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 |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Download here | Download here | Download here | |
| Installation & admin UI |  |
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| Support & docs | |
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| 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.
I have been busy to find a solution to block the access to the Membership Level after the Subscription days is over.
Hey Dev,
MemberMouse actually does that right out the box. You simply need to select that the membership expires and how long it takes for that to happen and you’re done. Once a member’s membership expires they will be locked out of the content that membership protects but they will still be able to log in so that you can upsell them or have them renew their membership.
Hope that helps,
Palak
MemberMouse
www.membermouse.com
I need some advice. I’m building a website with about 40 workout videos. The service will be sold primarily to companies as an employee benefit. I need a plug in that will allow me to create “groups” for each company name and have all of the employees for that company under that particular “group”. I’d like to send out drip emails/ content to each group separately.
The other hurtle is tracking. It would be great if I could tell each company how many of their employees are using the service, how long they are on the site, things like that.
Any thoughts?
You need a membership system so that people are members of groups and the group defines what can be seen. Think of each group as a product then people login and are allocated to products. Each product contains access to a bespoke set of videos that are not exclusive. This means that a strictly hierarchical system of membership won’t work since in that system the higher level capabilities contain the lower level capabilities. Whereas if you can define your products completely differently that will enable you to tailor the product to the company.
I think YourMembers will do that as the products are independent although it can be rather messy to set up in my experience and writes a [private] tag into the posts and pages which needs to be removed if you find it is the wrong system.
I think you’re exactly right Loggy on how to implement that. Groups that can be sold differently but contain the same content would be the best way to handle that situation. This is actually something that is built into MemberMouse and was specifically designed to do.
Jaclyn, MemberMouse’s Product Bundles are completely independent products you can sell and you can protect that content through a simple point and click interface. And you can even create custom messaging, confirmation pages, member homepages, and more for those different groups (for example, using each company’s logo in the design). The nice thing too is that none of that requires a developer or that type of knowledge. Check us out.
Palak
MemberMouse
www.membermouse.com
Very helpful guide to membership plugins – thanks!
I’m trying to do something pretty simple (I think) with my membership site; I need to be able to have people sign up and identify themselves as one of three roles (i.e. doctor, nurse, or administrator) and then have an extended profile that supports custom fields (i. e. licensed in what state, specialty practice, etc). I then need to be able for visitors to the site to see a searchable lists of people separated by role. Any thoughts on which plugin would work best? or is what I’m looking for more of a profile plugin?
Hi Nate, Almost all membership plugins allow you to extend the registration page with custom fields. But I haven’t come across a plugin that would allow your visitors to see a searchable lists of people separated by role—except perhaps if you use BuddyPress, which sounds more appropriate for what you’re trying to accomplish. s2Member has the best compatibility with BuddyPress, so try it out. And you may ask in their community forums. They’re pretty useful.
Hi Nate,
I think you don’t need a Membership plugin for that. A “Role Manager Plugin” should be enough (search for that).
All the best
Thanks for the great review…has anyone built a WordPress membership solution that protects video content? Preferably vimeo PRO… but could be another service if necessary. I’m stumped on the best way to present and protect this video content to members, including private videos to specific users (photo critiques). Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Have a look at Your Members. I haven’t tried the video bit myself but it has secure streaming:
“Amazon S3
Using Amazon s3 to store media content Your Members – Secure Stream allows protected content to be delivered using time sensitive URLS
Protecting Content
Associate media with other content types and they will automatically inherit permissions. Permission are checked on every load of the media to check if the user is authorised and a time sensitive URL is issued, if the URL is shared it will not work.”
HTH
Hi RossP, I’ve not seen any plugin that’s specifically made for Vimeo PRO. There are several plugins that protect videos, but all of them do it through Amazon S3, so you’d have to upload your videos there first.
I’ve got a challenge – I need a fairly straightforward membership plugin (1 free level, 1 paid level with access to all content). However, I need to create special membership logins that allow that member to have access to all items with a particular TAG, but not items with other tags.
