. Download »»
Digital Access Pass ($167) has the most features. And some of these features are developed to such a high degree of quality and depth. It has strong integration with payment gateways and supports various registration flow and payment scenarios. It puts a lot of emphasis on easy sequential content delivery, and drip feeding…among other things. Download »»
This is a comparison of these three popular plugins:
| s2Member |
WishList Member |
Digital Access Pass |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Download here | Download here | Download here | |
| Installation & admin UI |  |
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| Support & docs | |
|
 |
| Member management | |
|
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| Payment processing | |
|
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| Content protection features | |
|
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| Extensibility & API | |
|
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| Subscriber mailing lists | |
|
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| Affiliate management | iDevAffiliate | iDevAffiliate | Built-in |
| Satisfaction guarantee | (Core plugin is free) | 30 days | 30 days |
| Prices and licenses | Free core Single Pro module: $69 Unlimited Pro module: $129 Blog farm module: $289 |
1-site: $97 Unlimited sites: $297 |
1-site: $169 Unlimited sites: $297 |
| Download here | Download here | Download here |
Here are some more awesome membership plugins:
eMember ($49.95) sets itself apartment by offering a unique combination of simplicity, power, and affordability. It starts at $49.95 only, which is about half of what comparable plugins charge. But don’t let the low price fool you—this plugin can achieve amazing feats. And it is backed by passionate, yet very friendly support. Download »»
Magic Members ($97) is a beautifully designed, and well-rounded membership plugin. This is definitely one of the heavyweights. It can do it all. Yet, it is easy to use and it’s accompanied by high quality video instructions and tutorials that take you from A-to-Z. Download »»
Paid Memberships Pro ($10/month) is not as full of features as other plugins. It only covers specific use cases that utilize advanced payment processing. If one of the use cases that it covers fits you, you’re in luck because this is an excellent plugin. Download »»
WPMU DEV Membership (free) is an advanced plugin with a range of content protection options. It puts special emphasis on BuddyPress and Multisite protection. You can try the free version from WordPress.org before upgrading. Download »»
MemberWing ($199.95) is one of a kind. It is dedicated to protection of downloadable content by embedding traceable signatures and other tricks. It also has what it calls Time-Sensitive-Information delivery. It controls the availability of content based on its publishing date, where it gradually gives more and more access as content gets older. Download »»
Your Members ($95) is another heavyweight membership plugin that has a couple of unique features. With Your Members, you can easily embed your WordPress membership site into Facebook and accept Facebook Credits as payment! Download »»
wp-Member ($29.99) is a membership plugin with very basic options. It’s designed to help you setup a membership site with minimum fuss. It’s missing a lot of features, but it’s price very competitively at $29.99 only. Download »»
MemberMouse ($97/month) is a new membership plugin with interesting features. It claims to focus on marketing and conversion best practices. It’s the only plugin with direct integration with LimeLight. Download »»
And some more membership plugins
There are other membership plugins that aren’t reviewed here. Looking at their websites, I don’t see what they could possibly offer over the selection of great plugins above. Anyway, if you’re interested, here they are: WP Sales Automator, WP Member Site, and WP Member Champ.
Wow! Great Post!!!!!
I am kinda a newbie at building this type of site, so I need a strong plug-in that is fairly easy to use (if possible). Could you please make a suggestion as to which tool listed here would best suit my needs:
- Membership site with some content available before signing in, but most content available after signing in.
- Membership has a monthly subscription fee so need to integrate PayPal or Google Check-out with subscription payment processing (prefer to not open a new robust merchant account)
- Ability to post documents, blogs, possible a forum, videos, etc for both the member only access and limited public access.
- Ability to have different levels of membership with premium content for higher levels.
- Ability to market through affiliates, so need built in affiliate tracking.
- Need ability to sell items in an online store, so need online store, google or paypal checkout, and affiliate tracking of the online store items.
- Need to be able to cross market members via email addresses, so maybe the ability to automatically upload emails from new members into our constant contact list?
- Need ability to send newsletters to members.
- Possibly a platform for webinars? Conference Calls?
I know that is a big list! Do any of these offer all that?
Thank you so much in advance for replying to my novel!!!!!!!!!
