When you’re choosing a membership plugin for your WordPress site, it’s easy to skim a list of features and pick one based on what you need right now. But if you step back, you can imagine your membership a year from now.

How much has it grown? What kinds of experiences are you offering members that you could not have pulled off on day one? These are the questions that help you choose a plugin that lets your membership scale.

In this post, we will compare Paid Memberships Pro and Kadence Memberships (formerly Restrict Content Pro), so you can decide which one is the better fit for your membership site.

Paid Memberships Pro

You may start your membership by offering one thing to your members, but what you offer will likely change as your membership grows and develops. So it is essential to choose a plugin with the features and Add Ons to help your membership grow with you. That is exactly what we built Paid Memberships Pro to do. 

Our core plugin is always free, so you can try it out and see how you like it without a major financial commitment. You can run your membership for free until you are ready for more features. Our paid plans add Premium Add Ons and unlimited support to help you deliver more value to your members, but you can stay on the free plugin for as long as you like.

What we love most about Paid Memberships Pro is how versatile it is. You can run a simple membership or add an online course, if you want. Want to create a members-only podcast? We have you covered. No matter what you want to offer your members, Paid Memberships Pro gives you the tools to make it happen.

Paid Memberships Pro Features 

Running a membership is always a balance between giving your members the experience they deserve and having the tools you need to make it happen. Paid Memberships Pro has all the features to make your membership one-of-a-kind while also giving you the administrative tools to run it smoothly. It offers:

• Content features. No matter how you want to structure your content restrictions, Paid Memberships Pro can help. Easily restrict pages, sell one-time access, restrict custom post types, or drip content to your members.
• Administrative tools. We take the stress out of running a membership by letting you import and export members, add members manually, or assign others the role of membership manager. Plus, our administrative reports show you all your sales and signup data, so you always have an accurate record of how your membership is doing.
• Site enhancements. Paid Memberships Pro helps you grow your word-of-mouth marketing by turning your members into affiliates. And you can create sales and landing pages with built-in payment fields.
• Payment options. You’re not limited to one kind of payment. Paid Memberships Pro integrates with the top payment gateways, like Stripe and PayPal.

Paid Memberships Pro User Experience 

All the features in the world don’t matter if your members don’t enjoy the membership experience. Paid Memberships Pro gives members control of their own membership.

Members can log in and reset their password on their own, and access a membership account dashboard to view invoices or update their payment method. They can even cancel their account on their own if they need to. Plus, members can manage their profile information, using their preferred name or updating any other personal information.

Pricing for Paid Memberships Pro

We offer one of the strongest, most robust free membership plugins available, backed by a whole library of Free Add Ons. You can run a complete membership on the free plugin for as long as you like.

When you’re ready to grow, our Standard plan is $49/month (or $499/year) and unlocks our full library of Premium Add Ons plus unlimited support. And if you’d rather we handle the entire setup for you, including hosting, migration, and configuration, PMPro Max is a fully managed solution starting at $99/month (or $999/year) that gets you up and running fast. Our plans are designed for businesses running one site or many.

Kadence Memberships (Formerly Restrict Content Pro)

If you have researched membership plugins before, you may know this one as Restrict Content Pro. In 2026, Liquid Web consolidated its WordPress plugins, retired the StellarWP brand, and folded Restrict Content Pro into a product now called Kadence Memberships. Restrict Content Pro is no longer sold as a standalone plugin, so throughout this post we refer to it as Kadence Memberships (formerly Restrict Content Pro).

Kadence Memberships comes in two forms. There is a free version on WordPress.org that handles core content restriction and unlimited membership levels, and there are more advanced membership features bundled into Kadence’s larger paid plans. So you can start for free, but the features that go head-to-head with our paid plans live in Kadence’s paid bundles rather than in a standalone membership plugin.

Kadence Memberships is a capable tool for restricting content and taking payments. If you mainly need to lock down a few pages and collect payments, the free plugin can be all you need. Depending on where you want your membership to go, though, it may or may not be the right long-term home for your site.

Kadence Memberships Features

Kadence Memberships does what Restrict Content Pro always did: it restricts content. Paid add-ons and higher plan tiers extend it from there.

• Content features. Kadence Memberships lets you restrict posts and pages and show a custom message to visitors who do not have access. If you want to drip content, you will need a paid plan.
• Administrative tools. For detailed reporting on your sales, you will need one of the paid plans.
• Site enhancements. Paid add-ons cover extras like selling access to sites within a multisite network.
• Payment options. The free version supports Stripe and manual payments. Paid plans add more gateways, such as PayPal and Authorize.net. 

The Kadence Memberships User Experience 

Kadence Memberships gives members access to a dashboard to manage their accounts. Prospective members can also start with a free trial before they make a full purchase.

Kadence Memberships Pricing

Kadence Memberships no longer sells a standalone license the way Restrict Content Pro once did. The free plugin is available on WordPress.org, and the more advanced membership features are included in Kadence’s paid plans: Pro at $299/year and Elite at $499/year, which adds agency and multi-site management tools. Liquid Web also retired the older lifetime and unlimited-site licenses for new buyers, so new purchases are billed annually.

Who Should Choose Paid Memberships Pro?

If you want to build a membership site that grows with your business, Paid Memberships Pro is for you. Our free plugin is more robust and customizable than most others on the market, so you can shape your membership in many different ways. And when you’re ready for more, our Standard plan and PMPro Max are there to grow with you.

If you would like to see how other business owners use Paid Memberships Pro, take a look at our Case Studies.

Ready to migrate to Paid Memberships Pro? We have several guides on how to safely migrate an active membership site while keeping your payments intact. If you are coming from Kadence Memberships, check out our specific guide on how to migrate from Restrict Content Pro (now Kadence Memberships).