Stuck in the pits of WordPress development chaos? Here’s your ladder out! WordPress membership plugins are the secret weapons for turning your site into a bustling hub of exclusive content.
With the right WordPress membership plugin, you can restrict access, manage user registration and bring your user experience game to the next level. Let’s dive in and explore the exciting possibilities these tools offer for scalability and growth.
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Best WordPress Membership Plugins
Looking to create a membership site on WordPress? The right membership plugin can help you manage subscriptions, protect content, and offer exclusive perks to your users. Here are the best WordPress membership plugins to streamline your site and grow your community.
Paid Memberships Pro

WordPress users, have you ever wanted to create a professional and seamless membership experience on your site? Well, your search ends here. Presenting Paid Memberships Pro, the perfect plugin for restricting content, managing user registration, and handling paid subscriptions.
This WordPress membership plugin provides an all-inclusive solution to protect your content, offering over 28 ways of content restriction, superior membership management, and built-in recurring payment gateways. It’s designed with an aim to cater to your unique membership site needs, no matter the type of member-focused business or organization you run.
Key Features
- Protect content such as courses, videos, podcasts, and more.
- Create different pricing and content access for each level.
- Integrate with Stripe, PayPal, and more.
- Offer child accounts linked to a paying parent account for corporate memberships.
- Experience Front-end user profiles, registration, and custom form fields.
Benefits
Paid Memberships Pro solves the common challenges of creating a membership site. It secures your content, manages memberships, and handles payments, all within a user-friendly interface.
Use Cases
This WordPress membership plugin is ideal for associations, non-profit organizations, blogs, communities, and coaching websites. It can be particularly beneficial for sites that offer courses, directories, paid newsletters, and private video content.
Improvement Scope
1. The user interface could be more intuitive.
2. Additional payment gateway options could be included.
3. More customization options for the registration form could be added.
What People Say
Users have praised Paid Memberships Pro for its versatility, affordability, and scalability. It’s user-friendly and packed with features necessary to run a fully functioning membership site.
Pricing
Paid Memberships Pro offers both free and premium versions. The premium version comes with additional features and add-ons. Special offers are available for developers and agencies.
- Enterprise: $5,000+
- Plus: $299/year
- Standard: $174/year
Simple Membership

Unlock the power of exclusive content with the Simple Membership plugin, a robust and user-friendly solution for WordPress developers. This WordPress membership plugin addresses the age-old problem of content protection, allowing you to limit access to your posts and pages to members only. The Simple Membership plugin provides an innovative solution with its unlimited membership levels and easy-to-use content protection interface.
The plugin’s core functionalities include creating free and paid memberships, unlimited access levels, content protection, payment logs, and a developer API for customization. It enables secure payments via PayPal, Stripe, and Braintree, with both one-time and recurring payment options. The WordPress membership plugin provides a user-friendly interface, allowing developers to easily protect their content and manage memberships.
Key Features
- Create as many membership levels as needed, like free, silver, gold, etc.
- Easily protect your posts or pages with a simple selection in the WordPress editor.
- Offer both free and paid membership options with secure payments through PayPal, Stripe, or Braintree.
- Keep track of all membership payments within the plugin.
- Customize the plugin with various action and filter hooks and query, create, or update member accounts with an API.
Benefits
This WordPress membership plugin helps developers to protect their content effectively, manage memberships easily, and monetize their sites through paid memberships. It also facilitates secure payments and provides an option for email activation for free memberships.
Use Cases
This WordPress membership plugin is beneficial for websites offering premium content, online courses, or subscription-based services. It can also be used by developers building community forums, member-only blogs, and e-commerce websites.
Improvement Scope
1. Integration with more payment gateways could be added.
2. The user interface could be more intuitive.
3. More customizable options for membership levels and payment plans could be beneficial.
What People Say
Users appreciate the plugin’s flexibility, easy setup, and excellent support. They find the content protection feature particularly useful.
Pricing
The Simple Membership plugin is available for free. However, several premium add-ons are available for purchase separately, providing additional functionalities like Stripe payments, form builder, and more.
ProfilePress

