4 Popular WordPress Membership Plugins for Your Website

Quite often, you want to share files , tutorials and videos with your customers via a special restricted “Members Only” area on your WordPress site. There are loads of WordPress Membership plugins and selecting one that meets all your requirements with respect to ease of delivery, payment processor integration, support for coupons, subscriptions and so can be challenging.

Here’s a round up of some of the most popular WordPress Membership Plugins –

Membership

Membership is one of the most popular WordPress member registration plugins developed by WPMUDEV. This plugin seems to be loaded with capabilities that can transform your standard WordPress website into a fully functional Membership site. It is a simple plugin, that offers various options such as providing access to paid users to download content like videos, eBooks, posts, pages and much more. However, according to my analysis this plugin may lack some easy customization capabilities for those who are not knowledgeable in coding or website designing.

What’s hot about Membership?

• It costs $19.60 that Includes 350 premium plugins & themes, access to updates and new releases
• Allows you to create your own paid social network by controlling access to BuddyPress groups and BuddyPress blogs
• Provides unlimited membership as well as subscription levels
• Easy access controls for downloads, categories, pages, posts and much more
• Use of powerful API’s helps to add different gateways and rules
• Allow users to login securely using the Clef Wave
• Integrates with gateways such as Authorize.NET, 2Checkout, PayPal Express etc
• This plugin is well suited for advanced users who have little knowledge of coding

WPMUDEV has reduced the initial price of this plugin from $39.50 to $19.60 and also developed more documentation, keeping in mind the feedback that they have received from various critics and users. Suggesting that WPMUDEV not only proactively listens but also acts on user reviews.

WishList

WishList is another popular member login plugin that talks about transforming your site into a complete WordPress membership site. It is easy as well as intuitive to be used by all kinds of users including beginners. It offers good customer support along with great collection of video tutorials and support guides to aid the setup and installation process. However, there are a few characteristics which I found disappointing for e.g., The Wishlist plugin code is encrypted/obfuscated and is protected from any kind of modifications. This is highly disappointing as well as contradicting to the real essence of WordPress being an open source tool. Similarly, I have also noticed that WishList may not provide you its best performance, once your site reaches over 15000 members.

Some of the features offered by Wishlist Membership Plugin

• Wishlist costs $97 for single site licence and $297 for multi-site license
• It creates unlimited membership levels
• It offers customizable content security that can grant access to specific posts, pages, categories or comments
• Gives an ability to hide or restrict people from entering into members only areas
• Integrates well with Pay-Pal and ClickBank
• Provides one year of free updates and support
• It can easily take care of free, trial or Paid memberships subscriptions
• Comes along with 30 days trial offer

Although Wishlist offers several good set of benefits, it is also one of the most complex plugins that I have ever set up. Hence if you require a plain plugin that doesn’t bother you about its code being encrypted or you do not plan to have a huge membership site exceeding over 15k members, then it is for sure one of the descent plugin to start off.

S2 Member Pro

S2 Member Pro is another popular plugin, which according to me provides flexible and easier to use membership management solution for all WordPress sites. S2 Member Pro offers greater flexibility to customize its membership options, capabilities as well as user experience. It is also easily compatible with most WordPress themes and plugins like W3 Total Cache, W3 Super Cache as well as Quick Cache. S2 Member Pro does not come pre-integrated with payment options such as pay-pal or 2Checkout, but it is certainly quiet flexible to have it integrated and customized, without much efforts.

What’s hot about S2 Member Pro?

• It costs $69 for single-site licence and $129 for multi-site license
• Provides robust content access control
• Customizable file download protection by membership or other custom capability
• Allows seamless integration with Pay-Pal Pro, Pay-Pal Express Checkout
• Pre-Integrated with Affiliate options such as iDevAffiliate and Share a Sale
• S2 Member Pro is well compatible with BuddyPress and bbPress
• S2 Members Free version is required to be installed separately before installing S2 Member Pro

According to me this plugin is close to perfect, except for being a little higher on the price. However, as it provides a good professional membership Management Solution, I recommend it as one of the best and most trustworthy Plugins. However I would also suggest, if your membership site is not too huge currently, then you can continue to use the S2 Member Free version and upgrade to S2 Member Pro later, when your site becomes bigger.

Magic Members

I have found Magic Members to be a good membership WordPress plugin that is certainly flexible to fit the needs of the various WordPress websites. It can set up an unlimited number of membership levels and has a highly advanced member management system. Which I personally found better than most of the plugins. However there are certain disappointments that I faced with plugin such as, their support videos are of very poor quality and It has one of the slowest admin interface that I have ever used.

What’s hot in Magic Members?

• It costs $97 for one domain, $197 for three domains and $207 for unlimited domains
• It seamlessly integrates with Aweber and MailChimp for newsletters
• The download Manager, monitors and restricts file access according to member subscription
• It supports wide variety of payment processors such as PayPal Standard, PayPal Pro, 2CheckOut, CCBill, Authorize.net, ClickBank, WorldPay, MoneyBookers, iDeal, Epoch, AlertPay, Ogone, SagePay, eWay, PagSeguro and offline payment
• Offers course delivery for content dripping
• And an automated expiration process for the email reminders

Hence after a careful consideration of all the features present in various WordPress Membership Plugins. S2 Member Pro is my choice of Membership Plugin for all WordPress websites, as it comes along with brilliant set of features, along with reliability to perform best at all times. I would also like to know about your experiences, with WordPress Membership Plugins that you may have come across for Your WordPress Website.