3 Best MemberPress Alternatives You Should Try

MemberPress is a simple way to monetize your site.

At the beginning of 2023, MemberPress announced that it had helped its customers make over $1 billion – money talks, and this figure speaks VOLUMES about the plugin’s success.

If you want to create a members-only section of your website, you’ve probably already considered it.

However, while MemberPress is powerful and effective, it doesn’t come without its limitations – a lot of which come directly from the plugin.

If you’re looking at other options (or you want to consider alternatives before you start using MemberPress), we’ve got you covered.

Let’s take a look at some powerful and responsive Memberpress alternatives, and explore their capabilities, pros and cons, and more.

What Is MemberPress?

MemberPress is one of the most popular, featured-loaded plugins for WordPress.

If you’re ready to monetize your site and create membership options, you’re probably considering using MemberPress.

With the MemberPress plugin, you can….

• Create free or paid membership levels to segment your users
• Restrict access to some or all of your site with memberships
• Add popular payment integrations such as PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net
• Create flexible payment plans with one-time fees, free trials, one-off registration fees, and more
• Generate and use coupons to market your site
• Integrate with useful tools like Zapier
• Access detailed reports and manage your memberships and subscriptions
• Build courses for your members with the MemberPress course builder

MemberPress is pretty simple to set up on both the front end and the back end, and it offers a clean and responsive user experience for your members.

Setting up payment options and membership levels is easy, and you can even use the WooCommerce Plus plugin to help process your MemberPress payments if you want to use more than one gateway.

One big benefit of MemberPress is that you can create unlimited membership levels, including both free and paid options.

You can also choose how long to give your users access for their payment and membership level from Lifetime, Expire, or the Fixed Expire options.

You can even offer trial periods or limit the number of payment cycles!

MemberPress: Setting Up

Once you’ve set up your membership levels, you can start restricting content on your website.

MemberPress makes this pretty simple, and you’ll be given two ways to restrict access. These are:

• Creating rules to restrict specific content or bulk, such as all posts in a certain subcategory
• Use dedicated block, page builder integrations, or shortcodes to restrict specific segments of your website

You’ll have a lot of flexibility with restrictions, and you’ll get to choose the content you want to restrict and who can access certain content.

The specifics go a little deeper, though. You can restrict…

• All content
• All content in a specific category
• All content with a certain tag
• Single posts
• A single page
• Partial pages
• Custom URLs

Let’s not forget the content dripping and expiration features, where you can make content available or unavailable, at certain times, depending on your preferences.

When you’re setting up, you’ll also have access to other flexible, customizable features, including:

• Configuring Emails: Set up reminders, use mail integration for marketing emails, and more.
• Membership Management: Use membership management to see details of specific members and export the data if required
• Manage Subscriptions and Transactions: These designated areas let you see all of the subscriptions for your site, and you can edit details in a flash.

Pros And Cons Of MemberPress

If you’re considering MemberPress alternatives, it’s probably because you’re aware of its limitations.

So, let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of using MemberPress.

Pros

• Easy to set up
• Plenty of personalization
• Make as many membership levels as you need
• Sophisticated reporting features
• Various integrations available

Cons

• Personalizing forms can be a struggle. Registration and login forms can be buggy and complex
• Expensive to use, and there’s no lifetime option
• Integrations are not built inside the plugin, which is inconvenient
• The interface can be a little complicated for site owners
• It’s hard to make MemberPress consistent with your brand
• No functional app

MemberPress Alternatives

If you’re considering using a MemberPress alternative, you’re not alone. Although MemberPress clearly has some excellent features, it’s not for everyone.

So, without further ado, let’s consider some powerful alternatives to this popular plugin.

Mighty Networks

First up, we have Mighty Networks. This all-in-one platform is a reliable, user-friendly, and pretty popular alternative to MemberPress.

Mighty Networks prides itself on being a community-based platform – this gives you the power to create your own community, add different membership levels, live stream, create and sell courses, and much, much more.

