4 Best WordPress Membership Plugins Compared

Best WordPress membership plugins on your mind?

Besides making it incredibly easy to build and maintain websites, WordPress opens up a whole new world of recurring-revenue opportunities for creators, coaches, organizations, and businesses that want to gate premium content.

There are now dozens of WordPress membership plugins available, giving site owners true choice. But what are the best WordPress membership plugins in 2025? Which of the best WordPress membership plugins should power your member portal from day one?

The best WordPress membership plugins in ranked order are:

1. Paid Memberships Pro
2. MemberPress
3. WooCommerce Memberships
4. Ultimate Member

This article explains why these four membership plugins stand above the rest, highlights their key differences, and shows you how to pick the *best membership plugin for WordPress, for you.

What To Look For in a Membership Plugin

WordPress powers 43.4% of all websites in 2025. This steady growth proves WordPress’ staying power. Its open-source DNA, vast plugin options, and creator-friendly ecosystem make WordPress the obvious platform for launching recurring-revenue membership businesses.

While that popularity gives you choice, it also creates noise: dozens of membership plugins vary wildly in quality, pricing, and long-term support. 

The goal isn’t to find “the most features for the lowest price,” but the right mix of usability, performance, and flexibility you’ll still love when your member count grows.

Below are the five core areas that separate the best WordPress membership plugins from the rest, ranked in order of importance:

Balancing Ease Of Use and Functionality

Your membership plugin should install in minutes and guide you through creating levels, checkout, and restricted content, without forcing you into a proprietary page builder.

A simple UI keeps you shipping content instead of wrestling with settings.

Performance

Logged-in pages can’t rely on full-page caching the way brochure sites can.

Look for clean database architecture, selective asset loading, and proven compatibility with popular hosts/CDNs so your checkout and member dashboard stay under 2 seconds, even under load.

Flexibility & Developer Experience

Growth brings surprises: new CRMs, custom dashboards, headless front-ends. A well-architected membership plugin exposes hooks, filters, and REST/GraphQL endpoints while following WordPress coding standards.

The best WordPress membership plugins earn bonus points for public GitHub repos and active Slack communities.

Price

Ignore the sticker price and calculate everything you’ll need for day-to-day operations, including: recurring billing, email marketing, and advanced reporting.

Some plugins bundle these, others charge per add-on. Forecast one-year and three-year costs before you commit. And don’t make the mistake of undervaluing WordPress membership plugins if they have a free plan.

Company History

You’re not just buying code. You’re partnering with the humans behind the membership software.

Favor teams that:

• Still have founder involvement
• Ship regular releases
• Offer transparent development plans, and
• Deliver support via multiple channels

A vibrant user community (social media, webinars, livestreams, etc.) is insurance for the long haul.

The Best WordPress Membership Plugins Listed in Order

With these five key priorities in mind, let’s now take a look at the best WordPress membership plugins available in 2025 to see how they compare, how well they meet the priorities you will have, and how to make the right choice for both you and your members.

1. Paid Memberships Pro

Paid Memberships Pro is known as a top choice among the best WordPress membership plugins. It’s been around for over a decade and is the backbone of over 90,000 membership websites online.

Ease of Use

We could explain how Paid Memberships Pro (PMPro) walks you through setup in five minutes, but it’s more convincing to share what site owners say after building real-world membership sites.

One of the first hurdles with any membership tool is creating levels and gating content. “Paid Memberships Pro lets you create unlimited membership levels and even offers ready-made templates so you can get up and running fast,” notes the editorial team at WPBeginner, who routinely test dozens of plugins for their tutorials. If you’ve wrestled with clunky membership level builders before, their praise should be reassuring.

Tom Rankin at WPKube highlights the next piece of the puzzle, day-to-day management, writing that “the usability is excellent, and the documentation is comprehensive.” For creators who’d rather spend time crafting content than decoding settings, Paid Memberships Pro’s clear documentation and an intuitive dashboard make all the difference.

