Paid Memberships Pro vs. Wild Apricot

If you manage an association or nonprofit organization, you want to stay close to your members. A membership platform can help you communicate regularly with your volunteers and other members, growing your organization and keeping them invested in your mission. Looking for a membership platform to fit your needs? Here’s a comparison of Paid Memberships Pro vs. Wild Apricot.

Paid Memberships Pro

Paid Memberships Pro is a free plugin that integrates seamlessly into WordPress, providing everything you need to launch and grow your association’s membership program. One of PMPro’s biggest strengths is that it works from within your existing WordPress site, making it an excellent choice that requires minimal setup.

Another benefit to PMPro is its flexibility. You can adjust settings and launch content to your desired audience—all without the need for custom code or hiring a developer. This flexibility allows you to streamline signups for your membership community while customizing the experience to support your organization’s mission.

After you sign up, you get access to PMPro’s Associations Hub™, which guides you through all of the steps you need to take to get your first members, move your existing association online, and optimize your association in meaningful ways.

PMPro also offers 34 membership-boosting Add Ons that help you customize your membership offerings to fit your community’s needs. The core free plugin has everything you need in the box, but there are paid plans that allow you to add more advanced features.

Key Features of Paid Memberships Pro

Every membership platform has benefits and limitations. Here are some of the key features you’ll enjoy with the PMPro plugin.

Customization

You want your membership site to support your organization’s mission and goals. Customization is key to building community because you want your members to feel like they’re part of something unique when they log on. Use PMPros customization options to ensure your membership site truly reflects your organization.

Content Restrictions

PMPro offers a huge number of ways to protect and manage your content. You can restrict unlimited content, including individual posts, pages, or even individual sections of web pages. You can also release content in waves, giving you additional customization options and helping to build engagement.

Member Records and Management

The plugin’s tools help you manage everything you’ll need to with a growing community. PMPro offers simple importing and exporting of member lists, allows for unlimited customized levels of memberships, and even allows you to host memberships for multiple chapters in the same place. You can collect and organize full member information without paper forms or spreadsheets and even create member directories that you can share if you’d like.

Payment Options for Fees and Donations

PMPro integrates with a number of popular payment services, including Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Wallet. Customization options allow you to cover any scenario, including one-time payments or flexible pricing options based on your settings. You’ll be able to charge your members fees and accept donations from them. You also can track fundraising goals.

Group Accounts

More than just individuals want to participate in organizations. With PMPro, you can accept group and corporate memberships, growing your reach and participation.

Event Management

Organizations grow through community building and event participation. PMPro helps you host events by providing an online hub for you to organize and manage events, including ticketing, badges, and QR codes.

The PMPro User Experience

Users who sign up through PMPro can access their profile at any time and control most aspects of their membership. That means they can upgrade their membership tier, change their contact settings or payment information, complete one-time purchases, or cancel their membership without assistance. It takes much of the administrative work out of your hands, freeing up your time while providing valuable information about your membership community.

PMPro Price Points

It’s free to download and use the PMPro WordPress plugin. The free installation includes 33 powerful Add Ons designed to help grow engagement and provide customization options. The free version comes with all the tools you need to launch and manage a membership community, allowing for any number of custom membership levels and unlimited signups.

Advanced features are available with PMPro. These are designed to help a growing business or community upgrade the experience with additional customizations and tools to scale.

PMPro offers two primary plans:

1. Standard. The perfect option for an online business starting out, the Standard plan is $247 a year and includes everything in the free version plus a single site license, plus 20 additional Add Ons, all for a single site.
2. Plus. Priced at $397 annually, the Plus plan is designed for advanced membership sites or online businesses managing multiple communities. The Plus plan includes everything in the Standard plan as well as an additional 29 Add Ons for two websites.

Wild Apricot

Wild Apricot is a set of various web tools that integrate together to manage an online community or event attendance all from a single space. It combines website creation and management, membership subscriptions, event planning tools, and newsletter delivery, all in a single dashboard. The platform is popular with nonprofit organizations and is designed to help streamline the tools they often need.

One of Wild Apricot’s primary draws is that it allows you to create a website that integrates with an existing membership database. This feature helps the admin quickly create once-off websites for events or special releases. The tools also allow for simple setup of donations and public tracking of donation goals.

Pricing plans start at $51 a month and scale with the number of contacts, with options for free, limited-time trials.

Wild Apricot Features and User Experience

Wild Apricot is largely targeted at small membership organizations, making it effective for local groups who want to manage a tight community. Some of the features Wild Apricot users enjoy include:

Website Creation

One of Wild Apricot’s main features is its ability to quickly generate a website that will integrate with its full suite of tools. It’s a time-saver for small organizations that need to launch sites for events or to track donations.

Membership Management

Wild Apricot integrates your membership list with your website and allows you full access to your membership database anytime. That means no moving contact lists between various websites or software. You can launch discussion forums for members, allowing users to create and display profiles publicly to other members.

Event Management

Many of Wild Apricot’s features are designed for nonprofits, which may host several events a year that all require similar but unique approaches. Wild Apricot’s tools have everything needed to make sure your event goes off without a hitch, including the ability to set automated reminders, display a public calendar and provide updates on donation goals in real-time.

Volunteer Tools

Wild Apricot helps nonprofits manage a list of volunteers changing from event to event. Centralizing all users to one membership service allows organizers to manage staff and volunteers effectively in one place, streamlining all-important communications in event planning.

Payment Options

Wild Apricot offers its own payment system. It also integrates with PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.Net.

Wild Apricot Price Points

Wild Apricot offers limited-time free trials for anyone interested in their service. Pricing plans are tiered based on the number of contacts. Payments begin monthly and can be paid up to two years in advance for a discount.

Wild Apricot pricing plans are:

• Personal. $60/month, up to 100 contacts
• Group. $75/month, up to 250 contacts
• Community. $140/month, up to 500 contacts
• Professional. $240/month, up to 2,000 contacts
• Network. $440/month, up to 5,000 contacts
• Enterprise. $530/month, up to 15,000 contacts
• Global. $900/month, up to 50,000 contacts

Users can sign up for a year in advance for a 10% discount, or two years in advance for a 15% discount.

Why Choose Paid Memberships Pro?

PMPro and Wild Apricot are made for different types of memberships. While Wild Apricot offers many of the tools needed for small nonprofit organizations to successfully manage communities and launch events, it’s not made for as many businesses and communities as PMPro.

PMPro helps you reach large numbers of users and build a thriving community. Because it allows for any number of users and membership tiers, PMPro allows you to quickly grow a community without worrying about growing faster than you can keep up with financially.

Wild Apricot, on the other hand, ramps up quickly in charges as your contact list grows, making it ideal for small organizations looking to manage a consistent audience.

Another benefit of PMPro is that it integrates directly into your existing WordPress site, making it a strong addition to any growing community’s existing website. Wild Apricot offers the ability to create websites on the fly, but not to integrate directly with an existing website.

It takes time to build a thriving membership program, and PMPro can help. You can read case studies from some of our partners, then head over to our pricing page and choose the right plan for you.