MemberPress Review (2024): Is It the Best Membership Plugin?

Are you thinking of using MemberPress for your membership website?

MemberPress is a popular plugin that comes with plenty of features and support for a number of add-ons.

However, is it right for your membership business?

In this MemberPress review, we’ll give you a comprehensive breakdown of this plugin and cover:

• What to Look for in a Membership Plugin
• MemberPress Plugin Overview
• Key Feature of MemberPress WordPress Plugin
• MemberPress Pricing
• Pros and Cons of MemberPress Plugin
• Final Thought and Recommendations

By the end, you should have a good idea of whether MemberPress is right for you.

What to Look for in a WordPress Membership Plugin

• Content Dripping: Can you control when members see content?
• Membership Levels: Can you create different tiers with varying access?
• Payment Gateways: Does it integrate with your preferred payment processors?
• Content Protection: Can you restrict access to specific pages, posts, or categories?
• Ease of Use: Is the plugin user-friendly for both you and your members?
• Scalability: Can the plugin handle your membership growth as your business expands?
• Email Integration: Does it work with popular email marketing services?
• Discount and Coupon: Can you create discount and coupon codes for your existing and new members?
• Support: Does the plugin offer reliable customer support when you need it?

Considering these factors, let’s see if MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin or not.

MemberPress Overview

MemberPress is one of the best membership plugins for WordPress available.

It does well at managing essential tasks like content protection, access control, and subscription management.

With MemberPress, managing your content access is a breeze. In just a few clicks, you can create rules to control who sees what and when, giving you full control over your site’s content.

Whether you prefer partial protection, a paywall, or members-only access, the plugin is designed to adapt to your specific needs. It’s as easy as a few clicks to set up, giving you the flexibility you want.

Even more, it gives members complete control over where they may go, what they can view, and when.

It also offers a built-in email notifications functionality to send automatic emails. These are useful for essential tasks such as subscription renewals, credit card expiry, or cart abandonment.

What sets out MemberPress is its adaptability.

Its built-in features are enough if you need a basic membership management solution. However, if you want more advanced features, the plugin also offers tons of add-ons and integrations to help you with that.

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MemberPress Review: What People Say About It

MemberPress, which has been in business for over a decade, is one of the most trusted firms in this field.

Let’s see what real users have to say about it.

Here are a couple of reviews from popular review sites:

MemberPress Reviews on G2

It also gets 4.6 out of 5 stars from 250+ reviews.

MemberPress Reviews on GetApp

It gets 4.8 out of 5 stars from 260+ reviews.

MemberPress Reviews on Trustpilot

It gets 4.6 out of 5 stars from 275+ reviews.

That’s how users love MemberPress and use this plugin to create a membership site.

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MemberPress Review: A Key Features to Look

Here are some key features of the MemberPress plugin:

1. Built-In Course Builder

MemberPress is both a membership plugin and an LMS plugin. MemberPress Courses add-on offers a strong LMS tool that lets you easily create online courses.

With this, you can design your curriculum, organize your courses, and make quizzes using a simple drag-and-drop customizer. From there, you can easily add, update, rearrange, and sell courses on WordPress with a few clicks.

Additionally, it has a built-in progress monitoring tool that allows students to track their progress in each lesson they have started.

2. Powerful Access Rules

Another notable feature of MemberPress is its powerful access rules. This allows you total control over the content users can access based on their membership type.

You can restrict access to any content on your WordPress installation, including pages, child pages, posts, categories, etc. Similarly, if you don’t want to allow your members access to your content forever, you can do so.

You can use the MemberPress Expiration feature, which allows you to set the specific date on which content for each user expires.

3. Page Builder Integrations – MemberPress Review

If you’re creating your site with a page builder plugin, you’ll be glad to hear that MemberPress integrates with the most popular page builders:

• Elementor (our review)
• Divi (our review)
• Beaver Builder (our review)
• WPBakery Page Builder

With these integrations, you’ll be able to partially restrict content in your page builder designs.

