9+ Best WordPress Membership Plugins 2024 (Free & Paid) 

A membership site is the best way to generate revenue, as it lets you monetize by restricting your site content to only paid users. As far as online businesses go, membership sites are the simplest to create and manage.

A membership plugin helps you create subscription-based content with different management levels, ranging from free to paid. It also lets you sell content on a recurring or one-time access basis. Of all the membership plugins available in the market, the best ones always offer something unique. Here, we discuss 8 of our favorite membership plugins and their unique features.

Important Factors for Picking a WordPress Membership Plugin

1. Easy to Use: Pick a plugin that’s simple to understand and set up, saving you time and hassle.
2. Subscriber Growth: Set realistic goals based on membership costs and conversion rates to grow your revenue.
3. Payment Options: Accept payments from different sources to reach more people and boost earnings.
4. Budget-Friendly: Balance your revenue targets with the plugin’s cost to maximize your investment.
5. Membership Levels: Offer various membership tiers to meet different needs and preferences.
6. Content Delivery: Choose how you want content released—whether all at once, regularly, or gradually—to keep members happy.
7. Integration Flexibility: Integrate with essential tools like email marketing platforms and community forums to enhance workflow efficiency.
8. Support Availability: Make sure reliable help is available for any questions or issues.

Best WordPress Membership Plugins

MemberPress

MemberPress is a compact solution that adds different roles and capabilities and then assigns those to your users via potential tools. This plugin comes with a simple user interface that will allow you to set authorization to provide substantial content restriction capabilities. 

It comes with a variety of features and can help you monetize your site, limit access to your content, and create a perfect membership site with an easy setup process. This plugin will allow you to create, edit and delete roles and assign role capabilities. It can also assign multiple roles to any user. It comes with extensive access rules that put you in control of access to any content. You can easily restrict access to posts, pages, categories, navigation menus, tags, files, etc., with the help of this plugin. This plugin will let you release timed content to give your members access to your content over time instead of giving them access at once. This particular feature is best suited for different sites that offer online courses. 

MemberPress has built-in integration with major payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Wallet, credit cards, and many more. You can also integrate various WooCommerce capabilities into the member’s plugin’s role manager. 

Key Features: 

Easy setup to create different membership levels. 
Customizable membership plans. 
User access restriction. 
Content dripping.
Powerful LMS traits for online courses. 
Integration with popular email marketing services. 
Integration with WooCommerce and payment gateways. 

Pricing:

It’s a freemium WordPress membership plugin. The free version of the plugin is available on WordPress.org. And the pro version starts at $179 per year for one site.

SureMembers

SureMembers is an amazing WordPress plugin that allows you to build and manage membership sites easily. 

It is a versatile and user-friendly plugin that provides a variety of membership choices to accommodate various business models. SureMembers allows users to create membership tiers, handle payments, and configure content access rules.

SureMembers connects with multiple payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net, which is one of its distinguishing characteristics, making it simple for site owners to manage payments and subscriptions. 

SureMembers also has a number of customization possibilities, allowing customers to construct their own membership sites.

This membership plugin for WordPress is simple to use and has a vivid design that makes it simple to navigate and use. SureMembers provides various content security features, including page-level and post-level protection for specific kinds of posts.

Furthermore, extensive reporting options give deep insights into membership site performance, such as income, member data, and more. 

The plugin also enables drip content, which allows site administrators to deliver information over time to keep users interested progressively.

SureMembers, in a nutshell, is a comprehensive solution for anybody wishing to develop and maintain a profitable membership site. 

Its comprehensive features, customization possibilities, and user-friendly interface make it an excellent alternative for businesses and individuals wishing to monetize their content and establish a vibrant community.

Key Features: 

User management capabilities that allow you to manage your members’ profiles, account information, and access permissions.
Integrates with popular payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe to process member payments and subscriptions.
Create and manage multiple membership levels with different access permissions, content restrictions, and pricing options.
Content protection features that allow you to restrict access to your content based on membership levels.
Drip content to your members over a specific period, giving them access to content at predetermined intervals.
Automate repetitive tasks such as sending welcome emails, renewal reminders, and failed payment notifications.
Track member activity, revenue, and engagement with detailed analytics and reporting.

Pricing:

Since it is a premium-only membership plugin for WordPress, you have to purchase the plugin for $99 annually for a single website.

Ultimate Member

With over 200,000+ active installations, Ultimate Member is one of the most highly esteemed and reliable membership plugins for WordPress. It will help you to create any site with a large online community where users can sign up quickly. 

Ultimate Member makes it easier to manufacture any user-based WordPress website by integrating attractive front-end elements with profound admin functionality.  This plugin will automatically produce all the pages required for a complete membership functionality which will include user profiles, login, registration, and reset password page. It includes a drag-and-drop form editor with custom fields in case you need to modify any of the Ultimate Member’s forms. 

This WordPress membership plugin comes with a range of various extensions. You can easily add functionality by using the paid add-ons. With the add-ons, your users can create public and private notes from their profiles, add custom tabs on their profiles, add photos to their profiles, and many more. Also, you can restrict your content to your private users and allow private messages and public activities. 

