Evaluating 6 membership plugins for an author subscription with WordPress
I’ve been interested in using my website to host my membership, so I’ve assessed several options based on the criteria that are important to me.
My goal is to create a subscription membership with multiple tiers. My stories will be uploaded as posts in WordPress, organized into categories by story.
Summary Table
| Feature | Paid Memberships Pro (Deep Dive) | ARMember (Deep Dive) | Paid Member Subscriptions | s2 Member | Ultimate Member | WP-Member |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free; Paid is $247/yr (access to more addons) | Free; Lifetime $69-79 (more payment processors & addons) | Free; Paid $99/yr | $89 Lifetime (1 site) | Free (paid only opens up addons) | Free |
| Number of allowed tiers | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | 1 free and 4 paid | 1 (Member or non-member only) | 1 (Member or non-member only) |
| Payment processor options | Stripe, Paypal Express, Paypal Pro, Paypal Standard, Authorize.net, or Braintree | Paypal (paid version: WooCommerce, Stripe, Square, Authorize.net, etc) | Paypal Standard/Stripe | Paypal only (Pro Version: Stripe, Authorize.net, ClickBank) | None | None |
| Control access to individual pages/posts? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Control access to post categories? | Yes | Yes (currently not working for me) | No (only in paid version) | Yes | Yes | No (Global only) |
| WooCommerce integration | Yes (limit products to members; no checkout integration) | No (Yes, paid version, including Woo checkout!) | Yes (custom pricing for members; no checkout integration) | No | No | No |
| Speed of website | Saw some impact on backend load times | Not impacted | Not impacted | Not impacted | Not impacted | No impact |
| Notify users upon new post? | No (Can use mailOptin integration) | No | No | No | Unknown | No |
| Coupon codes | No | No (Yes, paid version) | Yes | No (Yes, paid version) | N/A | N/A |
Notes about individual plugins
Paid Memberships Pro
Read my deep dive here.
Limitations/Issues:
- Cannot use WooCommerce or Square as payment processor
- Saw some impact on the load times of backend. No frontend limitations.
- Yearly fee is prohibitive (though free version has plenty of features)
Benefits:
- Intuitive UI
- Lots of features on free plan
- Fully independent user experience (not using same WP login and stuff)
- Good selection of addons (free + paid)
ARMember
Read my deep dive here.
Limitations/Issues:
- The content access control page claimed to save but when you refreshed, the settings hadn’t saved. Since there’s no way to control access to categories from the category edit screen, I couldn’t set this up.
- When trying to set up test accounts, I kept getting errors because I hadn’t properly set up a payment method, even when trying to sign up with a free account.
- Payment method seems to be required even for free accounts.
Benefits:
- Beautiful UI
- Paid version is really inexpensive and lifetime (not yearly)
- Nice selection of addons
- The paid version allows you to integrate WooCommerce, including checkout with WooCommerce!
Paid Member Subscriptions
Limitations/Issues:
- Cannot control access to entire categories of posts with free version
- Yearly fee is prohibitive
Benefits:
- Did not meet my minimum standards, so did not assess benefits. Sorry XD
s2 Member
Limitations/Issues:
- Cannot use WooCommerce or Square as payment processor
- Content restriction requires you to enter post or category IDs.
- Added s2member branding to login page
- Must use their ugly payment buttons (if you get the pro version, you can use pro-forms, which allows you to do the entire checkout process on your site)
- UI is pretty clunky and unwieldy
- When user doesn’t have access to content, it redirects them to the membership page (or whatever page you configure, I think). You can’t change this behavior.
Benefits:
- The level of options available is pretty good, if you’re willing to dig through the configuration pages
Ultimate Member
Limitations/Issues:
- No options for tiers.
WP-Member
Limitations/Issues:
- No options for tiers.
Missing Features
There are features that are missing from all of these options, outlined below. Read more about how I’m handling these features in this article.
- Inline Comments
- Flexible Reading Experience
- Disabling Select Text
- Navigating Between Chapters
- Notifying Users of New Posts
- Tracking Reading Progress & Bookmarks
- Glossary
Wrap Up
I know the information above might not hit all of your wishlist items. But I think it’s a great starting point. This effort brought up several options I’d never heard of before, so I’m really glad I did it.
Which one will I choose? I’m torn between Paid Memberships Pro and ARMember.
Right now, ARMember is meeting all of my needs, although I am receiving a non-critical error. I also have identified a bug/conflict between ARMember and Docket Cache, so I have to disable Docket Cache when I want to change Content Access Rules. However, it fits all of my needs and has a price I can handle right now. It could pay for itself with 14 $5 member payments. That means, with my current membership, I could easily start profiting within a year.
If you’d like to read my deep dive into ARMember free, check out this article.
PMP free is already meeting all of my needs with no bugs (I did have one bug early on, but it was a conflict with another plugin that I was able to work with developers to resolve), but if I need to expand to the paid features, the cost of entry is sizeable. I would need to process 60 $5 member (which means 5 paid subscribers) payments EVERY YEAR before I’d even start to profit. Additionally, I have noticed that my backend pages seem to load more slowly since I’ve installed this, which is a bit worrisome.
If you’d like to read my deep dive into PMP free, check out this article.
Tough choices. Only time will tell.