For example, with Elementor, you’ll get a new MemberPress tab in any Elementor section. It allows you to restrict everything inside that area by connecting it to one of your MemberPress restriction rules:

4. Customizable Coupons

As a course creator, you are already aware of the type of marketing effort required to grow your courses.

Promotions and giveaways are important, and you can use MemberPress to create unique coupons to power this.

You can build as many MemberPress coupons as you want and manage them when they expire. This not only saves you time, but it can also save you money because you won’t have to use any additional third-party promotional apps.

5. Dynamic Pricing Pages

MemberPress allows you to design dynamic, appealing pricing pages for selling your membership products. It includes many default templates that allow you to quickly create a high-converting pricing page.

Without a doubt, it’s quite adaptable and allows you to simply adjust any component exactly how you want it. For advanced users, you can use CSS styles or create page templates in your WordPress theme.

6. Premium Community Forums

MemberPress is compatible with forum plugins like bbPress, BuddyBoss, and others. This allows you to add message boards and discussion forums to your site. This helps you in building engagement and connections among users, not just with your brand. This type of peer-to-peer connection is essential for building a sustainable community.

MemberPress, like everything else on your site, may limit access to your forums depending on membership level. This allows you to make some forums available to the public while keeping others private.

7. Built-in AWS Integration for Safe File Storage/Delivery

If your membership site includes video or audio content, you’ll need a mechanism to securely store and deliver those files. You can use third-party video hosting services like Wistia, although some users prefer to host the files themselves.

Unfortunately, it’s not a good idea to self-host files on the server for your WordPress website, which is why MemberPress’ interface with Amazon S3 is so helpful.

With the integration, you may use your files from Amazon S3 while still limiting who can access them on your website. You can, for example, prevent files from being downloaded and create expiring links.

8. Integration of Blubrry PowerPress for Podcast Member Sites

This is a more specialized feature, but if you’re building a membership website for your podcast, you’ll like MemeberPress’s compatibility with the well-liked Blubrry PowerPress podcasting plugin.

Essentially, this integration allows you to create private podcasts and/or episodes that are only available to certain membership levels.

Here are some of the best podcast WordPress themes to start your podcast website.

9. Automatic Email Reminders

For a membership site, members are always important. You cannot actually lose any member or subscription for any reason. If a user’s membership expires, renews, or fails to sign up, you can send a reminder email to get them back to your site.

MemberPress lets you effortlessly automate reminder emails with custom or default messages. This is a highly useful feature because it allows you to gain and maintain more members.

10. Content Dripping and Expiration – MemberPress Review

Another interesting feature of MemberPress is content dripping and expiration.

Content dripping refers to giving access to protected content after a certain time. As a result, users should return to your site to get access to specific restricted content. With this feature, you may expect more returning visitors and recurring revenue.

Similarly, the MemberPress plugin lets you specify an expiration date for protected content access.

11. Comprehensive Reporting

It is impossible to build a successful anything unless you track and analyze its progress.

Creating a membership site is no different. With the MemberPress plugin, you can generate and run comprehensive reports to track revenue, subscriber numbers, engagement, etc. This helps you to ensure your members get the best service possible.

12. Supports Popular Payment Gateways

Selling memberships is a common method of making money blogging. With that in mind, MemberPress offers a number of payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.Net.

People are more likely to make a purchase when they can use their preferred payment method. MemberPress allows you to add numerous payment ways to your site, which will help you gain as many members as possible.

13. Create a Content Paywall

Paywalls usually ask readers to buy a subscription to see the restricted content, making them a great way to generate passive income.

However, not all paywalls ask for a subscription. Certain paywalls ask users to sign up for a free account to read content. As a result, it helps build an email list.

To create a paywall, show a post excerpt when non-members try to access your protected content.

If you decide to implement a paywall, you may want non-members to read a certain number of posts for free.

To do this, enable the paywall checkbox in the MemberPress settings and choose how many pages visitors can read without a subscription.

14. Integrations and Add-ons

MemberPress integrates with many email marketing services you may already use on your website. This allows you to easily stay in touch with your members and sell products and services they may be interested in buying.

