MemberPress Review (2023): Is It Worth the Money?

Are you looking to create your own membership website? Our in-depth MemberPress review will help you decide whether or not this plugin is right for you.

MemberPress is the most popular WordPress plugin for creating a membership site. It does not have a free version like some other plugins. However, it provides everything you need to establish a fully functional membership site, including its own built-in course builder.

In this MemberPress review, we’ll explore its features and discuss what makes it one of the top WordPress membership plugins.

MemberPress Review: Best Features

To start our MemberPress review, let’s look at some of its essential features.

1. Built-In Course Builder

MemberPress is both a membership plugin and an LMS plugin. Its course addon includes a strong LMS tool that allows you to quickly 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 includes built-in integrations for four of 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 that 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 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.

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 allows you to 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 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.

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. Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs can be an excellent strategy to promote and help your membership site in reaching a large number of people. You can collaborate and work with your current members, bloggers, vloggers, creators, and others.

You can quickly develop and manage affiliate programs using the MemberPress plugin and other third-party integrations.

Check out: Best Affiliate Marketing WordPress plugin.

MemberPress Integrations and Add-ons

MemberPress works with thousands of third-party services and software programs. These integration partners include payment gateways, email marketing providers, affiliate software, podcasting programs, and more.

There are many more features we could include, but these are the most important ones for most course creators. They enable you to create a profitable and loyal membership site that can expand over time.

MemberPress Pricing: How Much Does MemberPress Cost?

As previously stated, MemberPress is a premium WordPress plugin. This means unlike other WordPress plugins, it does not have a free version. You will purchase it from its official website.

Having said that, MemberPress offers three different plans to choose from Basic, Plus, and Pro.

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

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 yearly licensing price at regular. 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 Alternatives

Without a doubt, MemberPress is a great, all-in-one membership plugin. However, it may not be best for all users and businesses. In such cases, you should consider other options. So let’s have a look at some MemberPress alternatives.

1. Paid Membership Pro

Paid Memberships Pro is a well-known WordPress membership plugin. It’s an all-in-one solution for restricting content and managing recurring payments for member subscriptions.

You can use this to create premium content sites, online courses, members-only products, subscription boxes, and so on. It enables you to add unlimited members for any membership level. You can also restrict the number of members on a single membership level.

The best aspect of this plugin is that it includes its own WordPress theme. This is a good touch because certain themes don’t work well with membership plugins.

Price

Paid Memberships Pro plans start from $247 a year for a single site license.

2. ARMember

ARMember is a popular free WordPress membership plugin with lots of features. This plugin has advanced membership modules as well as several integrations.

Its built-in drip content function allows you to schedule content releases for articles, pages, custom content, etc. Furthermore, you can drip immediately after a certain subscription time, a post published, or a specific date range.

It also has an integrated form builder that allows you to design custom forms or use pre-made templates. You can also build several plans for your customers, such as free plans, infinite paid plans, a fee per post, and so on.

Price

ARMember offers a free version that you can download from the WordPress.org plugin repository. However, Paid plan costs a $59 one-time payment for a single site license.

3. Restrict Content Pro

Another top membership plugin for WordPress is Restrict Content Pro. It allows you to create an all-powerful membership site and earn money by selling different membership levels.

Furthermore, it allows you to build an unlimited number of subscription packages, including free, trial, and premium subscriptions. It has a simple member administration interface where you can see all of your active, pending, expired, canceled, and free users.

Additionally, It allows you to send automatic emails to your members to keep them up to date. Plus, It also provides a selection of great addons for more functionality.

Price

Restrict Content Pro plans start from $99 a year for a single site license.

MemberPress Pros and Cons – MemberPress Review

Now, it’s time to look at some pros and cons of MemberPress in this MemberPress review.

Pros

• Convenient and friendly setup.
• Highly customizable membership levels.
• Allows users to make as many numbers of membership levels as required.
• Offers customizable content dripping and coupons.
• Excellent drip content option.
• User-friendly drag-and-drop course builder.
• Seamlessly integrates with third-party and other WordPress plugins.
• Comprehensive reporting.
• Offers multiple payment gateways.

Cons

• No lifetime purchase option.
• Doesn’t offer a free trial.
• The front-end design is somewhat outdated.
• Limited customization for registration and login forms.

Final Thought – Is MemberPress Worth It?

Overall, I believe that MemberPress is undoubtedly 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.

When it comes to features like pricing tables, the course builder, the Amazon S3 connectivity, and other features, MemberPress does more than just the bare minimum in some cases.

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

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

Click Here to Get Started With MemberPress Today!

Also, check out these helpful resources:

• Best Membership Plugins for WordPress
• Best WordPress LMS Plugins for Online Courses (Free & Paid)

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