Any thoughts? S2Member seems to allow membership levels that grant access based on tags, but they always include the tags at the lower level and that won’t work for this site.
Help?!
Hey Kelly,
You can actually do this easily (and with no coding) with MemberMouse. MemberMouse has the ability to group content and make that content accessible for free or for a price – called Product Bundles. You can then restrict parts of your website to just be accessible by that Product Bundle – and have that be completely different protected content from your Free and Paid memberships. Take a look at the video on our homepage to get more of an idea of what you can do.
Thanks,
Palak
MemberMouse
Hi Kelly, If you must have tag-based protection, then you might have no choice other than s2Member. I have not seen any other plugin that offers tag-based protection.
If you’re looking for something simple and free to use, try Paid Memberships Pro.
Most membership systems I have seen don’t include email notification of posts. In a non-membership site, this can be easily done by, for example, Subscribe2 which sends emails to all subscribers and users. But you may not want to warn free or lower level members of posts at the Gold level for example, particularly if this level is private.
In addition, it may be necessary to limit menus to different levels and tag clouds to point to entries that the member can actually see. Lastly when a visitor or member comes across a post that they are not entitled to see, there should be the option of not seeing anything at all or just a taster message to encourage them to upgrade.
These last issues are all to do with the theme of course so it does make it difficult to implement and requires coding.
Thanks for your observations, John. You’re right, I’ve never seen a membership plugin that sends automatic email notifications either. But there are workarounds. For example, s2Member and Digital Access Pass can both add members to specific mailing lists based on the members subscription level. If your content protection is based on WordPress categories, you can setup the RSS feed for those categories with, for instance, MailChimp to send notifications to subscribers.
As for limiting menus, I think that’s built into some of the plugins. WishList Member and s2Member both do this, I think. And as you said, a theme developer could use the API of those plugins to control what is and isn’t available to visitors in menus and theme templates.
And the last bit about replacing protected posts with taster content, most plugins do that. Some plugins let you to use
[shortcodes]to protect content and leave some of it visible…other plugins only protect content after the<!--more-->tag.Hi – I’m trying to find the best fit for a membership/subscription site that ships a physical item vs. providing digital content. The needs are:
1. Easy access, set and use as I’m learning my way and building the site myself
2. Members join, in 3 steps – name and email, pay (likely via PayPal), then fill out a detailed profile questionnaire.
I need all of the data from sign up to go into a database that also includes their payment status each month, questionnaire answers along with shipping info. Suggestions?
Simple is best. At this point, I don’t need protected content and I don’t even know what a drop feed is
Thanks for your input!
Hi Aysia. Thanks for your comment. Cart66 is a shopping cart that has built-in members management capabilities. I think it matches your requirements!
Hi,
After I’ve read your review of eMember, I wanted to see if you had a review of Rapid Action Press. I’m considering buying it, since I need drip feeding, and although I would love to buy eMember (they have great service and great products), I’m afraid the auto-upgrade function will not fulfil my needs, since one of our membership sites will have drip-feeding over 21 days.
I’ve tried Digital Access Pass in 2008 and again now for the last time.
Another great membership plugin (which doesn’t do drip feeding, though) is WP Sales Automator for only $10. The programmer does EXCELLENT service! Really! You should take a look at it.
Thanks a lot for your feedback and these recommendations, Britt. I’ll look into Rapid Action Press and WP Sales Automator.
Hey, great reviews.
I am looking for a membership site of sorts. I teach classes and want to offer a package where you the client can buy 10 credits, and then utilize your credits to sign up for a class.
I have tried searching for punch cards, loyalty program management, membership, and others, without any help.
What I really want is something where I have a list of “members” on the back end with a number of credits, that I can add credits to as required.
Any suggestions would be insanely appreciated
I think you could achieve this with Digital Access Pass. DAP has a feature called Self Service Store. Here’s one way the Self Service Store works:
This feature is offered at an extra cost by the way—a $97 plugin in addition to DAP itself. Best you contact DAP before you buy and verify whether it can accomplish what you’re trying to do.