Some of the most popular features of Mighty Networks include…

• A mobile app that lets your users and students access your content and courses wherever they are
• A course builder that allows you to customize the virtual design of your course, add in your own lessons, and more
• Schedule course content and delivery with features like drip schedule, which let you publish specific sections of content at certain times
• Stream live classes with the Zoom integration – no coding required!
• Student discussion and messaging, so members can chat with each other (and you) on the platform
• Website builder, complete with templates and plenty of customizable options
• Use the sales tracker to keep tabs on how much money you’re making and see how your courses are performing in real-time
• Use the email marketing tool to create and send marketing emails to up to 100 users
• Create membership sites and plans for your users. Determine who you want to target, what you want to sell, and customize your plans accordingly.
• Payment integrations such as Stripe help organize all of your payments in one place
• Benefit from a full payment gateway, so you can charge in whatever currency you desire
• Keep your content on WordPress or build your own content library on Mighty Networks

Who Should Use Mighty Networks?

Mighty Networks is a great community platform, but it’s primarily geared toward educators.

It’s clean, responsive, and has almost everything you could think of to monetize your online community, making it a great alternative to MemberPress.

Pros

• Create courses and charge access according to your membership preferences
• Use native apps for iOS and Android – this is a big benefit to your users
• Create sub-groups
• Let your members personalize their notifications
• Live stream on the platform with no coding required

Cons

• Limited payment integrations
• No native support for regular or live videos
• A transaction fee is charged on all pricing tiers

MemberSpace

MemberSpace is another flexible alternative to MemberPress, but how do its features compare?

With MemberSpace, you can create your own memberships on WordPress or choose to move to another CMS without any disruption for your members.

With MemberSpace, you can quickly block access to any pages on your website, choose where you want to set up memberships and let MemberSpace take care of the rest.

Straight out of the box, MemberSpace is far simpler than MemberPress.

MemberSpace is specifically designed for non-technical people, and it gets the job done with a very hands-off approach for its users.

MemberSpace doesn’t just work with WordPress, either. It can also be used with other major CMSs, including Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, and HTML.

With MemberSpace, you can…

• Create member-only pages with limited access. This can be content, videos, links, or pictures
• Customize pop-ups and control which members have access to certain pages with the drip content feature. This is ideal for those selling online courses and videos
• Control members’ access to your content through the dashboard. Choose how long members can access your content, and choose to limit content after a certain period
• Track analytics for your members through their own personal MemberSpace account, which they receive when they become a paid member
• See the billing history of your members and set up automatic billing dates in just a few clicks
• Create free trial periods and have full control over the customization of trail periods, duration, and which content can be accessed during a free trial
• Create as many membership tiers as you want
• Benefit from convenient payment tools such as filed charge recovery and tax collecting
• Integrate with popular payment methods like Stripe
• Integrate with Zapier and create forums, podcasts, affiliate programs, and member directories
• View analytics of your site subscriptions, and other features like content views, downloads, signups, and more, directly within MemberSpace

Who Should Use MemberSpace?

MemberSpace is a versatile platform that comes with exceptional features and recommendations.

Unlike platforms like Mighty Networks, MemberSpace is geared toward ANYONE who wants to introduce memberships to their website or restrict content.

Whatever your business and whatever your niche, MemberSpace can do the job for you.

If you’re still getting used to the technicalities of your website (or you’re just not technically minded), MemberSpace may be the ideal platform for you.

It’s specifically designed to be as simple as possible to set up, and they take care of most of the complicated stuff for you.

As you can see, MemberSpace has most of the same features as MemberPress, just without the extra complexity.

Here’s a closer look at the pros and cons of MemberSpace.

Pros

• No coding knowledge required to set things up
• Additional marketing features like affiliate links, coupons, and upsells are great additions
• Use MemberPress with other Content Management Systems, not just WordPress
• Create unlimited websites with unlimited members
• Detailed reporting and analytics to track your progress

Cons

• Great for small businesses, but with limited features, this probably isn’t ideal for bigger businesses
• Can slow down some WordPress websites

ClubExpress

If neither of these competitors pique your interest, let us introduce you to ClubExpress.

ClubExpress is a comprehensive member management platform and integrated cloud software that’s geared toward clubs and associations.

If this is you, read on. With this member management platform, you can do it all.

