WordPress is a popular blog hosting platform that’s used by millions of bloggers around the world to get their message out to customers and readers. If you have a WordPress blog, you can take it from good to great by adding a plugin that allows subscribers to sign up for your posts. The following plugins are the best for adding subscriptions to your blog.
Table of Contents
Best WordPress Plugin For Subscriptions
1. MemberPress
MemberPress is one of the most popular WordPress membership plugins. It is also the easiest to use and the most robust when it comes to features.
Pros of MemberPress WordPress Membership Plugin
Easy to Setup – MemberPress makes it simple to setup a membership website with WordPress. It can automatically setup pricing, login, account, and thank you pages for your users. Adding membership plans is also very straight forward.
Content Access Control – MemberPress comes with powerful access control, which allows you to restrict access to any content including posts, pages, categories, tags, files, etc.
Content Dripping – Content dripping allows you to show restricted content to members after a certain time. This is a very useful feature for selling online courses or learning materials.
Sell Courses – MemberPress lets you to easily create and sell online courses. It offers an interactive learning experience for users that focuses on course completion rate.
Integrations – MemberPress integrates with AWeber, MailChimp, GetResponse, and MadMimi email services. It also integrates with Amazon Web Services and BluBrry for podcast hosting.
Payment Gateways – MemberPress comes with built-in support for PayPal and Stripe payment gateways. Developer plan also adds Authorize.net support.
Cons of Using MemberPress Pro
Limited Payment Options – MemberPress only supports the three most popular payment gateways. This would be a deal breaker for site owners who live in countries not supported by these payment gateways.
Limited Integrations – While the plugin has enough support for popular services to run a membership site efficiently, it still lacks integrations with some other popular services. The plugin is easily extensible, and you can pay someone to integrate a third-party service you would like to use.
Pricing: Starting from $129 / year for the Basic plan and $249 / year for the Plus plan.
We think MemberPress is the most easy to use WordPress membership plugin for beginners. It is quick to setup with tons of powerful options.
2. LearnDash
LearnDash is a super flexible and extremely easy to use WordPress LMS plugin. It comes with advanced membership modules and tons of integrations.
Pros of Using LearnDash
Easy to Setup LearnDash is quite easy to setup and adding content to it much more simpler. It also comes with advanced tools to easily organize your membership content into levels, groups, etc.
Easy Content Restrictions LearnDash allows you to easily hide any content and restrict it to different membership groups.
Sell Courses – LearnDash allows you to easily create and sell online courses. It has advanced modules that allow you to better manage learning material than other WordPress membership plugins.
Drip Content – It comes with powerful drip content feature allowing you to roll out content to users on regular intervals or upon completion of levels.
Built-in Community Features It comes with tools to create highly engaging membership sites with quizzes, user badges, course specific forums, certificates, user profiles, etc.
Integrations & Payments LearnDash offers an amazing set of integrations and payment gateways. You can even connect it to MemberPress, WooCommerce, bbPress, Slack, etc.
Cons of Using LearnDash
Lacks some membership features – If you are trying to build a membership website without selling courses, then some of LearnDash features may not be useful to you.
Pricing: Starting from $159 for a single site license with 1 year of support and updates.
LearnDash is the perfect solution if you want to sell online courses on a paid membership website. It’s extensive set of addons and integrations allow you to build a highly-engaging platform.
3. Teachable
Teachable is an all inclusive online courses builder. It packs membership website, LMS, discussion forum, email marketing, and analytics all under one dashboard.
Pros of Using Teachable
Ease of Use Teachable is easy to set up and does not require any technical skills at all. Creating membership content is a breeze and includes built-in tools to quickly create and upload videos, text, PDF, and more.
Drip Content It includes flexible drip content feature, which allows you to roll out content based on a users’ progress or subscription level.
Built-in Engagement Features It offers discussion forums, quizzes, contact forms, certificates, and other features to boost user engagement and build powerful online communities.
Cons of Using Teachable
Not a WordPress Plugin Teachable is not available as a WordPress plugin. Instead, you can integrate it to your WordPress site by adding links or a sub-domain.
More Expensive Teachable includes everything which makes it more expensive than other WordPress membership plugins.
Pricing: Basic plan starts at $39 / month, professional $99 / month, and business $499 / month.
4. Restrict Content Pro
Restrict Content Pro is a powerful contender for the title of the best membership plugin for WordPress. It is created by same team that’s behind the popular Easy Digital Downloads and AffiliateWP plugins.
Pros of Using Restrict Content Pro
Easy to Use – Restrict Content Pro beautifully integrates with the WordPress user interface. This allows you to easily figure out how to use it.
Built-in Integrations – Unlike other membership plugins, Restrict Content Pro comes with built-in integrations that other plugins ship as paid addons. It has Stripe, PayPal, MailChimp, MailPoet, email manager, CSV export, and many more features.
Payment Gateways – Stripe, PayPal, and Braintree come as free addons. Other supported payment gateways include 2Checkout, PayPal Website Payments Pro, PayPal Express, and Stripe Checkout.
Works with Easy Digital Downloads – If you are running Easy Digital Downloads to sell digital products, then Restrict Content Pro is the perfect companion for that.
