If you are finding out which WordPress plugin will help you
in building a membership site, then you have come to the right place. In this
comprehensive guide, we will go through top-rated WordPress membership plugins
for 2020

With the right membership plugin, you can transform your
ordinary site into a business generating premium content library, where only
the registered members can access to your website. Hence, you can achieve
higher sales targets, generate more recurring income, and a list of loyal
registered customers for future lead generation.

In this guide, we will compare 5 best WordPress membership
plugins to help create a best-paid membership site.

Let’s dive in!

Advantages of a Membership WordPress site

Establish yourself as an expert

If you build a membership site that allows only the
registered members to access your content with some payment, it shows that you
are an absolute authority in your industry, and only you have the high-quality,
valuable content which no one other has to offer. Finally, you establish
yourself as an expert in your field with some relevant content.

Get a consistent, stable income

Get steadier continues income stream when visitors pay to
get access to your site. Likewise, Income will increase as more visitors get
registered.

Always deliver high-value content

If you are providing high-value content which no one else
does, that symbolizes that your content is something special, and only valuable
customers may get access to this content. This creates a constant value for
your visitors, and they admire your site as a trendsetter; hence, continues
paying you to get right of entry.

What types of membership sites you can create to generate income

Most common types of paid membership sites are as follow

1. Online
courses/eCourses: the most common form of paid membership sites is offering
an online course with specific course outlines, documents, PDFs, and videos.

2. Service-oriented Membership sites: if
you are a consultant, coach, or offer particular service, then you may ask customers
to pay for your assistance.

3. Online resource
offering sites: online communities, websites, e-magazines that provide
access to only registered users.

4. product-oriented
membership sites:  these types of
membership sites offer specific products, whether physical or digital products,
only to registered members.

Let’s discuss and compare our top-rated WordPress membership plugins in detail.

MemberPress WordPress membership plugin

MemberPress Plugin Features

MemberPress is an all-in-one solution to create a membership site with an easy to use interface. MemberPress offers all those essential features that can transform your current website into a membership site without any hassle.

Once you install the MemberPress plugin, the next step is to
enter your payment gateways, edit product details and start contacting your
visitors to register your paid membership site.

Memberpress Plugin Pros

• MemberPress can easily set up your registered
  member’s subscription plans, log in details, and thankyou pages automatically.
• Manage and allow your users which posts, pages,
  videos, and categories they can access based on the subscription plan they
  choose.
• Content dripping feature is handy with selling
  online courses or learning activities where you can restrict content to your
  users for some time and reveal it after a specific time.
• Integrates with 3^rd party services
  very well like stripe, WooCommerce, Active Campaign, and many others to run an
  affiliate program smoothly.

Memberpress Plugin Cons

• Integrates with only 3 primary payment gateway
  services, PayPal, stripe, and zapier which is a significant drawback for users
  whose countries don’t support these payment services.
• It comes with limited integration to many 3^rd party services.

Memberpress Plugin Pricing

• The basic plan comes in $129/year, and the premium plan starts at $249/year.

Teachable

Teachable Membership Plugin Features

Teachable is a stand-alone all-in-one pack of creating and publishing online courses. This plugin comes with seamless integration of your existing website with your online courses, enabling you to teach them online, on your subdomain.

Create a user-friendly online school website with intuitive design, and the influential editor lets you create and modify any attribute of your online school.  

Teachable Membership Plugin Pros

• Create a fully functional learning school, where
  your students could easily signup, view your course syllabus or course outline,
  and purchase it through secure payment gateways.
• Get a professional website with built-in sales
  and marketing tools that are highly customizable to meet your needs.
• The most straightforward procedure to start your
  school — just enter your email address and name of the school and there you
  go – no payment or credit card information is necessary.
• Responsive websites—looks great on any device,
  tablets, and Smartphone
• You can create new pages, add audio video or pdf
  files to your courses, and easy setup with drag and drop builder to create
  pages according to your taste.
• A compelling page editor lets you create new
  sales pages related to your new course launch to convert more students
• Attract students from different parts of regions
  with language modification tools.

Teachable Membership Plugin Cons

• Teachable is a wonderful software, yet it is not
  available as a WordPress plugin, and you have to integrate it with your site
  via a link or by subdomain.
• It’s expensive than many other WordPress plugins
  offering same features at a reasonable price.