Sincerely,
Jamie BBurg
Hi Jamie, Yep, that is a big list! Fortunately, WordPress membership solutions are advanced enough and there are a couple of plugins that meet almost all of your requirements exactly. The two I would most recommend for the requirements you listed are Digital Access Pass and s2Member, in that order.
M.K.
THANK YOU so much for replying to my lengthy post! I really appreciate it! After reviewing your two suggestions, I think I am going to try s2member just because it looks about 1million times easier to use (for me anyway, not a dev, just a knucklehead trying to build a member site). Would you agree that s2member is easier to use for those of use who are comfortable with the WordPress UI?
Thanks again!!!
Jamie
You might also look at cart66 pro; I have a similar set of requirements. Cart66 is a shopping cart, so you can sell goods, but at the Pro (paid) level it is also manages memberships. Although you don’t plan to use a payment gateway, if you ever did Cart66 has two very cool features not found in alot of cart plugins: a simple checkbox to force the checkout pages into SSL (no wordpress hacking required), or integration with a pay-per-use 3rd party hosted shopping cart (i.e. no SSL cert required but you will still have full PCI compliance).
Something else that I ran into in evaluating membership solutions is that some of them use a “hierarchical” model…each level of membership inherits all rights assigned to the membership below. That may work for you, but it does not for me – I need to be able to assign random categories to specific membership levels.
KellyAZ
Thank you so much Kelly! I think I am sticking with s2member for now, I really like it! And with integrating idevaffiliate, it looks like it will do everything I need. Any suggestions on a better affiliate application with s2member?
Yes, s2Member is a good choice. iDevAffiliate is a popular software and it works reliably. However, its reporting features are limited (at least from my experience as an affiliate). However, it’s about your only option if you’re gonna use s2Member, unless you use a payment gateway that also does affiliate management, like ClickBank, Avangate, ShareASale, etc, in which case you wouldn’t need to worry about affiliates inhouse.
Great Post. Thanks. I want to create a password protected site and it seems like one of these would work, but I am not sure if there are other solutions that may work better. We are an entertainment and event planning company and want to grant access to our planing website to our clients. They would be able to browse articles, listen to audio, view videos etc. I would like to have the following functionality.
1) the ADMIN would create their account and email them their username and password.
2) We would set an expiration date after which they will no longer be able to access the site.
3) Certain sections would be available to certain clients based on the package they purchase with us.
Thanks
Jose, Any of these membership plugins can allow you to create new users and email credentials to them. In fact, that feature is built-into WordPress itself. And the plugins allow you to create subscription packages that expire after a specified period of time. The content protection methods of the plugins vary a little, but your requirement to make certain sections available to certain clients are pretty straight-forward, so most of the plugins would work. I would recommend you either go with s2Member or Wishlist Member.
Thanks so much. Greatly appreciate your advice.
JoseG
I have a client that has videos protected using amember. We are redesigning the site using wordpress and I want to see if one of these plugins work better than amember. I prefer a plugin than an install program. I am trying to decide between wishlist and magic members. My clients requirements:
- User signs up using paypal for either 7 days, 1 month, 3months or 1 year.
- After payment, they have access to all of the videos.
- He only wants certain blogs blocked. Others will be free.
- After the time expires, it rebills the client for the same membership they currently have. If payment fails, the membership is cancelled.
- If a client isn’t happy before 3 days is up, we want to be able to cancel the membership and credit the users account.
-
Ernest, Both Wishlist Member and Magic Members can satisfy these requirements. But if you want to have profiles automatically processed when a cancellation or a refund is initiated through PayPal, I recommend you go with either s2Member or Wishlist Member because these two can automatically process PayPal transactions such as refunds and cancellations. However, you also mention that you want “certain blogs” blocked. By blocks do you mean blog posts or is your client running a multisite blog network? If it’s a blog network, then you better just go with s2Member because it can handle multisite and BuddyPress well. There’s also WPMU DEV Membership, which is also good with blog networks.
Sorry, I meant blog posts. Sounds like wishlist will handle this. I haven’t heard about s2 member. I will read you reviews and see if that is an option.
Thanks!
Hi Eaton:
IMHO s2member would be the better option. I have seen the administrative back end of both wishlist member and s2member on wordpress websites and my recommendation would be s2member. The user interface is less frustrating for someone who want to install and set it up and or maintain the site administratively .
