Best Membership Plugins for WordPress (2024 edition)

We often get asked which plugins work best alongside WP Fusion for creating a membership site.

While WP Fusion officially integrates with 21 different membership plugins, some work better than others. As well, different membership sites have different requirements in terms of how transactions are processed, groups (or umbrella accounts), and social features.

In this post we’ll be looking at the most common membership site setups we see with our WP Fusion users, and exploring some pros and cons for each.

Contents:

• Do you need a membership plugin?
• Selling memberships
  • WooCommerce
  • Paid Memberships Pro
  • Honorable mentions
  • Avoid
• Social features
  • BuddyBoss
  • Other options
• Team memberships
  • With WooCommerce
  • With Paid Memberships Pro
  • Honorable mention
• In summary

Note: If a plugin mentioned in this post has an affiliate program, you may see an affiliate link to their website. Our recommendations aren’t in any way affected by these affiliate programs—we’ve been recommending these same plugins for a long time, based on our experiences and those of other WP Fusion users.

#Do you need a membership plugin?

WP Fusion has hundreds of options for controlling access to content in WordPress based on a contact’s tags in your connected CRM. In that way WP Fusion can be used as a very simple membership plugin.

For example, maybe you just want to import your CRM contacts as WordPress users, send them a password, and then use a CRM tag to unlock a members-only page on your site. In that case, you can build a very basic “membership site” just with WP Fusion.

However, WP Fusion doesn’t add anything to the frontend of your website. WP Fusion does not have:

• A way to take payments
• A login form or registration form
• Profile forms
• Member directories

Those are the features that we’d look for in a membership plugin, and that’s what we’ll be exploring in this post.

#Selling memberships

Usually the first question when building a membership site is how you’re going to sell access. The two most common setups we see are using WooCommerce and Paid Memberships Pro.

#WooCommerce

WooCommerce is by far the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress, and as such, it has a massive ecosystem of extensions that let you customize it in almost any way imaginable. WooCommerce is also supported out of the box on almost every theme, so you know it’s going to integrate tightly with the rest of your site.

The most common setup we see for selling memberships with WP Fusion is to use WooCommerce and the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension (for recurring payments).

Using WP Fusion with WooCommerce is intuitive. You set up your WooCommerce products to apply tags in your CRM at checkout, and then those same CRM tags can unlock content in WordPress, or even auto-enroll users into courses or social groups.

In the case of a subscription cancellation or payment failure, those tags can be automatically removed, and the user would lose access to the membership content until they reactivated their subscription.

In this scenario, your CRM tags act like membership levels, with WP Fusion unlocking content based on purchases and subscription statuses in WooCommerce. This is a really flexible system that gives you a ton of options for offering promotions, free trials, upgrades, group accounts, and bundles (i.e., a course bundle).

Pros:

• Easy to get started (the core plugin is free), and lots of learning resources online
• Huge ecosystem of available addons, extensions, and themes

Cons:

• WooCommerce is optimized for selling physical products, so the experience is sometimes not as intuitive for your customers as it would be with a dedicated membership plugin
• The extensions can get expensive. For example, if you want to sell group / umbrella accounts, you’ll need the Teams for WooCommerce Memberships addon, as well as the WooCommerce Memberships addon, which brings your costs up to $527 / year

Price: Starts at $199 / year for WooCommerce + WooCommerce Subscriptions

See more at WooCommerce.com »

Read more about WP Fusion’s WooCommerce integration »

#Paid Memberships Pro

The second most common solution we see for selling memberships is with Paid Memberships Pro.

Paid Memberships Pro is a robust membership plugin that offers a wide range of features needed for any membership site. It allows you to create unlimited membership levels, set up recurring payments, and restrict access to content based on membership level.

With Paid Memberships Pro, setting up membership levels is straightforward. You simply click “Add New Membership Level,” enter the details, and you’re ready to go. It also comes with built-in features for content dripping, member notifications, and reporting, which means you won’t need many additional extensions to run a full-featured membership site.

Paid Memberships Pro is often more affordable than other solutions, especially considering the amount of functionality included in the free core plugin. For instance, you get recurring payments and extensive reporting capabilities out of the box.

Pros:

• Optimized for selling memberships out of the box, with many features included in the core plugin
• Affordable pricing structure, especially for sites needing advanced features without additional costs

Cons:

• Smaller ecosystem of extensions compared to WooCommerce, but covers most membership needs well
• May require some additional styling to match your theme perfectly

Price: Starting at free, with plans up to $299 / year for access to all extensions

See more at PaidMembershipsPro.com »

Read more about WP Fusion’s Paid Memberships Pro integration »

#Honorable mentions

An honorable mention goes to SureMembers, combined with SureCart for payments. This setup is significantly lighter and easier to set up than WooCommerce, but I don’t love how much of the subscription management is handled via SureCart’s servers— it can make it difficult if you ever need to add custom code to customize the checkout process. Read our review of SureCart here.

And MemberPress or Restrict Content Pro as alternatives to Paid Memberships Pro. Both are solid membership plugins with similar features, but Paid Memberships Pro is more popular with WP Fusion users and has a bigger community.