Hey M.K.! Man I really like your site but it is a pain to navigate because I can’t find articles, that I want to read again, easily in Google or on your site. That’s great for stickiness but bad for getting the info to read again and again. Would you be willing to trade a search box for likes and tweets? I really could use a search box at the top of your site. ;0)
Which plugins do you recommend that would work with 1shopping cart and also provide sequential content distribution. In other words, some content is only available in month 2, month3, etctera of the subscription.
Hi Tim, Wishlist Member and Digital Access Pass both support 1ShoppingCart, and both of those plugins support sequential content delivery.
Check out these two pages:
* Supported payment gateways for WordPress membership plugins
* WordPress membership sites with gradual content delivery
Hey M.K. have you seen the newest wordpress membership site plugin, MemberMouse? The plugin is designed to follow marketing best practices for signing up new members and keeping them as long as possible. Its got some great features such as 1-click buy links & a my account page.
You should check out the video on the homepage (has some really cool stuff in it):
www.membermouse.com
That looks pretty interesting. Thanks a lot for your comment!
Hello !
I would like to hear more about http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/membership/ (And Premium: http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/membership) . Does any body have Idea on both versions of this plugin?
Personally, I don’t like WPMU’s plugins. But would like to use this one
The full version of WPMU DEV Membership is reviewed here. What exactly would you like to know about the plugin?
At that moment, I was confused a bit about configuration . But now it’s Okay. Could any one share their opinion on this plugin before I purchase premium version ? Free version is too limited .
I request other subscribers of this post to share their opinion on this plugin as this plugin just seems as a fork of other plugins
Thank you!
Membership-only menus
Does anyone know of a plugin that enables a special members-only menu? So that non-logged in users don’t see pages that they can’t access? WP-members doesn’t provide this, and the built in wordpress private pages function returns a 404 if non-logged in users click a private page.
I’ve tried using custom menus plus “if ( is_user_logged_in() ) ” but I don’t know PHP at all.
Suggestions most welcome.
If your menu is done manually in the template file, you could use something like the following code (it’s what I used in one of my previous websites):
I am using Paypal Subscription Button together with User Access Manager for my membership site. The interface of PSB is very simple and easy to use and it’s not bloated like other plugins out there. Though it’s not the ultimate solution but it’s exactly what I need. You may want to try it: http://goo.gl/bhA20
On my other site I am using s2Member. It’s a beast but non-technical users may find it very hard to set up.
The most popular RoleScoper and Capability manager were not listed here. Is there a reason for that?
Most of the plugins listed here are paid plugins tough
I’m nothing to do with the site, but I’d imagine that as good as they are, they’re not really membership plugins.
I’d also point out that the vast majority of membership plugins are commercial (a couple have free “lite” versions). If the implication is that these are paid reviews then I’ll state that a plugin I’m involved with is on here, we didn’t pay for the review and the author isn’t even using our affiliate link!
Glenn Pegden,
Oh ! I didn’t mean what you thought. I don’t mind if someone write reviews on useful tools, his favorite plugins or the plugins which he like. That’s his choice .I just suggested the author that it would be useful to WinkPress users if the popular free plugins were mentioned in the review.
Thanks !
BTW, I don’t know who you are and ‘one of the plugins’ listed here is yours . I didn’t use most of these plugins and don’t know much about them or their authors (Plugin Authors)
It’s deliberate you don’t know which one I sell. I not here to pimp our stuff, I’m here to be helpful
.
Clue: It’s not one of the three listed as “best”, even though I think it’s better than them (if you don’t need multisite support).
As Glenn said, Role Scoper and Capability Manager are not real membership plugins. They can’t automatically grant access to a member when payment is made. Those free plugins don’t have any payment processing capabilities, which is an essential feature of the plugins listed here. For a plugin to be listed here, it must have this feature and it doesn’t have to be commercial.