Long-term reliability matters, too. Edvard, who has run PMPro on a production site for half a decade, reports on WordPress.org that it is, “brilliantly coded and very easy to manage. PMPro has worked like a Swiss clock for five years.” That kind of consistency means you can focus on growing revenue instead of chasing membership software bugs.

Of course, even the best interfaces can’t anticipate every situation, which is where support comes in. A G2 PMPro reviewer, Lauren B., sums up the PMPro experience: “It’s able to manage and organize my subscriptions. When issues crop up, their knowledgeable support team jumps in quickly. And the product works well!” Knowing expert help is only a ticket away removes the last barrier to pressing “launch.”

Between its five-minute setup wizard, block-editor-native workflow, and responsive support crew, PMPro makes building a polished paywall feel more like ticking off a checklist than tackling a complicated software project, freeing you to pour energy into welcoming your first members.

Performance

Membership sites place heavier loads on WordPress than blogs or brochure sites with logged-in page views, protected content, and recurring checkout flows that can expose inefficiencies fast. A sluggish dashboard frustrates paying members and kills renewals, so long-term speed and stability matter as much as launch day polish.

That’s where Paid Memberships Pro shines. As the PMPro engineering team notes, “Paid Memberships Pro scales to what you need, even at high-traffic volumes.” Edvard, who has run the plugin on a busy community site for five years, backs that up, saying PMPro, “Works like a Swiss clock, rock-solid for years.” Another veteran user, Tony Pearl, reported, “Not only does it work perfectly, but the updates and upgrades are all top-notch.”

Under the hood, PMPro:

• Keeps its core code under 1 MB zipped
• Loads assets only on pages that need them, and
• Plays nicely with full page caching and CDNs.

The result is an under 2 second first time page load, even with thousands of members hitting the dashboard simultaneously. Paid Memberships Pro also offers checkout flows that stay snappy during traffic spikes.

For developers, that efficiency translates into fewer database queries to tune and less server horsepower to buy. For membership site owners, this means happier members, higher renewal rates, and confidence that the platform won’t buckle just when growth takes off.

Flexibility & Developer Experience

Whether you’re a non-coder who wants a few strategic tweaks or a developer building a headless React front-end, Paid Memberships Pro gives you room to maneuver.

Chris Lema, who has audited most of the big name plugins, calls PMPro “the membership solution I reach for when a client’s roadmap is still evolving. Its hooks and filters cover almost every edge case.” Open source under the GPL, the plugin lives on GitHub with regular commits, so you’re never hacking obfuscated code. Jessica Kavalec-Miller at WP Fusion echoes that sentiment, noting that “PMPro’s action/filter system is clean and predictable; extending checkout or member dashboards takes minutes, not hours.”

Even power users with no desire to write PHP appreciate the modular design. Should you decide to go bespoke later, the REST API exposes membership levels, orders, and user meta out of the box, making Paid Memberships Pro customizable and extendable for developers.

For agencies, PMPro’s licenses allow for multiple client sites, and the team actively merges community pull requests. As G2 reviewer Michael W. puts it, “I’ve never hit a wall. If something’s missing, there’s either an add-on or a well-documented filter waiting for me.” That combination of transparent code, thriving extension marketplace, and responsive maintainers means you’re free to build your membership platform your way today, and still push boundaries tomorrow.

Price

For budget-minded creators, Paid Memberships Pro is hard to beat because the core plugin is completely free. You can gate content, create unlimited membership levels, and accept payments without spending a cent. “The free version alone does more than some premium plugins,” notes the editorial team at WPBeginner. The review further highlights how generous the base offering feels.

When you’re ready for advanced features, think automated tax calculations, group memberships, affiliate tracking, or priority support, Paid Memberships Pro’s paid tiers remain straightforward and affordable. The popular Standard plan starts at $174 and covers 1 sites, 32 add-ons, and one-on-one helpdesk support. For agencies and large networks, the Plus plan at $299 per year, 2 site license, 45 more premium Add Ons, and priority helpdesk support.