ClubExpress allows its users to manage subscribers, websites, communications, financials, content, and support, and all website admins will have complete control over the user experience.

This is a very hands-on, feature-rich software and a fierce MemberPress competitor.

Some of the key features of ClubExpress include…

• Control the front and back end of your site with ease. The user interface is beautifully laid out, and most of the navigation is handled with simply logos (such as a pen for editing and a person for people management)
• Select which pages you want to appear in membership signup, what information is required and what is optional, and what questions you want to ask users as they fill out your forms
• Members have control over their visibility, bios, what links they want to access, and more
• Choose from three membership options: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary members can handle membership payments, secondary members have their own accounts, can sign up for events, talk in forum, and have some admin rights, and tertiary members don’t have logins, but they’re still in the database
• Process payments through the platform with a number of payment integrations. However, Clubexpress doesn’t use a separate gateway (like PayPal) – instead, it has its own automated clearing house (ACH) payment distributor
• Manage membership fees and donations straight from the dashboard
• Custom-branded mobile apps: from here, you can access most of the desktop features, including member directory, storefront, and more. Each app is custom-branded to a specific club
• Access the ‘meets’ feature on the mobile app: this allows you to use geolocation to create meetups with channel members
• Website hosting, site bandwidth, storage, file storage, admin numbers, and the number of emails sent through its marketing tools are not charged for
• Create events and track attendance. You can also set registration and fee details, customize text, and link to financial accounts to track revenue when you create an event

Who Should Use ClubExpress?

As you’ve probably already noticed, ClubExpress is not as versatile as MemberSpace.

However, this doesn’t mean you should discard it- especially if you’re a club or association.

ClubExpress is made for clubs and associations to help them manage their membership, create events, track financials, access email marketing tools, and so much more.

ClubExpress packs a LOT of functionality into its services.

All-in-all, it’s a business operations software solution: it not only includes some of the key features of MemberPress, but it also has more sophisticated, targeted features for clubs and associations.

It’s feature-rich and handles almost every aspect of club and association management, all from one platform.

This is far more than just a member management platform, and it’s ideal for clubs and associations looking for a powerful, all-in-one solution.

Here are some of the pros and cons of ClubExpress:

Pros

• It’s not just a membership management platform: this is an all-in-one software solution for clubs and associations. This saves time and money and makes managing business processes far easier
• Completely cloud-based, which eliminates the need for a ‘super-user’
• Easy to use with a responsive interface
• Handles all things from member management and email marketing to financials, facilitating meetups, and more

Cons

• Can be difficult to set up for non-experienced users
• Some aspects of the design can be clunky and difficult to use

Should You Use A MemberPress Alternative?

MemberPress is a great membership management plugin that can help you monetize your site and create a user-friendly experience for your users.

Although MemberPress is one of the most popular membership management plugins, we urge you not to shy away from alternative providers.

MemberPress is notoriously pricey, and although it has some great features, it actually looks pretty limited when compared to other competitors.

If you’re in charge of a club or association, for example, you’ll probably find that your money will go further with an all-in-one platform like ClubExpress.

Although MemberPress has an attractive interface, it can be tricky to set up – especially for those with limited experience.

You’ll probably find that alternatives like MemberSpace can ease some of your stress and do most of the heavy lifting for you.

Membership Management Software: Things To Consider

If you’re exploring alternative membership management software, there are a few things you’ll need to consider, including…

• Your Budget: Most membership management software comes at a price, but how much are you willing to spend? Look for the most feature-rich alternatives to make your money go further, especially if you’re already dependent on multiple software.
• Desired Integrations: What integrations do you need? Find out whether your software offers accounting integrations, payment gateway integration, and more.
• Your Business: What’s the nature of your business or website? If you can’t find software that’s targeted to your niche, choose a more versatile option, such as MemberSpace.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, MemberPress is a powerful but restrictive plugin.

When you take a look at what other competitors are offering, MemberPress can seem a bit basic.

If you want the most bang for your buck, you’ll probably find a more feature-rich software that can do everything you need, and then some.

So, before you install MemberPress, check out alternative providers and do your own research to make an informed decision.