If you want to set up a referral program for your membership site, MemberPress also works with various affiliate marketing plugins.

Do you run an online store? Then, MemberPress is completely integrated with WooCommerce. This means you may restrict access to particular WooCommerce products, products with specified categories and tags, and more.

This allows you to provide VIP WooCommerce products, unique discounts, and early access to registered members.

You may even make your shop completely private and charge a fee for access to your members-only WooCommerce store.

MemberPress Pricing: How Much Does MemberPress Cost?

MemberPress is a premium plugin, and unlike some of the free WordPress plugins, it does not offer a free version. However, all of the plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

It offers four different pricing plans, and each plan comes with a different set of features/add-ons, as well as different limits on the number of sites that you can use the plugin on.

Which MemberPress package should you choose? Well, you can get a thorough feature comparison at this link, but in general, we believe that the lowest Basic plan should be enough for most sites.

Here are the main reasons to consider higher plans:

• Need to run memberships on more than one website.
• Need functionalities like podcast memberships, forum/community integrations, advanced marketing integrations, and developer tools.
• If you want to use Authorize.net payments.
• Offer features like gift memberships, corporate accounts, and order bumps at checkout.
• Need faster and more dedicated support options.

Unless you need one of those requirements, you should be good with the Basic license.

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MemberPress First Year vs Renewal Prices

It is important to remember that the pricing listed above are introductory rates that only apply to your first year. If you wish to continue receiving support and updates after the first year, you’ll have to pay the regular price, which is significantly higher.

Just keep this in mind while you plan your budget.

No Lifetime Usage

Another key price point to remember is that you must have an active license to continue using MemberPress.

If your license expires, your frontend membership content will continue to work normally. However, MemberPress will disable your access to the MemberPress dashboard.

Basically, if you want to use MemberPress, you must be prepared to pay the regular yearly licensing price. As a result, it’s critical to consider this while making decisions.

MemeberPress Support

MemberPress offers support to both customers and non-customers. Users can submit a ticket to the tech team or send them an email if they do not have a MemberPress subscription.

Of course, both have access to the knowledge base. Although the layout is a little confusing, the articles are most useful. In addition, you can hire a professional developer for more assistance.

The service provided by the customer support team is good. Their responses could be a little more detailed, but they are quick and informative.

They have standard business hours, during which you will get a prompt response.

MemberPress Review: The Pros

• Easy to use and set up.
• Sell unlimited membership levels and subscriptions.
• Create exclusive, members-only content.
• Paywall and content dripping.
• Powerful access rules.
• Integration with various email marketing services and other tools.
• Highly customizable coupons.
• Comprehensive reporting.

MemberPress Review: The Cons

• Don’t offer a free version to test out.
• No lifetime purchase option.
• Essential features like forums and order bumps are only available with more expensive plans.
• Popular payment gateways Authorize.net are only available in higher plans.

Final Thoughts on MemberPress

Overall, we think that MemberPress is, without a doubt, one of the best WordPress membership plugins.

It nailed the core features that you need in a membership plugin when it comes to creating subscription levels, restricting content, and so on.

It also provides a pleasant frontend experience for your members, allowing them to simply manage their own memberships.

Aside from core features, MemberPress also goes above and beyond when it comes to features such as pricing tables, the course builder, the Amazon S3 integration, and so on.

Furthermore, you can easily integrate MemberPress with most third-party tools.

At full price, its pricing places it near the top of the market. But, for a serious membership site, we don’t think a hundred dollars on a yearly license cost should actually influence your decision that much.

Yes, saving money is always great, but spending a little extra to have the perfect functionality is a logical investment for a serious membership site.

Furthermore, we believe that most sites will be fine with the Basic license, which is still reasonably priced.

Overall, we think MemberPress is an excellent choice for your membership site.

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For more, check out these other helpful resources:

• 10 Best Membership Plugins for WordPress
• 7 Best WordPress LMS Plugins for Online Courses (Free & Paid)
• 10 Best WordPress Paywall Plugins for Content Monetization

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