There are a few things that you might wanna know about how a membership plugin manages subscribers to your site.
You’d want to know if the plugin integrates with the built-in WordPress users table. Moreover, you’ll wanna know if it integrates with the roles and capabilities features of WordPress. Proper integration in this area ensures that the plugin will play nice with other plugins that depend on WordPress roles and capabilities, such as the popular bbPress forum. And it ensures that you’ll be able to export users, create branded public profiles, and do the other things that you can do with WordPress users through 3rd party plugins.
You might also want to know whether the plugin can display custom registration and profile fields and manage multiple membership tiers.
You’ll find out about all of this right here.
You can click on the name of the product below to view its full review.
s2Member
s2Member has excellent member management capabilities. It adds new columns to the native WordPress Users table, such as "Registration Date", "Custom Capabilities" and "# of Logins". The access rights are determined by the native WordPress roles and capabilities.
s2Member allows you to customize the registration form in many ways, including the ability to add custom fields. It also supports an unlimited number of membership levels.
WishList Member
Subscribers within WishList Member and WordPress users are the same. Adding a member in either one is reflected on the other. However, while WishList Member uses WordPress users to manage members, it does not use WordPress roles and capabilities. WishList Member membership levels are separate from those.
You can create an unlimited number of membership levels and you can associate and capture custom profile fields through WishList Member.
Digital Access Pass
DAP's members and WordPress users are two separate collections of data—one doesn't see the other. However, DAP has a feature to synchronize the two.
DAP offers robust members management capabilities, such as bulk import and export, not to mention the basic members management features that one would expect, such as the ability to edit users profiles, browse and search users, and more.
In DAP, each member is assigned to product(s). Each product is a collection of protected content, so you can think of a 'product' as a 'membership level': platinum, gold, silver, bronze, etc...
By using DAP, you're not limiting the number of fields you can collect on registrations. DAP allows you to add custom fields to your registration form and user profiles.
Speaking of user profiles. In DAP, they are customizable and can be blended in with your existing WordPress theme, as explained in this documentation page.
Screenshot: DAP members management page
eMember
eMember can synchronize its database members table with WordPress default users table. This can be useful for integration with other plugins that rely on WordPress users table. eMember even allows you to specify a "WordPress Role" for every membership level that you create so that when you sync the two tables roles will also match.
On top of that, eMember offers some great members management features. It can import existing WordPress users. It can export members to a CSV file—or just export their emails. And it is able to collect and manage custom registration fields.
Magic Members
Magic Members integrates with the pre-existing WordPress users table and treats users as subscribers. It doesn't create a list of subscribers that's separate from WordPress, which is the right way to do it. However, you cannot manage subscription related options from WordPress users screen. Magic Members has its own dedicated page for that.
For customizing the access rights for your subscribers, Magic Members ships with a powerful roles and capabilities editor. You can associate each WordPress role (i.e. subscriber, editor, author) with any membership level that you create with Magic Members. You can have an unlimited number of membership levels.
Other powerful features Magic Members has include its ability to create and display custom registration and profile fields, and a selection of shortcodes for displaying registration forms, user profiles, and more...
Paid Memberships Pro
After activating PMPro, every WordPress user will now have a "membership level" attached to it. You can edit a user's membership level from the WordPress user profile. But, for some reason, PMPro keeps some user related data, such as membership dates and billing details, away from the native WordPress user profile. Some of these details can be viewed by going to the "Members List" of PMPro.
While PMPro can export all members to a CSV file, it cannot bulk import neither from an external file nor from the built-in users table in WordPress.
WPMU DEV Membership
Membership relies fully on WordPress built-in users table to manage the site members. Membership levels are not associated with the native WordPress roles and capabilities. However, each membership level can be linked to a role. You can create unlimited number of membership levels.
Unfortunately, Membership cannot produce and utilize custom registration fields.
MemberWing
MemberWing uses WordPress users to manage its members. But the way it handles user access privileges is not tied to WordPress in anyway. WordPress built-in roles and capabilities are not used at all. With MemberWing you basically create products and then give users access to those products.
Using this model, you can create unlimited products and give users access to any number of products. These products determine users access rights to posts and files.
You can't collect or utilize custom profile fields with MemberWing.
Screenshot: MemberWing member profile
Your Members
Your Members users management is excellent. First, it works with the built-in WordPress roles, which means it would work well with other plugins that also utilize WordPress roles and capabilities, such as the bbPress discussion forum. It enables you to show users their profiles outside the admin backend and easily embed custom registration forms on WordPress posts and pages. These features are available to most other membership plugins if you're willing to install additional plugins, but Your Members has this built-in.
Your Members allows you to collect custom fields during user registration, and, of course, you can create unlimited membership tiers with the plugin.
wp-Member
While wp-Member uses native WordPress user profiles to manage members, it does not use the built-in user roles and capabilities that WordPress employs. It has its own membership levels system. And I found the user interface for managing members to be a little tedious to use.
However, wp-Member does have some advanced members management capabilities. It allows you to create unlimited membership levels and it supports custom registration fields. But in the version that I tested, the registration page was kind of broken (but I'm sure that's easily fixable).