Hi,
I need to find plugin(s) that have the following abilities:
- for job seekers to upload their custom profile describing their skillsets that can be searchable only by paid recruiters.
- for recruiters to “buy” an ability to search through job seeker profiles.
The job seekers would be a Job Seeker Paid Membership.
The recruiters would have several levels of memberships depending on size of company.
Can you suggest any options to accomplish this?
Alexandra, The requirements of a job site are kind of unique. WordPress membership plugins aren’t gonna be able to easily handle requirements like “search through skillsets”. I think you’ll have to find a plugin that’s dedicated to job sites for that, or even look at CMSs other than WordPress.
Hi, I need some plugin for wordpress to make something like club for releasing the wordpress themes we have. The way like elegantthemes.com work. For example user subscribe for yearly package and get all files/updates which are protected from inside. Any idea which would bestly fit for this?
That’s easy, gevork. Almost all of the plugins can do that. You simply create a yearly subscription membership site.
My client wants a membership system where there are two main roles: student and marker. Students buy (with money) credits. They then use credits to interact with markers. I guess similar to iStockPhoto.
Are any of the systems above capable of doing something like this?
thanks
Hi Andrew, Digital Access Pass has an add-on called Self-Service Store. It basically does what you described!
Can anyone recommend a good, reliable stand alone autoresponder plugin for WordPress?
Hi Michelle, I have another page dedicated to autoresponders
Hi,
I need a Membership Plugin that will allow me to capture addresses and TNs during registration. Unfortunately the plugin I currently have (WPMU Dev Membership Premium) will not allow any additional fields. I will also need two levels (one paid, one free) and need to have the ability to restrict access for the free Members to specific pages/posts across three themes/sites under the same domain (I am using multisite). Any help is greatly appreciated!
You need to add fields to the user or usermeta data or add your own tables. Then use Theme My Login which is a plugin that puts the login/registration on the front. You can add a custom facility to include extra fields at registration. This takes a bit of coding but it quite simple.
I do this with s2member (free version). I see no reason why it shouldn’t work with any other membership plugin as it is nothing to do with restricting pages or posts or anything like that.
Hey Jeff,
Custom fields are actually completely out of the box with MemberMouse. You can even choose to have them appear on the registration page or the my account page (or both or neither).
Palak
MemberMouse
Palak,
Will MemberMouse work with WP Multisite across multiple sites attached to the same main domain?
Jeff
Hey Jeff,
MemberMouse will work on the main site but won’t work the child sites. Feel free to contact us and we can talk you through it.
Palak
MemberMouse
You didnt mention Mingle?
Mingle is comparable to BuddyPress, which is not a membership plugin. One of the essential features of membership plugins is the ability to paywall content. Mingle doesn’t do that.
You all NEED to check out WP eMember! This is the plug in I use for MY membership site! It’s is so advanced and so simple at the same time. It’s has lot’s of very useful features, settings and stuff. It’ll even build the login, registration and sign up pages for you if you don’t wanna build your own! It can be used with UNLIMITED sites, UNLIMITED upgrades, UNLIMITED help and all of this is FOR LIFE! So check out wp Emember! You will not be sorry! http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-emember-easy-to-use-wordpress-membership-plugin-1706
If I didn’t know how cool WP eMember is and how nice the people behind it are, I would’ve said this is spam!
Hey nice post. Btw can u help me i want to start a blog about my city, but i also want it to have a section where users can discuss and raise issues related to the city and i want different user levels with point system similar to that ofanswers.yahoo.com can you suggest me any pugin(wp)? Please it will be a great help, I right now want to use wordpress, do i need to choose drupal or joomla for this purpose.
i have seen this functionality in a plugin. WPMUDEV Q&A Lite.
http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/qa-wordpress-questions-and-answers-plugin-lite
Hi,
I am looking for a Membership plugin to add to my pay per view movie, video streaming website. I am using eStore and looking into eMember by Tip&Tricks HQ. I am wondering if any of the above Plugins has specialized features for such use. I don’t have any download products. You pay by PayPal and automatically redirected to a page where the video player is hidden until the payment is made.
