Run Your Online Community with PMPro
You’ve found it: Paid Memberships Pro is the most robust membership plugin to sell access to your online community on WordPress.
Build and grow an online community that you control. Bring together like minds and niche groups of people while earning a reliable income through a fully customizable online business.
Real Communities. Real Results.
The Vintage BMW Motorcycle Owners Club (founded in 1972) made the transition from a previous website platform to WordPress.
Paid Memberships Pro was the key to making this possible.
We have a very active forum that needed to be converted to phpBB and a full membership management system. I could easily use hooks and filters to customize the plugin for our needs. This made building the WordPress member, billing, and self-service interfaces quick and easy with very little help from the wonderful staff at PMPro.
Excellent Product, Fantastic Support, Perfect with BuddyBoss
We migrated away from expensive SaaS products and settled on PMPro as our membership tool. As an association of more than 4,000 members, we wanted an elegant solution that would allow us to restrict content, manage memberships, and integrate with a variety of other WordPress plugins for Events, CRM, and LMS.The migration was easy and doing custom dev has been smooth and seamless.
What happens after you sign up?
After checkout, you’ll get access to the software, documentation, and tutorials you need to build and run your online community with WordPress.
You’ll also get access to our Communities Hub™, which guides you through all of the steps you need to take in order to get your first paying member—as well as create, enhance, price, and market your online community even better.
Online Community Platforms for Membership Sites
Paid Memberships Pro puts your community members at the center of everything. We’re the foundation of your WordPress community site: control access, protect content, and accept member registrations with paid subscriptions.
Our plugin tightly integrates with the most popular WordPress-based community plugins and third party platforms.
The bottom line? You can nurture an interactive online community with the third party tools that you choose—powered by the robust membership features of PMPro.
Sell access to your online community with Paid Memberships Pro
Restrict over 28 types of content for members only
Add community features like forums, profiles, messaging, directories, and events
Completely control who accesses your content, when, and how often
Charge fees on a monthly, yearly, or even daily basis with diverse payment methods
Fully manage memberships and paid subscriptions
Create unlimited membership levels
Personalize everything from profiles to member dashboards, including custom user avatars
Promote members to community managers, giving them granular access to lead discussions and moderate conversations
Customize your community website to your heart’s content
UPDATE: Years later, I am STILL in love with this membership solution! Streamlined, tons of features. Just so well-designed. THANK YOU PMP!
LOVE PMP! Not only am I in complete control of the set-up, I feel that it draws in a certain type of supporter who doesn’t want to go through crowd-funding sites. Great job developing an awesome system!
We believe in open source software.
We’re tired of plugins and themes that don’t play well together, aren’t you?
At PMPro, we fully embrace open source, which means that compatibility problems are less likely—and they’re easier to fix if they do happen.
We make our code publicly available so anyone can read it, extend it, and integrate with it. We work closely with plugin and theme authors to handle compatibility issues so you don’t have to.
Own the Land You Build On
We always say, “Own the land your business is built on,” and with an online community, this could not be more relevant. With some other hosted solutions, you don’t have the same ownership.
This could mean:
You rely entirely on the platform, its viability, performance, and security
Growth is taxed: the more you grow, the more you pay
You’re limited (and sometimes censored!) in the type of content you post
You’re stuck, even if prices change or something else happens and you want to move your community elsewhere
Branding and customization options are extremely limited
You can’t access your community members outside of the platform
When you sell access to your online community with WordPress and PMPro, you own the land you build on. 100% ownership with total control over your content and audience.
Focus on Members and Rich Community Interactions
Paid Memberships Pro is the foundation of your WordPress community website.
Lock down your forums, directories, profiles, messaging. Basically any component of your community can be protected with PMPro
Set up different tiers of community access: restrict who can open topics, send messages, moderate conversations, or be included in your directory
Allow members to customize their profile with an avatar, banner, and the custom profile fields that matter for your community theme
Offer different pricing tiers—from free to lifetime and anything in between—to appeal to different supporters and budgets
Enrich your community experience with courses, private videos, newsletters, and events
Allow members to connect and chat via direct messaging and friending.
Our Commitment to You:
Money Back Guarantee
Every purchase is backed by a 100 day money-back guarantee. If you decide not to use your premium plan, request a full refund—no questions asked.
Even if your request comes after 100 days, we will still refund your payment by any means necessary.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which plan should I choose?
We currently offer three plans: Free, Standard, and Plus. Here’s a guide to help you select the right plan for your business.
We designed these plans through our experience supporting thousands of membership sites on this platform for over 10 years. As such, Add Ons cannot be purchased individually. As a fully open source WordPress plugin, you can use our code for free if you cannot afford a membership or if you’re just testing.