Unlock the potential of your WordPress site with ProfilePress, a powerful membership plugin that transforms your website into a thriving ecommerce platform. This WordPress membership plugin addresses the complex challenge of managing one-time and recurring payments, digital downloads, user profiles, and secure content restriction.
ProfilePress offers a dynamic and comprehensive solution with its easy-to-use features. It allows you to create captivating user profiles, member directories, and front-end login and registration forms. The WordPress membership plugin supports multiple payment processors, including Stripe, PayPal, RazorPay, Paystack & Mollie, enhancing the user experience and facilitating swift transactions.
Key Features
- Accept payments via Stripe, PayPal, RazorPay, Paystack & Mollie.
- Create checkout pages, member login forms, user registration forms with a drag-and-drop builder.
- Add user profiles and create searchable member directories.
- Easily create user profiles and forms with an intuitive builder.
- Control user access and restrict content based on membership plans.
Benefits
ProfilePress solves the common challenge of managing a membership site by providing a simple and efficient way to handle payments, user profiles, and access control.
Use Cases
This WordPress membership plugin is beneficial for developers managing ecommerce sites, online learning platforms, digital download sites, and any website that requires a membership model.
Improvement Scope
1. Expanded payment processor options could be beneficial.
2. More customization options for user profiles could improve user experience.
3. Enhanced analytics and reporting features could provide users with more detailed insights.
What People Say
Users praise ProfilePress for its user-friendly interface, reliable customer support, and efficient payment processing capabilities.
Pricing
ProfilePress offers both free and premium versions. The premium version includes additional features and integrations. Discounts and special offers are periodically available for developers and agencies.
- Standard: $129/year (For 1 Site)
- Plus: $299/year (For 3 Sites)
- Agency: $499/year
ARMember

ARMember is a top-rated WordPress membership plugin designed to build fully functional membership sites with ease. Known for its user-friendly interface, ARMember simplifies content restriction, membership levels, and user management, making it one of the most comprehensive free solutions available. Whether you want to create free plans, paid subscriptions, or auto-recurring memberships, ARMember has all the tools needed to streamline your membership site’s functionality.
This WordPress membership plugin also includes a built-in form builder for creating registration, login, and profile forms, complete with spam protection. Content restriction is seamless with just one click, and partial content protection is available through shortcodes. With ARMember, building a membership platform for anything from professional communities to training services becomes effortless.
Key Features
- Create and manage free or paid subscription plans with auto-recurring payments.
- Built-in form builder for creating signup, login, and profile management forms.
- Restrict content easily with one-click controls and shortcode-based partial restriction.
- Set up unlimited membership levels with custom permissions.
- Integrated payment gateways for smooth transactions and plan management.
Benefits
ARMember offers a simple yet powerful interface that allows users to create various membership types without hassle. The wide range of use cases, from fitness websites to educational platforms, showcases its versatility.
Use Cases
One can use this WordPress membership plugin to build exclusive communities or offer premium content for professionals. Fitness & Wellness businesses can set up membership-based training programs or health classes whereas Education & LMS can develop online tutoring or coaching platforms with student access levels.
Improvement Scope
- More integrations with third-party plugins could enhance its capabilities.
- This WordPress membership plugin could offer additional design templates for forms and user profiles.
What People Say
Users love ARMember for its ease of use and robust feature set, though some feel that the advanced features require a learning curve. Testimonials highlight its flexibility and ability to handle complex membership sites.
Pricing
ARMember is free, with premium plan. It is priced at $69/lifttime.
WP User Manager