Thanks M.K.
Hi Sam, Yes, most of these plugins can protect video streaming if you use Amazon S3 service. Some even work without Amazon S3. Checkout this page where I detail the content protection features of each plugin.
Hi there,
I am looking for a membership management plugin to help me keep track of membership lengths and expiration dates. For example if someone signs up for my 3-month membership, I want some kind of automation so that things don’t slip through the cracks. The issue I have is that I have a main website (blog) and a separate landing page (with no page or post capability) that directly links to my shopping cart (ultracart). My shopping cart is also integrated with Mail Chimp. Each week I will send member a link to a protected PDF file for the length of their membership. Also I want to send monthly newsletters with bonus material. Do you have a recommendation for a plugin that would work for this set up. I do have plans for private eCourses this year too, if that makes a difference.
Thanks so much for this valuable information!
It sounds to me that Digital Access Pass could be just what you need. It offers a lot of automation and can be made to work within and outside of WordPress. It also integrates with MailChimp.
Great post. I have a client who is running membership site that is free but users must register to download content. I see several of these plugins will solve this. However my client needs to be able to track what members download, do any of these plugins provide metrics on who downloads what?
Thanks
None of these membership plugins tracks who downloads what, but this can be done with Google Analytics custom variables and a bit of WordPress development.
M.K
thanks for the reply. Is google analytics accurate or just ballpark metrics? My client needs to know document A was downloaded 58 times between date 1 and date 2 by which members. Or do i need to look in other directions?
thanks
liking WinkPress a lot
Hi Scott:
I stand to be corrected here but I believe you can track downloads with Google Analytics by adding the file extensions and in the settings panel in the dashboard area if you are using WP. I think you can also set up a funnel as goals in the Google Analytics dashboard itself and if it is a paid item set it to tract as ecommerce.
Scott, If it’s implemented correctly in Analytics, it’ll probably be the most accurate metrics you can get. Yes, it’s possible to know how many downloads occurred when by who.
HI there
Thanks for the great post!!!!!
I currently use whishlist to run my membership webiste and I was wandering if you knew membership plug-in that allow user to receive auto generated password and username.
Ideal would be the username=address that user used to sigh up pay pal and password=auto generate.
Been try to figure this out for such a longtime but not real solution yet,,,
Digital Access Pass has a feature where if someone signs up through an email opt-in form, it automatically creates an account in your membership site for the user. You can set it up to also email the login credentials to the user.
Thanks!!!!!
I will look into DAP!!
Again cheers for your advice
This a great post. Thanks for the info. I have been trying out a few different membership plugin options but I can’t find one that allows non-registered users to view posts/wiki/forum ect. but only allows registered users to participate. Do you know if any of the plugins you mentioned have this capability? So far s2member has been the best (and thanks to the video tutorials), easiest free plugin to use. I just can’t seem to make it to this one thing.
Erik, have you tried s2Member‘s integration with bbPress? As far as I remember, it does have this feature.
Thanks for the reply. I am using bbpress forums but I haven’t noticed a way to create the situation that I want yet. I am having a problem with the log in/registration page, so maybe once I clear that up other features will make more sense. Thanks again.
Hi guys! Thanks for putting together such a comprehensive guide to membership plugins for WordPress – very useful.
I’ve been reading through and haven’t yet found a good answer to a couple of questions, so thought I’d follow everyone else’s lead and ask directly…
I am building a site that needs the following membership features:
1. Multiple levels of access to different areas
2. All membership levels to be free
3. Some membership levels to have time-based expiry
4. Username for membership to be email address, not a custom username
5. Membership approval to be based on a unique code – this is the tricky one, so here’s some background:
The site is for a company that creates and sells music tuition textbooks. Each book has a unique code printed in the front of it. Along with the purchase of the book comes a free digital copy, as well as access to a digital resources section of the website containing music files, examples, etc. So we need users to input their number and (ideally) have the system automatically check that number against a list/table and approve the member accordingly.
We are currently using Wishlist Members, which is pretty good but I’m not super happy with it. While it does allow custom fields to be placed in the registration form it allows you to do very little with them. They can’t be reported in the approval email sent to admin, they can’t be displayed very easily, and they can’t be checked against anything before registration. Wishlist also does not allow use of email address as username (although there’s a kludgy way to get around that – rename the username field to “email” and call the email field “confirm email”. Works, but doesn’t give any checking to the matchup between the two fields.