Key Features: 

Front-end user profiles and registrations. 
Front-end member signup. 
Drag and drop builder. 
Integration with bbPress and MailChimp. 
Content restriction. 
Customized user roles. 
WooCommerce integration. 

Pricing: 

Ultimate Member is available for free on the WordPress directory. You can extend the core plugin by purchasing individual extensions or buying a bundle of all extensions for $249 per year.

Restrict Content

Restrict Content is a powerful WordPress membership plugin that will allow you to monetize your content by dynamically unveiling your content based on different user roles and membership levels. This lightweight plugin will give you control over restricting the content on your WordPress site to certain valued members. 

It will offer you to create an unlimited number of subscription packages with different membership levels.  This plugin’s excellent member management interface will let you view all members, whether they are active, pending, expired, canceled, or free users. It will also let you make your pages, posts, archives, and WordPress blocks access to your members according to their plan, status, and more.

This membership plugin for WordPress will also keep your members updated; they can quickly check their account status, renewal, or expiration date and provide options to upgrade or cancel their membership account. Your members can easily track the history of the payments that were made to their account, and with the help of the profile editor, they can easily update their account username, email, and password. The Pro version of Restrict Content will come with more enriched features; it will let you display previews to your members and entice them to become members to view the content. It will also let you create discount codes that can be set up to offer a percentage discount or flat rate discount. 

Restrict Content plugin is designed to work perfectly with any theme. It also integrates perfectly with third-party services, e-commerce systems, Pro payment gateways, email newsletter services, and many more. 

Key Features: 

Offers an unlimited number of membership levels, including free, trial, and premium subscriptions. 
Content-based user role, access level, and membership level. 
Supports Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, Braintree, and Custom. 
WooCommerce integration. 
Dashboard for members. 
Offers built-in discount codes and other promotional tools. 

Pricing:

The basic version of the plugin is free. And the pro version starts at $99 per year for one site.

Paid Memberships Pro

Paid Memberships Pro is a powerful solution to your membership solution for all types of membership sites. With more than 100,000+ active installations, this plugin features all the necessary tools to create, manage, and grow any kind of membership site. 

This WordPress membership plugin will help you generate limitless membership levels with flexible pricing. From the dashboard, your members can choose any of the subscription levels, including free, trial, one-time payment or recurring payment subscription, and many more. This plugin will also allow restricting your content to members only. It has a powerful member management system where you can easily supervise membership data, import or export members, and survey your sales and revenues, signups, cancellations, and expirations.

The plugin’s built-in payment integration makes it work perfectly with Stripe, PayPal, 2Checkout, Braintree, and other payment gateways. You can also entertain the features of a great reporting dashboard, content dripping, email notifications, and many more. 

Paid Memberships Pro is best made for premium content sites, Learning Management Systems (LMS), online courses, member-only discount sites, paid newsletters, and many more. And if you want some more features from the plugin, you can easily extend its capabilities with paid add-ons. 

Key Features: 

One-click installation and update. 
WooCommerce integration. 
Provide previews of content. 
Different membership levels with flexible pricing. 
Integration with payment gateways. 
Content dripping. 
Built-in sales or revenue report.

Pricing: 

You can download the plugin for free from the WordPress repo. The pro version of the plugin costs $247 per year for one site.

Ultimate Membership Pro

Ultimate Membership Pro is one of the best membership plugins, which is designed to ease the pressure of managing multi-level subscriptions. This plugin is best suited for those WordPress sites that look to sell their content through a membership system to different asymmetrical subscription levels. 

Ultimate Membership Pro will help you to restrict access to your exclusive website content by providing a content subscription to unlimited membership levels. With the plugin, you can easily set up a free membership package with a variety of premium options. The plugin will let you charge your members a one-time fee, long-term recurring fees, or unlimited recurring fees. The robust system of this Membership WordPress plugin will offer a dashboard to observe your member’s activity, current subscription status, and reports, whereas advanced filters can be used to export customers’ lists. Ultimate Membership Pro will also provide a dynamic membership framework to restrict your content access with time-restricted access, unrestricted access, periodic access, and date-ranged access. 

Ultimate Membership Pro provides built-in integration to allow popular payment and checkout systems, including PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, Zapier, PayPal Express to MailChimp Aweber, and 2Checkout. If you are concerned with your WooCommerce product, you can use its WooCommerce integration to restrict access to your products.

Key Features: 

Restrict access to contents from pages, custom post types, categories, files, and navigation menus.
Multilevel subscribers management. 
Easy setup of plugin.  
Unlimited membership levels. 
Drip content. 
WooCommerce integration. 
Numerous subscription billing options. 
Built-in integration with payment gateways. 

Pricing: 

This WordPress membership plugin is available for a one-off cost of $59. And while the platform itself comes with 41 free add-ons, you could still purchase an additional set of pro-add-ons for $149 per year.

Simple Membership

Simple Membership comes with a lightweight and user-friendly interface to offer free and premium content from your WordPress sites. This flexible and well-supported plugin will provide your desired content protection to your content from your pages and posts so only members can take a peek at them. 