Reviewers appreciate that transparency. Tom Rankin of WPKube calls PMPro’s model “refreshingly clear with no surprise upsells.” Many PMPro users run thriving 5-figure subscription businesses for years, and the only software cost is the annual license, which is predictable and easy to budget.

The bottom line: consider starting with the free Paid Memberships Pro plan. Then, scale to a premium plan when your revenue justifies the upgrade. You’ll know exactly what you’ll spend each year.

Paid Memberships Pro’s core mission is to help creators get paid online. No matter which PMPro plan you choose, you will quickly discover how committed Paid Memberships Pro is to helping you get paid.

Company History

Paid Memberships Pro was launched in 2011 by husband and wife team Jason Coleman and Kim Coleman in the United States. Fourteen years later:

• Both founders still steer the product’s roadmap and actively answer questions from their users.
• The stewardship of PMPro hasn’t been handed off to investors.
• The company’s singular mission has always been clear: build the most flexible, open-source membership platform for WordPress to help membership entrepreneurs get paid.

From day one, the Colemans treated fast, human support as a feature, not an afterthought. Every license tier includes support, and the public Slack community sees the core developers chatting with users daily. That focus on service has earned PMPro a reputation for “support that feels like an extension of our own team.”

As one of the earliest dedicated membership plugins, PMPro helped define how WordPress handles recurring revenue and protected content. Paid Memberships Pro founder Jason Coleman was actually the first person in the World to create an ecommerce transaction on a WordPress website in 2011.

Today the Paid Memberships Pro project boasts 90,000+ active installs, regular GitHub commits, and a thriving add-on ecosystem. They have done all this while keeping the core plugin free.

Continuous iteration, transparent leadership, and a community-driven development model ensure Paid Memberships Pro remains the benchmark for modern membership sites built on WordPress.

2. MemberPress

MemberPress was one of the original WordPress membership plugins from the early days like Paid Memberships Pro. The plugin is part of the Awesome Motive collection of WordPress software products.

Ease of Use

We could lay out every step of the MemberPress setup wizard, but it’s more telling to hear how real site owners describe the experience. “MemberPress is hands down one of the easiest plugins I’ve ever purchased. Install, walk through the onboarding and bam, it’s ready,” writes Patricia A. in her G2 review.

Colin Newcomer calls MemberPress “one of the top WordPress membership plugins. It nails the core features you need.” Developer Jon Brown of 9Seeds agrees. He praises the clean code and noting that his agency hands finished membership sites to clients, “confident they can manage things themselves.” Early impressions, then, are undeniably smooth.

Dig a little deeper, and the picture becomes more mixed.

• A Reddit thread shows mixed reviews.
• More concerning, reviewer ddas ran into a session handling quirk: “User Switching shows members-only content to the wrong role. Something weird is happening with MemberPress cookies.”

Taken together, MemberPress earns high marks for its guided onboarding and intuitive dashboard. But a noticeable slice of users report friction once real traffic, advanced reporting, or complex login scenarios enter the mix. For small, straightforward membership sites, that may be a non-issue. For those planning to scale, the learning curve can reappear when you expect the platform to disappear into the background.

Performance

A membership site lives or dies by how quickly it serves protected content to logged-in users. On lighter traffic, MemberPress generally feels snappy. “Solid solution with fast performance even on inexpensive shared hosting,” reports Scott A. on G2. Those early wins reflect a lean plugin that avoids unnecessary frontend scripts.

More serious pain points appear in edge cases. Documentation flags a “major plugin conflict: Stripe checkout fails if another plugin enqueues its own version of jQuery.” Plus, Craig in the GeneratePress forum describes “custom headers are disappearing on course pages whenever MemberPress is active.” These issues don’t affect every install, but they illustrate the extra tuning large or complex sites may require.

In short, MemberPress starts strong on modest traffic and straightforward setups. But MemberPress falls short for sites with thousands of concurrent members, or heavy stacks of additional plugins or a third party themes. These sites must budget time for performance audits and possible workarounds.