Can you guys suggest a plugin that could do these things? Tried out so far:
spMembers (free)
WPMembers (free)
Wishlist (paid but still within 30 day period)
As it took several days setting up Wishlist before the limitations became really apparent I don’t really have the time to dig through the others comprehensively enough to be sure they can do what I need, so thought I’d ask!
Thanks – would appreciate any advice you can give!
– Andrew
Andrew
I think s2Member will do this but you will have to get your hands a bit dirty. For example to activate levels rather than by Paypal (ie make them free), you can set the role s2member_level{n} using a line or so of php. s2Member extends the standard WordPress roles.
The free version allows up to 4 levels (plus a free level) while the pro version allows infinite levels. Note that levels are nested so level 3 contains level 2 etc. If you have particular requirements then capabilities can be used instead of roles. s2Member Pro includes coupon codes. If you don’t want nested membership then look at Your Members. s2member also allows you to protect the back end by making it invisible unless you are an admin.
I think s2member will also allow login with email addresses but if not, then Theme My Login does.
Does s2Member do login based on a unique code?
No, Andrew, it doesn’t do that out of the box. That feature will have to be custom built.
I think many of the membership plugins suit most of my organization’s needs, from what I’ve seen. However, I’m unclear as to whether any (or most) of them allow you to give permission to members to add content to your site. For example, I would like to allow our member organizations to be able to add job postings for THEIR organization on a “jobs” page that I would create. So, I want them to be able — as a benefit of membership — to be able to post job listings for public viewing…and, of course, I would like to have some control over the fields and parameters so that the “jobs” page they are adding content to looks uniform and appealing to job hunters.
Do any of the membership plugins fit the bill — oh, and this is for a WordPress based site (just to be clear).
Thanks in advance for any and all pointers…and THANKS so much for these reviews; very helpful!
I would recommend you use Gravity Forms to create the job submission form. (See this article on allowing visitors to post content to your site.) And then use a membership plugin to protect the page that has this form.
I have installed Gravity Forms and have learned how to create basic forms. Check. I have read posts on allowing visits to access forms that then post content to your sit, HOWEVER, they all seem to deal with allowing POSTS to be created. I need advice on allowing visitors to fill in a form that then generates content for a page!
So, for example, a visitor would enter a set of info into fields in a form and then it would generate content listings on a page, taken from their submission.
Can anyone help? Thanks!!!
Scott do you think you would be able to achieve what you are trying to do – membership features and directory listing – on your website by using a directory plugin for to list the info after members use the membership feature to register? Just a thought.
Scott, It’s possible to allow visitors to create Pages on your site using Gravity Forms. Contact Gravity Forms support for more details.
However, I would advise that you use Posts instead of Pages. Posts have categories, tags, and are generally more versatile. Then consider using a WordPress category template to display your list of posts.
Hello,
I hope someone can help me out here.
I have a real estate site for which I want to upload a new themeforest theme.
However, I want the visitors to upload their real estate information (images, description).
For that I need a membership plugin. But it has to have the feature to combine it with the real estate functionality. Moreover, it should have (at least for the future) a payment option. Maybe I would like to switch to a fee-based version.
Would that be possible with the free plugins mentioned above?
Some advice would really be appreciated.
Thanks in advance
What do you mean by that? As I told Jim below, if you’re looking for a flexible membership plugin that has good API for integrating with other stuff, take a look at s2Member.
I need a plugin that can accept third party payment and provide direct access to another custom plugin I’m having developed that will have three levels of memberships, two are paid levels. I’d like all the other bells and whistles, but communication with my custom plugin that will handle delivery of content based on membership level is a must.
Ideas?
So, your custom plugin already handles content access control, you don’t want a membership plugin to do that? In that case, you just need a plugin to handle the payment and has an API. For Authorize.Net, there’s Authorize.Net for WordPress by Daniel Watrous and I’m sure a plugin to facilitate integration with PayPal exists, but I’ve not researched that.
If you want a membership plugin with strong API, I recommend you look into s2Member or WishList Member.