Creating a WordPress membership site has never been easier, thanks to the WP User Manager plugin. It is a versatile WordPress membership plugin that helps you manage your online community more efficiently, eliminating the hassle of creating customizable user profiles, registration forms, and account customization forms manually.
WP User Manager is a must-have tool for WordPress developers looking to build a comprehensive membership website. It offers a unique solution to the challenge of user management by providing a robust and flexible platform that is easy to set up and use.
Key Features
- Enable users to register and login from the front end and customize the registration form with custom fields.
- Customize the emails sent to users upon registration, password reset, and more.
- Allows users to personalize their site avatar by uploading an image from the account page.
- Edit roles and their capabilities, create new roles, and duplicate existing ones.
- All the URLs are SEO friendly.
Benefits
The plugin solves common challenges like user management, account customization, and user interaction. It offers a seamless user experience by allowing front-end registration and login, custom email notifications, and role-specific access.
Use Cases
This WordPress membership plugin is particularly beneficial for community-based websites, e-commerce sites, or any WordPress site that requires user registration and interaction.
Improvement Scope
1. Could benefit from more integrations with popular plugins.
2. User interface can be more intuitive.
3. Offering more customization options for email notifications.
What People Say
Users appreciate its versatility and ease of use. They find the plugin powerful and flexible, making it a popular choice for WordPress developers.
Pricing
This WordPress membership plugin offers a free version with basic features. For advanced functionality, there are premium options available with a subscription model.
- Agency: $599/year (1 year of support and updates for 25 websites)
- Pro: $299/year (1 year of support and updates for 10 websites)
- Plus: $199/year (1 year of support and updates for 5 websites)
- Starter: $149/year (1 year of support and updates for 1 website)
Restrict User Access

The Restrict User Access plugin is a powerful tool for WordPress developers seeking to create a robust membership site with exclusive content. It allows you to easily restrict and protect your content, offering different access levels such as Platinum, Gold or Free, based on user roles or actions. It’s a simple yet effective solution to the challenge of managing user permissions and access to content.
The core functionalities of this WordPress membership plugin include unlimited access levels, level membership automations, contextual content protection, grant and deny capabilities, admin bar and nav menu visibility control, restricting content from other plugins, WordPress security enhancements, restricting content with shortcodes, and a developer-friendly API.
Key Features
- Control the duration and permissions of memberships.
- Automatically grant levels based on user actions or traits.
- Prevent unauthorized users from accessing specific posts, pages, or categories.
- Full control over the capabilities the members should have.
- Customize WordPress access control programmatically.
Benefits
The plugin simplifies content restriction and membership management. It offers a wide range of options for restricting access to content based on user roles, purchases, and other criteria.
Use Cases
This WordPress membership plugin is ideal for creating a paid membership site, a private community, or any website with restricted content.
Improvement Scope
1. The plugin could offer more customized membership levels.
2. The user interface could be simplified for non-technical users.
3. More integration with other popular WordPress plugins could be added.
What People Say
Users appreciate the plugin’s functionality and flexibility, though some find it complex to navigate.
Pricing
This WordPress membership plugin is free, but there are premium add-ons available for purchase.
- Access: $399/year (Maximum Benefits for 50 sites)
- Plus: $199/year (Popular features for 5 sites)
- Essentials: $99/year (Essentials for membership sites for 1 site)
Final Word
Invest in WordPress membership plugins to unlock a new realm of possibilities for your website. By using these tools, you can restrict and protect your exclusive content, create customizable user profiles, manage memberships, and much more.
Achieve your site’s full potential by leveraging these plugins’ capabilities. Take action now and experience the power of these WordPress membership plugins.
FAQs
What is a membership plugin?
A membership plugin allows you to create a restricted area of your WordPress website where only members can access exclusive content.
Why should I use a membership plugin for my WordPress site?
Membership plugins can help you monetize your content, build a loyal community, and offer premium features to your subscribers.
What features should I look for in a membership plugin?
Essential features include user registration, membership levels, content restrictions, payment integration, and drip content. Use staging sites to check the availability of desired features before installation.
Can I use a membership plugin to create a subscription-based model?
Yes, many membership plugins offer subscription features, allowing you to charge recurring fees for access to your premium content.