#Social features

On top of the “ecommerce” layer, you may also want to add social features to your membership site. That could include

• Community forums
• Activity feeds
• Member-to-member messaging
• Social groups

#BuddyBoss

For that functionality, we recommend BuddyBoss. BuddyBoss works seamlessly with either WooCommerce or Paid Memberships Pro to add a social layer on top of your membership site.

You can disable and enable whatever modules you need based on your requirements. For example, maybe you want to have discussion groups but don’t want to have a public forum open to everyone. In that case, you would just turn off the forum module.

The BuddyBoss Platform plugin is free, which provides all the underlying functionality for profiles, forums, groups, and activity. However, the BuddyBoss theme is a premium theme.

The theme is what gives you this really attractive visual interface, and without it, BuddyBoss looks a little dull. You can try a live demo of the BuddyBoss theme here.

Pros:

• Contains a bunch of common membership features (forums, groups, profiles, activity) in one plugin. Easy to turn modules on and off
• The BuddyBoss Platform plugin containing all the functionality is free
• The premium theme is super slick looking, has a ton of plugin integrations, and is infinitely customizable

Cons:

• It doesn’t look very nice without the premium theme, which is an extra $228 / yr
• Could be overkill if all you need is one component (for example, if you just need a forum, installing bbPress on its own is simpler)
• If you’re not careful and don’t put in some extra design time, you could end up looking like every other BuddyBoss site

Price: Plugin is free. $228 / yr. for a single site license to the premium theme

Learn more about BuddyBoss at BuddyBoss.com »

Read more about WP Fusion’s BuddyBoss integration »

#Other options

BuddyBoss has a lot of features, and you may find it overkill for your site. Especially if your membership site is primarily built for selling courses, you may not need a social layer on top of your ecommerce and LMS plugin— that’s also totally fine.

One other plugin we’ve seen a lot of success with for membership sites is Gamipress. That lets you award points and badges based on site activity such as completing your profile, finishing a course, posting in a group for the first time, etc.

Gamipress is compatible and already integrated with everything we’ve mentioned here so far, and WP Fusion can sync Gamipress data bi-directionally with your connected CRM.

#Team memberships

One important thing to consider is whether you will ever want to sell “team” memberships (sometimes called “umbrella” or “corporate” memberships).
For example, maybe you sell a professional certification course, and a company needs to be able to purchase access for their employees.

That’s actually a rather complex component, and very few plugins do it successfully. If you think you might need to sell team or group access in the future, it’s important to start with something that will support that functionality.

#With WooCommerce

Team memberships with WooCommerce come from the Teams for WooCommerce Memberships extension, which also requires WooCommerce Memberships.

This is probably the most powerful teams solution we’ve seen, as it’s compatible with everything else in WooCommerce. You have all the flexibility of WooCommerce Subscriptions in terms of billing, lots of options for taxes and payment gateways, and of course the best theme compatibility.

However, it does get expensive. Running WooCommerce Subscriptions, WooCommerce Memberships, and Teams for WooCommerce Memberships brings your costs up to $527 / year, just for WooCommerce extensions.

In terms of WP Fusion, the Teams extension is supported, and you can apply tags in your CRM when new members are added to a team.

#With Paid Memberships Pro

If you sign up for a Plus license to Paid Memberships Pro, you automatically get access to the Group Accounts addon.

This addon works similarly to Teams for WooCommerce Memberships. You can specify that a membership level is a group level, and then when someone buys that membership they will be able to invite sub-accounts to the membership. You can specify a number of seats when configuring the membership, or allow users to purchase as many seats as they want at checkout.

Sub-account management is intuitive with Paid Memberships Pro, group admins can easily invite new members to the group, and remove existing users.

In terms of WP Fusion, the Group Accounts addon is supported, and you can apply tags in your CRM when new sub-accounts are added to an account by configuring them on the child membership level.

#Honorable mention

The only other plugin we’ve seen used successfully for group / umbrella accounts is the Restrict Content Pro Group Accounts addon.

It does work well, but Restrict Content Pro is less popular than WooCommerce and Paid Memberships Pro… and so it’s not something we encounter often.

WP Fusion also supports the Group Accounts addon and can apply tags in your CRM when new members are added to a group account.

#In summary

When building a membership site with WP Fusion, we’ve seen our customers have the most success with either using WooCommerce or Paid Memberships Pro for the ecommerce and membership layer, and (optionally) BuddyBoss or BuddyPress for social features.

(If you check out the plugin integration stats from our most recent Year in Review post, you’ll also see these plugins are also some of the most commonly used with WP Fusion. No surprises there.)

When choosing whether to use WooCommerce or a dedicated membership plugin like Paid Memberships Pro, the main points to consider are:

WooCommerce:

• Has the biggest ecosystem of extensions, and works with every theme. Infinitely customizable
• Can be more expensive over time since you need multiple extensions to run a membership site
• Is not optimized for memberships out of the box. Requires some additional setup / tweaking the signup flow

Paid Memberships Pro:

• Has a good number of extensions and works with some of the most popular membership themes (such as BuddyBoss)
• Contains more functionality in the free plan than any other membership plugin
• One annual price gets you access to all addons and extensions, which is usually more affordable than WooCommerce
• Is optimized for selling memberships out of the box, all in one plugin

Whatever plugins you choose, we hope you’ll consider using WP Fusion to deeply integrate your membership site with your marketing automation platform.

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