Excellent Support – There is extensive free documentation available for all users. You also get professional support by email with very fast response times.
Cons of Using Restrict Content Pro
Fewer Integrations – It has fewer integrations with third party services such as email service providers than some other plugins on this list.
Pricing: $99 with 12 addons and single site license, $149 for 5 sites, and $249 for all addons and unlimited sites. There is also a $499 lifetime plan.
We found Restrict Content Pro to be one of the most easy to use membership plugin. It is also developer friendly, and comes with a great set of features that are perfect for all kind of membership websites.
5. S2Member
S2Member is a popular free WordPress membership plugin with pro version available as well. It has been around for quite a while and has a devoted userbase.
Pros of Using S2Member WordPress Membership Plugin
Free Base Plugin – The s2Member base plugin is free. Anyone can download and give it a try. It is limited in terms of features and support but gives you a good starting point.
Content Dripping – S2Member Pro comes with content drip feature.
Payment Gateways – The free version supports PayPal. Pro version of the plugin supports Stripe and Authorize.net as well.
Integrations – Works with MailChimp, bbPress and BuddyPress.
Documentation & Support – S2Member has an extensive knowledgebase available to all. Pro users also get email based support.
Cons of Using S2Member WordPress Membership Plugin
Not very user-friendly – We found s2Member to be a little more difficult to use than other membership plugins.
Free Version Limitations – Free version only supports PayPal, limits to only 4 membership levels, and does not have drip content feature.
Pricing: The base plugin is free, then Pro version for a single site license costs $89 USD. For unlimited sites pro version costs $189 USD.
wordpress subscription plugin free
In order to run a membership site with WordPress, you need one of the numerous, free or paid, WordPress membership site plugins. You can’t say one plugin is better than the rest – it simply depends what you need it for. Here’s a roundup of the best free WordPress membership plugins you can start using on your website today.
1. WP-Members
WP-Members is probably the first WordPress membership site plugin that comes to mind. This isn’t strange because it’s a very popular plugin – it has 60,000+ active installs.
The list of its features is rather impressive. In a nutshell, it has all the features you will need to manage your members and the content they can access. Some of the features you won’t find in all other plugins are inline login/registration (i.e. from the page itself, not from the WP login page), custom registration and profile fields, automatic creation of post excerpts, and so on.
Additionally, you can find a Quick Start guide and plenty of extensions to further enrich the functionality of the plugin.
2. Paid Memberships Pro
With its 40,000+ active installs and lots of add-ons, Paid Memberships Pro is one of the most popular free WordPress membership site plugins. It has unlimited membership levels and is 100% GPL.
Among the best features of Paid Memberships Pro are its great integration options. The plugin integrates with MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, KISSMetrics, Infusionsoft, WP Courseware, LearnDash, Post Affiliate Pro, bbPress, WooCommerce, and many more popular third party tools. There also paid add-ons for more advanced features, such as PayPal Express Checkout, or affiliate tracking.
With Paid Memberships Pro you can accept payments via Stripe, Authorize.net, Braintree Payments, and PayPal. These payments can be one time or recurring payments. You can also set trials with a duration you choose and have the corresponding payment set in the system.
3. Simple Membership
Simple Membership is a simple to use plugin but it offers everything you need for a membership site. For instance, it offers free and paid memberships, as well as unlimited membership levels. You can hide all content, or you can show teaser content to prompt users to register or login.
Simple Membership doesn’t offer numerous payment options – it works with PayPal only – but since with PayPal you can accept any major credit and debit card, for most of us this is all we need. You can also have one time or recurring payments. Finally, Simple Membership comes with translations in close to 20 languages, which makes a difference, if you want a non-English membership site.
4. Membership 2 from WPMU DEV
As you probably guess from its name, Membership 2 is the successor of Membership, one of the first WordPress membership site plugins. Based on the number of the active installs (10,000) as stated by the WordPress.org site, this isn’t the most widely used plugin, but still it’s a popular one.
Membership 2 comes in two varieties – a free and a pro version. Of course, the paid versions (at 49 a month) offer more but even the free version comes with enough functionality to run a membership site, including a multisite one. The free version offers four membership options (Standard Membership, Dripped Content Membership, Guest Membership, and Default Membership).
With Membership 2 you can protect anything on your WordPress site: “pages, posts, comments, content below the “read more” tag, categories, menus, URLs, special pages, content by user role, media files, forums, downloads, videos, support…you name it”. Additionally, you can receive payments via PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, or manually accept payments in 25 currencies.
5. s2Member
s2Member is another free and very popular membership framework. It has a Pro version as well that comes with more features, more notably unlimited membership levels, coupon codes, and integration with more payment services.
You will find all the standard features, such as protect pages, posts, tags, categories. In addition to these, the plugin also offers some not so common features, such as the ability to protect portions of content within posts, pages, themes, and plugins, as well as downloadable files and streaming audio/video.
I also like the flexibility they give when you want to offer your users access to any particular page. With other plugins it’s usually based on the membership level, while here every user can choose every page/post and pay for it to be unlocked.
Conclusion
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