Flexibility & Developer Experience

MemberPress markets itself as “developer-friendly,” and for straightforward use cases. Colin Newcomer at WPKube lauds the Rules engine: “The conditional logic is powerful. Content dripping is more granular than most.” Those strengths make life easy when a site’s roadmap stays within the guardrails MemberPress already provides.

Push beyond the basics, and challenges start to show.

• There’s no public repo, so submitting pull requests or tracking issues is awkward. Hooks and filters exist, but not everywhere you might expect.
• Third-party add-ons partly fill the MemberPress gaps, yet they introduce version coordination headaches.
• For sites that rely on a constellation of third-party plugins, every update cycle becomes a mini QA sprint.

In sum, MemberPress offers enough flexibility for most turnkey membership sites, but developers who thrive on open repositories, exhaustive hooks, or headless builds may feel boxed in. MemberPress is a solid choice if you stay inside the lines, but it is less fun if your project colors outside them.

Price

MemberPress skips the freemium model entirely and jumps straight to paid licenses, a decision that divides reviewers. On the upside, Aaron Brooks argues that “MemberPress justifies its price tag with some big-ticket features like built-in courses and coupon rules.” A 14-day money-back guarantee, as the MemberPress FAQ reminds potential buyers, softens the initial leap of faith.

Colin Newcomer notes that “MemberPress doesn’t have a free version like some other plugins, which may put off hobby sites.” For agencies looking to use the membership software on multiple websites, Aaron Brooks finds it “more expensive than the other membership plugins if you need multiple installs.” All MemberPress plans come with one site activation (license key) as standard. That means regardless of which MemberPress pricing plan you choose, you will never get the benefit of using the membership plugin software on multiple websites.

Sticker shock grows sharper in user forums. u/PluginCritic on Reddit complains that “MemberPress will cease to work the second you let your licence lapse. Hard pass for me.”

MemberPress updated its renewal policy and software in 2022 to block access to all admin screens once a user’s license expires, leaving only front-end functions working.

This product decision has drawn sharp criticism from the WordPress community for effectively holding site owners’ membership management hostage to ongoing payments. According to Sarah Gooding, “Cutting off access to the plugin’s admin screens leaves users without the ability to manage the membership functions of their sites if their subscriptions lapse. This prevents users from doing things like issuing customer refunds, adding new members, managing memberships and site activations, among other actions.”

In short, MemberPress can feel like a solid value if you leverage its bundled course builder and plan to recoup the outlay quickly. For sites on tighter budgets, the lack of a free tier and the hard stop on expired licences make the math harder to swallow.

Company History

MemberPress was released in 2013 by developer Blair Williams under his U.S. company, Caseproof. Blair, already known for his Pretty Links plugin, wanted a native WordPress paywall that site owners could control outright. More than a decade later, he still serves as CEO and chief product architect, a point the plugin highlighted while celebrating its 10-year anniversary and $1 billion in creator revenue in September 2024.

Caseproof has expanded its footprint through strategic deals: in January 2023 it acquired the MemberMouse plugin, positioning the two products to serve distinct market segments while sharing engineering resources. The acquisition also formalized Caseproof’s participation in the Awesome Motive Growth Accelerator, giving MemberPress access to Syed Balkhi‘s marketing playbooks and business playbooks.

That partnership accelerated feature releases but also drew mixed reactions in the WordPress community. Commentators at The WP Minute and other outlets argue that Awesome Motive’s aggressive cross-promotions can feel heavy-handed, a cultural shift long-time WordPress independents watch warily.

Even with the bigger marketing machine behind it, MemberPress remains Caseproof’s flagship product and primary focus. After a decade of continuous development, founder-level leadership, and new corporate backing give MemberPress solid longevity credentials. The trade-off is a faster-growing, more commercial ecosystem that some open source purists find less congenial than in the plugin’s early days.

3. WooCommerce Memberships

WooCommerce Memberships is the top-featured membership solution on Automattic’s website for WooCommerce. SkyVerge and its WooCommerce Memberships plugin sold to GoDaddy in 2020.