Remember that if your needs change in the future, you can upgrade at any time and it will not affect your site settings, content, user and member information, or subscriptions.
If you’ve already read the guide and still can’t decide which plan is right for you, you can always try out Paid Memberships Pro for free.
What communities Add Ons do I get with my purchase?
The core plugin has everything you need to sell access to your online community with WordPress. With our free membership, you get access to over 30+ free Add Ons, including:
- bbPress and the bbPress Integration
- BuddyPress and the BuddyPress/BuddyBoss Integration
- Basic User Avatars
- Discord Integration
We also recommend using an email marketing platform like ConvertKit or Mailchimp (we offer free integrations for these) to make sure you’re set up to succeed.
Purchase a premium plan to get additional community Add Ons like:
- Approvals (Plus): Approve or deny members
- Donations (Plus): Allow customers to set an additional donation amount at the checkout
- Lock Membership Level (Standard): Restrict level changes by user
- Member Directory (Plus): Add a public or members-only directory to your site
After signup, you’ll gain access to our Communities Hub™ with focused documentation to guide you through the decisions you’ll need to make when setting up your online community site.
Can I offer a free membership level with Paid Memberships Pro?
Absolutely. The content protection rules you’ve learned about in this guide are separate from how you choose to price your membership levels. Paid Memberships Pro supports free memberships, plus every variation of paid membership from one-time, fixed-term, recurring, trials, lifetime, and more.
Can I use Paid Memberships Pro even if I’m not a technical person?
There are over 100,000 sites that use Paid Memberships Pro — and from our customer research most of them are DIY. They’re building their own site (not working with a developer) just like you.
Here’s what our user @asienchris says about PMPro:
Even a tech noob can get a passive income with PMPro!
I’m a tech noob, but PMPro still makes it possible for people like me to successfully handle payment processing automatically so that I now have a passive income. Awesome plugin with a LOT of functionality, even in the free version!
Will I have to pay more as my online community grows?
Many hosted community platforms charge you more money as your community gains more members.
Paid Memberships Pro is 100% free and open source software. If you decide to pay for one of our premium plans, you will pay a flat fee that does not change, regardless of the size of your community. This makes PMPro a great solution for communities who plan to scale over time.
Also, we don’t take any portion of your revenue at the platform level. Your payment gateway does impose fees for credit card processing, so please check with your gateway to determine their fees.
We have a special relationship with Stripe whereby membership sites that do not have a valid premium license pay 2% in gateway fees on top of the default gateway fees imposed by Stripe. You can remove this fee by upgrading to a Standard or higher membership plan (starting at $247/yr.) or using the recipe in this post to remove the connected platform fee.
How much support can I expect to receive?
We provide very deep support and are able to troubleshoot most issues via the support forums.
Some custom code is straight forward, and we can assist with writing the code and instructing you on exactly where to put it. If you have found a tutorial on our site about a customization, we can usually help you to set that customization up or tweak it in small ways.
What if I have unique requirements and need more help?
In the case you need more hands-on help, we can recommend a developer we trust.
We will write the requirements and outline the possible solutions for you to share with them. This alone saves your developer tons of time, which saves you hundreds of dollars.
Choose a Plan
Enterprise
- Everything in Plus, with:
- 50+ sites
- Phone support
- Development consulting
- Performance scaling
- Onsite visits
- Premium hosting
Plus
- Everything in Standard, plus:
- 2 site license
- Priority support
- Accept donations
- Invite only membership
- Member approvals
- Member directory & user profiles
- Multisite & WordPress Network features
- Payment plans by level
- Prorated pricing
- Sell gift memberships
- Series/content drip-feed
- Sponsored or group accounts
- Variable "pay what you want" pricing
Standard
- Everything in Free, plus:
- 1 site license
- Premium support
- Advanced customization recipes
- Automatic updates
- Affiliate tracking
- Protect custom post types
- Email confirmation
- Membership cards
- Shipping address
- Google Analytics + Ecommerce Tracking
Free
- The entire core plugin, with:
- Unlimited restricted content
- Unlimited membership levels & members
- Free or paid registration
- Multiple memberships per user
- Recurring subscriptions
- All gateways, including Stripe & PayPal
- All email marketing integrations
- bbPress, BuddyPress, BuddyBoss integrations
- Courses & LMS integrations
- Frontend login
- No-code user profile fields
- Restrict access to WordPress dashboard
- WooCommerce integration
- Zapier integration
Not sure which plan to pick? Choose Plus Membership to get everything you need for an advanced membership site. Or try things out for free.