Teachable Membership Plugin Pricing

Basic plan:
starts at $39/month.

Professional plan:
$99/month

Business plan: $299/month

LearnDash membership plugin

LearnDash Plugin Features

LearnDash is a potent WordPress membership plugin plus a WordPress LMS which helps you create a beautiful membership site with numerous membership modules and bundles of integration with powerful administration facilities.

LearnDash Pros

• The drag and drop builder helps you in creating multi-layer
  courses with an ability to re-use your session to spin-up your existing classes.
• Advanced quizzing feature comes with eight
  question types, whichever you like to use in your quizzes.
• Drip-feed content management allows you to
  schedule your courses over a specified period.
• LearDash prerequisite feature helps you define
  your course orders, so your students may know which course they should take in
  which order.
• It comes with an enormous list of integrating
  able add-ons like woocommerce, stripe, samcart, zapier, and many more.
• With LearnDash, you can easily create and sell
  courses online because of its advanced modules, which assists you greatly in
  managing different learning materials.

LearnDash Cons

• Integration and add-on list is quite
  overwhelming, and if you are not interested in selling out your courses, than
  these might be useless to you.
• Some design features lack options to customize.

LearnDash Pricing

The basic plan starts at $159 for one site.

WooCommerce membership plugin

WooCommerce membership plugin Features

WooCommerce plugin is an add-on for the WooCommerce platform, which enables you to create a membership for your registered customers if you want to sale your digital products through memberships only.

Now you can integrate your content and products into
membership and can easily manage membership with a product purchase, manually
assign memberships to your registered customers and show them their membership
perks in Member Area.

However, the WooCommerce Membership plugin is not a
stand-alone plugin, and to receive payments; you have to install another free
WooCommerce Subscription plugin.

WooCommerce membership plugin Pros

• You can create different sorts of memberships,
  i.e., standalone product purchase membership, monthly or yearly subscription
  membership, or you can assign premium membership manually.
• You can sell membership to boost the sale of a
  standalone product and then tie some membership plans to increase its sales.
• In your members-only content area, you can
  activate a drip content strategy,
  i.e. you can create a schedule when the members can access your content; for
  example, you can do that members can only access specific product discounts
  unless their subscription is one month old.
• You can turn your site into a purchasing club by
  giving access to specific products only to exclusive members.
• You can add perks to encourage your registered
  members to keep purchasing like free shipping or a discount coupon after
  minimum purchase order.
• You can import and export customers’ email lists
  to manage members with an import/export tool.
• Teams for WooCommerce extension allows you to
  create subscription or membership for companies, group, or organizations.

WooCommerce membership plugin Cons

• No custom message could be sent to all of the registered members, and you have to send one message at a time.
• No members-only coupons feature that enables you to control the members-only section.

WooCommerce membership plugin Pricing

The price for one site starts at $149/ year.

Restrict content pro membership plugin

Restrict Content Pro Membership Plugin Features

Restrict Content Pro is a full-featured, fast, and clean solution to give access to your members-only area.  Now you can lock your exclusive content in a meaningful way, so only the valued members could get access to your premium content.

Restrict content pro membership plugin Pros

• The plugin seamlessly integrates with the WordPress
  user interface, and you can easily create membership plans and procedures.
• Many integrations come in for free with this
  plugin, which other plugins offer with paid versions only, i.e., PayPal,
  Stripe, Mailchimp, CSV export, and many other features.
• You can create free, trial, and premium
  subscription plans with unlimited numbers of subscriptions.
• Mange members area easily from the dashboard
  where you can easily view active, pending, expired, and free users.
• Send welcome emails to new users.
• It comes with 30 days money-back guarantee for a
  trial period.      

Restrict content pro membership plugin Cons

• Integration with email services comes with
  limited options, while many other plugins offer more email service
  integrations.

Restrict content pro membership plugin Pricing

It starts at $99 for a single site.

Summing up

In my view, if you want to sell your courses online, then there is no better choice than teachable, with exclusive features focusing on students and coaching needs.

While MemberPress is also the right choice if you are looking for an all-in-one solution pack for a membership site. LearnDash works best if you are a heavy-duty site developer.

All of these membership plugins are hand-picked carefully to
provide you a perfect solution for your membership site. So, which one you like
the most, do tell us in the comment section.