Ease of Use

We often hear that WooCommerce Memberships feels “obvious” to merchants who already live inside WooCommerce. Those early adopters appreciate that rules, coupons, and email templates sit in familiar WooCommerce metaboxes rather than a separate dashboard.

But WooCommerce familiarity has limits:

• If you know WooCommerce, it’s straightforward, just be prepared for a lot of boxes to tick.
• The extension inherits Woo’s sprawling settings pages, so first-time users often spend an afternoon hunting for the right tab or checkbox.

Complexity jumps again if you need recurring billing, because Memberships relies on the separate WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. You will need to pay an additional $279 per year for WooCommerce Subscriptions, and keep in mind that coordinating updates between the two extensions can cause friction.

In short, WooCommerce Memberships could be a good fit when you’re already fluent in WooCommerce’s ecosystem and your usecase is simple with single-pay products, member discounts, and VIP content. For newcomers or anyone layering in subscriptions, coupons, and complex access logic, the learning curve might grow quickly. You might be turning what starts as a familiar workflow into a multi-plugin shopping spree and juggling act.

Performance

On modest stores, WooCommerce Memberships can feel lightweight. A developer on StackOverflow who runs the WooCommerce Memberships extension for over 70,000 members reports, “95% of the time it copes very well, with 10,000 daily visits and response times under one second.” That reassuring benchmark shows the plugin can scale, provided the environment is tuned and traffic patterns remain predictable.

Reality gets bumpier once uncached, logged-in traffic rises or additional extensions pile on. One site owner, antoinemg, using WooCommerce Memberships with bbPress measured, “around 20 seconds to load a page from the Dashboard whenever Memberships and bbPress are both active.” Even core Woo engineers have flagged slow queries in the settings screens: GitHub issue #54445 lists Memberships among extensions triggering orders_pending_sync bottlenecks for busy shops.

In terms of performance, WooCommerce Memberships can deliver sub-second page loads on well-provisioned hosts, but performance is highly contingent on caching strategy, query tuning, and the number of companion plugins. Stores expecting sharp traffic peaks or heavyweight add-ons should plan for periodic database optimizations and keep an eye on the changelog for performance patches.

Flexibility & Developer Experience

WooCommerce Memberships wins immediate praise from developers who already breathe WooCommerce. The SkyVerge dev docs point to hundreds of hooks. The sky’s the limit for custom logic. The official Woo Dev Blog likewise touts REST-API endpoints that expose memberships, making it easy to feed data to mobile apps or a headless frontend.

That versatility, however, comes with extra homework. On Stack Overflow, a developer struggled with WooCommerce Memberships’ filters, saying, “I’m trying to register a function to a WooCommerce Memberships filter hook, but I’m not getting any results.”

WooCommerce Memberships offers near limitless extensibility if you’re comfortable navigating through hooks, REST endpoints, and unofficial snippets.

• For shops that already employ WooCommerce developers, that trade-off can be acceptable.
• For teams seeking straightforward, well-documented APIs, the WooCommerce Memberships plugin’s power often feels offset by the extra lift required to wield it.

Price

WooCommerce Memberships follows the à-la-carte pricing model common to the WooCommerce ecosystem. The base extension costs $199 per year for a single site, a figure WP Mayor calls “cheaper than SaaS platforms charging monthly plus revenue-share.” SkyVerge’s own dev blog adds that you pay no transaction fees. You only pay your gateway costs, and WooCommerce’s 30-day refund window means, as the marketing copy puts it, “zero-risk to try it.”

Once you move beyond a simple pay once model, the math shifts. You’ll pay $199/yr for WooCommerce Memberships plus $279/yr for WooCommerce Subscriptions. This is an expensive combo just to bill monthly.

For stores that already rely on WooCommerce (and plan to recoup costs quickly), the single payment for Memberships may feel reasonable, especially compared with hosted membership platforms. But once you add WooCommerce Subscriptions, tax extensions, or multiple site licences, the annual spend can climb north of $500 before you process a single transaction. In other words, WooCommerce Memberships starts with an attractive sticker price, yet the full build often lands in the same price bracket as all-in-one competitors, minus the convenience of a full solution bundled package.