Simple Membership will help you to offer content to a particular user by setting up free, silver, gold, etc., membership levels. You can easily protect your content from non-members by setting up a member-only viewer system right from the WordPress editor. The content protection system from the plugin will help to hide and lock contents from any kind of general view. You can also easily block any unusual members with the help of the plugin. This plugin will let you set up a free or paid membership system on your site. You can easily charge your clients using a one-time or recurring payment process. You can also set up an email verification system for your free users. 

The built-in integration system of Simple Membership allows payment handling via popular payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, etc. The plugin will let you track your client’s payment history easily right from the admin dashboard. 

Key Features: 

Protection for page or post content. 
Partial protection of content. 
Works perfectly with WordPress themes. 
Teaser content to attract your users.
Payment log options. 
Free trial and one-time payment memberships. 
Easy translation. 
Filter members by different membership levels. 

Pricing: 

It’s a completely free plugin.

ARMember

ARMember is your comprehensive membership solution that will cover your membership website requirement with a customized design. With an easy and user-friendly interface, this plugin will come with special features, including different membership levels, content dripping, restricted content, and many more.

ARMember will come in handy with features like member management, payment tracking mechanism, drip content, etc., with an easy setup process. This plugin will let you trail your member’s total units and track how many of your members are active or inactive on your site and their payment history. This plugin will let you upgrade, cancel, renew or downgrade memberships, as well as you can choose to give award certificates and badges to your subscribers.

With this WordPress membership plugin, you can easily make certain exclusive content accessible by a particular membership category. You can also schedule your content release according to the member’s subscription time and level. This plugin will provide shortcodes to add different features such as plan selection, registration, payment, and coupon creation to your site with ease. This plugin will also let your users hold multiple membership plans and add-on options at the same time. Additionally, if any of your users miss the deadline for their payment and if their membership expires, they will entertain a grace period to access content for a specific period. 

ARMember will provide content dripping with built-in facility and, at the same time, will provide IP and URL-based restriction and ban options to protect your website from unwanted access. Also, it will offer a convenient payment process by providing easy integration with popular payment gateways, including Stipe, PayPal, Bank Transfer, 2Checkout, and Authorize.net.

Key Features: 

Options to create both trial and free memberships. 
Easy member management. 
Facilities for content dripping. 
Offers to upgrade, cancel, renew, and downgrade memberships. 
Content restrictions facility. 
Integration with multiple payment gateways. 
Log in with social networks.
Add badges and unlock achievements. 
Exclusive coupon management. 

Pricing:

ARMember comes with a $59 price for a lifetime purchase.

WooCommerce Memberships

WooCommerce Memberships creates a program that will help you to bring all your content, shops, and memberships together. This plugin will allow you to create an entire membership system to help you integrate the membership benefits with the store, so your visitors will be encouraged to subscribe and purchase. 

WooCommerce Memberships provide a variety of essential membership features. This plugin will let you restrict your content only to members and let you drip your content over a time period when your members have access. It will also let you assign manually by your choice and export that member list to a CSV file. To give your members a greater value for money, this plugin will offer you membership plans as part of the product purchases. This unique feature will help you boost your store’s credibility. This plugin will also authorize you to create a separate section for members in your store. You can easily drip content access, so your members will have the facility to buy products before they are available for public purchase or will be offered free shipping as part of the benefits of membership perks. 

This plugin will also let you shift your store into a purchasing club where you can offer certain products exclusively to your members. It will also let you set up a system to reward your members with discounts for all products or specifically categorized products. 

Key Features: 

Offers content dripping.
Provides flexibility by letting you assign or sell memberships. 
Provide different membership levels. 
Tactical way of content access. 
Provides easy member management. 
Turn your store into a purchasing club. 

Pricing:

The plugin costs $199.00 per year. 

Membership for WooCommerce

The feature-rich, well-supported, and simple-to-use Membership for WooCommerce Pro plugin allows all owners of eCommerce stores to sell and administer membership plans. The WooCommerce Membership Extension is all you need if you want to build or enhance your WooCommerce membership site for recurring revenue collection.

By utilizing memberships, you can maximize the potential of your WooCommerce business. The WooCommerce plugin enables the sale and administration of membership plans and provides flexible choices to enhance your company with full services. Using this WooCommerce plugin, you may create a membership website for WooCommerce to generate revenue.

Key Features:

Discounts on particular products should only be given to members
A few product tags, categories, and sections are exclusively accessible to WooCommerce members.
Combine the advantages of multiple membership options into one.
Send membership-related plan actions through emails.
Two unique templates are available, one Simple and the other Comparative.

Pricing:

This plugin costs $99 & is also available on WordPress.Org with a free version.

Conclusion

Membership plugins will help you restrict access to your content to selected pages or posts and then help you sell your content on a subscription basis. This plugin will help you to turn your entire website into an excellent, exclusive, and members-only portal. Membership plugins with all their unique features help you not to start from scratch. 

Gain comprehensive insights about the best WordPress membership plugins from our article, and feel free to engage with us in the comments for any inquiries.

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