Sorry ! I mistaken
Would like your thoughts on aMember Pro. http://www.amember.com/p/
Hi Michael, While aMember does have an official plugin to integrate with WordPress, it remains an external script that’s not really made for WordPress. Even if that mattered only a little to the end user, aMember doesn’t offer much more than the existing membership plugins for WordPress. And aMember is expensive ($175 for a single site license). I don’t see why any WordPress user would want to use it, honestly. Thanks a lot for your question!
Thanks M.K. Very helpful.
WPMU Dev offers a Lite version for free and it’s great for most basic membership sites but only allows 2 levels which usually isn’t a problem.
Just a heads up
Here’s a link to it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/membership/
I have WP with the Thesis theme. WLM seems to have problems with Thesis. Can you comment on this? And do you know if any of the other membership plugins have problems with certain WP themes
I heard from more than one developer that Thesis is needlessly complicated. Regardless though, I doubt that WLM doesn’t support Thesis properly because both Thesis and WLM are popular among internet marketers. I think the problem lies in your particular setup. Try contacting WishList or Thesis creators.
Unfortunately, there is no way for me to test a membership plugin against all the possible themes out there. If contacting the creators is not an option for you, try membership plugins that offer a refund policy. If the plugin works for you, keep it, otherwise, refund it — until you find one that works.
What about Digital Access Pass — doesn’t it do what AWeber and Wishlist member do — and as an all-in-one package?
Yes, DAP offers a built-in autoresponder for convenience, but I would suggest integrating with a real email service provider if you really wanna use an autoresponder sequence. WishList Member and DAP both offer integration with several email marketing services.
I understand the need for a ‘real’ email service provider if I’m going to be sending hundreds or thousands of emails… due to server challenges. But if I have fewer than 100 members at any given time, won’t DAP work fine alone>?
It all depends how much the rest of the internet’s mail servers trust the mail server your web host uses. It’s getting increasingly hard to send mail from “your own” mail servers without being flagged as spam.
The Membership Plugin I’m involved with supports using the servers configured in php as an autoresponder, but we strongly recommend people use the gateways we provide to professional services (i.e. Aweber, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor etc) to avoid the mail ending up in your user’s spam buckets (at best).
Thanks for your answer. I just hate the thought of ‘integrating’ two separate companies (i.e., Wishlist Member and AWeber). I’ve heard nightmares about difficulty getting them to work together. DAP is as expensive as both of those together — which makes it not cost effective if I have to get AWeber in addition to DAP
! Seems to defeat the purpose of purchasing an ‘all-inclusive’ service. I’m not thrilled about the learning curve of DAP, but they do post their entire manual on the net for all to see — so I can see what it will take to make it work. AWeber and Wishlist Member are relative unknowns. So the question becomes, again, does it really make a difference if I’m working with paid members whom I will ask to add my email to their contact list. If they don’t, and messages go to their spam, and they contact me because they think they haven’t gotten their emails…… is that really a huge problem? So sorry to be a pest. I’m just really trying to figure our the best approach for my situation. Thank you.
Hi Bonnie, Thanks for your questions. From what I’ve seen, WishList Members’ integration with AWeber is simple and reliable. When a user signs up for your site, they’re added to your AWeber list. They will then begin receiving your autoresponder sequence or your manual email broadcasts that you setup within AWeber.
But like you said, if you only have around 100 members, using DAP’s built-in email broadcast module may work for you.
THANK YOU
” ….. If they don’t, and messages go to their spam, and they contact me because they think they haven’t gotten their emails…”
That’s the best case scenario. Unless you already have some kind of positive relationship with these people they are much more likely to lose confidence, be wary it’s some kind of scam and cancel their subscription.
Most of the reputable membership plugins and service providers (such as Awebber) have plenty of experience at tying their services together and provide robust mechanisms for doing so. Although as somebody involved with doing these types of integrations I’d probably list WishList+Aweber as one of my least preferred.
I don’t wish to use these comments to advertise, but the YM/MailChimp integration video at http://www.yourmembers.co.uk/the-support/guides-tutorials/mail-manager/mail-chimp-integration/ gives you a great idea of how completely a membership plugin can work with mailing manager.
Thanks — I’ll give it ‘a look.’
Blessings
B