Company History

WooCommerce itself began life in 2011 as an e-commerce add-on from the former WooThemes team and was acquired by Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) in 2015. Two years later, WooCommerce extension shop SkyVerge, led by Becka Rice and Max Rice released WooCommerce Memberships to give store owners a native way to gate content, offer VIP discounts, and bundle digital products inside the Woo ecosystem.

In 2020 SkyVerge was acquired by GoDaddy, but the original engineering crew continues to steward WooCommerce Memberships at GoDaddy.

With more than a decade of WooCommerce momentum behind it and millions of merchants running the base platform, WooCommerce Memberships enjoys a large, active user community, extensive documentation, and priority ticket support through the official Woo Marketplace. The trade-off is focus. Unlike single-product companies, the WooCommerce Memberships team juggles roadmap priorities across dozens of other Woo extensions.

4. Ultimate Member

The Ultimate Member plugin started as an advanced user profile plugin and evolved into a full-featured membership plugin for WordPress.

Ease of Use

Ultimate Member’s front-end form builder and profile layouts often feel inviting at first launch. As the team at 10Web puts it, “rich feature set, ease of use, and extensive documentation make it a solid option for community sites.” That sums up why bloggers and directory owners frequently cite the plugin when they want to spin up public user profiles fast.

The learning curve steepens once you step beyond the default wizard. Pat, writing on WordPress.org, says, “I can’t see what improvements are there over WP core. A lot of the settings are buried three levels deep.” Theme and CSS quirks add another layer of friction. Clinicien complains, “The UI/UX is really bad, and there is messy CSS. Every update means fixing the design again.” Some installs never get past the starting line. Lancinginternet reports that, “registration failed on first test. We gave up and removed the plugin.”

In short, Ultimate Member’s drag-and-drop tools can make simple profile sites feel approachable, but complexity and occasional breakage can creep in for anything beyond the basics. New users should budget extra time for troubleshooting and style cleanup before opening the doors to members.

Performance

On a lean install, Ultimate Member can feel deceptively quick. A Rapyd Cloud case study raves about “lightning fast page speed after moving to Rapyd. Ultimate Member didn’t add measurable overhead.” The plugin’s own documentation endorses performance tweaks like enabling a separate usermeta table, noting this change can “improve heavy query pages by 40% – 60%.”

Yet as membership numbers climb, many admins report the opposite experience.

• A developer on Github, MissVeronica, traced page hangs to SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS queries that stretched to 90 seconds under load, calling Ultimate Member “the single biggest bottleneck on the site.”
• Ultimate Member user CyberChris voiced concerns about dramatic site slow downs, saying, “The issue with the site is it times out 9 times out of 10 when going to Users list in wp-admin. WP-admin is extremely slow only when Ultimate Member plugin is active.”

The pattern is clear: Ultimate Member can hum on small communities, but heavy logged-in traffic exposes database queries and admin screens that don’t scale gracefully. Anyone expecting to grow past a few thousand members should budget for query optimization, specialized caching, and custom development for performance optimization.

Flexibility & Developer Experience

Ultimate Member sells itself on extensibility with twenty-plus add-ons, a template-override system, and a respectable list of hooks. Developers who stay within those lanes often speak well of it. Developer Hasi Weragala says, “Ultimate Member is a highly developer-friendly plugin. It provides a plethora of actions and filter to customize the plugin functionality to one’s needs.”

Outside those common touchpoints, enthusiasm varies. A developer named Clinicien on a WordPress review said, “The Ultimate Member UI/UX is really bad, and you will have to manage a CSS stylesheet with dozens of class, IDs and “!important” CSS rules if you want to change any layout on forms or user profile unless you buy their Ultimate Member theme… which is very dubious for a standalone plugin.”

WordPress reviewer, Elnine, also expressed frustration with Ultimate Member’s code quality and “site slow downs by 60%.”

Ultimate Member offers decent flexibility for straightforward profile and community tweaks, but the deeper you dig, the more you’re likely to wrestle with tightly scoped methods, template maintenance, and extension sprawl. These factors can turn a quick win into ongoing technical debt.

Price

Ultimate Member looks wallet-friendly at first glance because the core plugin is free. That no-cost entry point wins applause from casual builders: “Free core plugin packs a serious punch. You only pay for extras,” writes Harley in his Ultimate Member review. Freelancers also like that individual add-ons start at about $40, letting them cherry-pick just what a client needs.

The mood shifts when sites outgrow that piecemeal approach. Many end up eyeing the Pro pricing plan, which costs $348 per year. Reddit user Nagup14 questions the value of Ultimate Member’s “expensive” price point.

Ultimate Member is cost-effective for simple community sites that need only one or two extras. For businesses that expect to layer on social features, gamification, or e-commerce, the seemingly modest starting price often balloons into a mid-tier annual spend.

Company History

Ultimate Member debuted in 2014 as a passion project by UK-based developer Calum Allison, who wanted a lightweight, front-end user-profile solution after finding existing membership plugins too rigid. What began as a single free plugin on WordPress.org quickly attracted thousands of active installs and a steady stream of feature requests. To keep pace, Allison incorporated a small remote team of designers, support engineers, and documentation writers under the Ultimate Member Ltd. banner. Calum has remained the lead architect and public face of the project ever since.

From day one the Ultimate Member plugin embraced the WordPress ethos of open source and community contribution.

• Code lives in a public Subversion repo, and the team runs an active support forum where core developers answer questions alongside power users.
• That commitment to accessibility explains why Ultimate Member passed 200,000 active installs by 2022, making it one of the most-downloaded user-profile plugins in the ecosystem.

Ultimate Member makes money via a growing catalog of paid extensions (social login, private messaging, WooCommerce integration) bundled into an annual pro pricing plans. They also devote a slice of revenue to a public bug-bounty program and periodic code audits, which is evidence that security and stability remain top priorities even as the business matures.

Choosing The Best WordPress Membership Plugin For You

Not every WordPress membership plugin aims at the same job.

If you want something simple and store-centric, an add-on like WooCommerce Memberships can make sense. Community builders who prize social features often gravitate to Ultimate Member. Agencies that like simple memberships might lean toward MemberPress.

But when you need a solution that scales from side project to a substantial revenue subscription business without forcing a rebuild, Paid Memberships Pro (PMPro) rises to the top.

Paid Memberships Pro offers the most powerful free solution for membership site builders on the internet. The entire core PMPro plugin, including unlimited membership levels, recurring payments, multiple gateways, and 29 free add-ons, costs nothing to download or use.

Open source and developer-friendly, PMPro is 100% GPL. Its code is not obfuscated, and you can run or customize it on as many sites as you like with no artificial domain limits.

Paid Memberships Pro is an ecosystem, not a silo. Beyond the free core, 60+ official add-ons cover group memberships, tax/VAT automation, email marketing, LMS integrations, and more. You activate only what your membership site roadmap requires.

Paid Memberships Pro also sets the standard for what high-quality customer support should feel like from your membership platform. While the software is free, optional annual licenses unlock automatic updates and human helpdesk support from the same engineering team that built the product, ensuring continuity when you need to ask for help.

Choosing a membership platform shouldn’t hinge on a single feature comparison. You’re picking the foundation for recurring revenue, protected content, and future integrations. A rock-solid core and open architecture matter because six months from now you may need a developer to wire in a CRM, swap gateways, or build a headless front end. PMPro’s expansive feature set, clean code, and exhaustive hook system make that future work possible.

That’s why, after evaluating ease of use, performance, flexibility, price, and company track record, Paid Memberships Pro emerges as the clear “best WordPress membership plugin” for creators who want freedom to start small, iterate fast, and scale without fear of lock-in.

FAQs on the Best WordPress Membership Plugins