The Best Membership Plugins for WordPress in 2026 (Based on real work with our customers!)

One of the questions that I hear most frequently is:

“What is the best membership plugin for WordPress?”

This is kind of like asking “what’s the best car to drive?”

Because it really depends on your needs, your future vision for your site, and frankly, on you.

While I always try to match my recommendations to the specific person and situation, I generally recommend the same membership plugins over and over again.

Let’s take a look at which options might be right for you.

It goes without saying that these are all plugins that my team and I have worked with extensively and I only write about things with which I have real experience!

1 – MemberPress

MemberPress is our favorite WordPress membership plugin.

I attribute this in part to the fact that Mike and Callie from the Membership Academy (where I’m a member, too) promote MemberPress to their substantial audience as their preferred WordPress plugin.

But in fact, MemberPress is an excellent membership solution.

It’s easy to get started with thanks to their setup wizard.

And while it’s highly functional it’s also fairly easy to use (with a few caveats).

MemberPress also maintains several official integrations with various apps (although they’ve recently discontinued their WooCommerce integration).

On top of that, there are many 3rd party extensions available for MemberPress, including several of our own! 🙂

PROS

• Extensive developer tools along with REST API
• Easy to set up

CONS

• Transactions-based access might be confusing
• Content protection rules are a bit developer-y
• Forced 2-step registration
• Shopping cart somewhat limited in styling and payment processor integrations

2 – Paid Memberships Pro

Paid Memberships Pro is the plugin I recommend when someone wants a flexible, developer-friendly membership site without a big license cost up front. The core is free and open source, and you bolt on only the add-ons you actually need, which keeps the site lean. It has a large add-on library, a well-documented API, and an active community, so it scales as you grow.

It is more technical than MemberPress or MemberMouse, and the default screens are more functional than pretty. But for leaner or budget-conscious sites, and for anyone who wants to own their stack with no vendor lock-in, it is an excellent choice. We have built and migrated plenty of sites on PMPro.

PROS

• Free, open-source core
• Modular add-ons keep your site lean
• Developer friendly with a solid REST API
• Large add-on library and active community

CONS

• More code-oriented than MemberPress or MemberMouse
• Default UI is functional rather than polished
• Some features require paid add-ons

3 – MemberMouse

MemberMouse is one of my favorite membership plugins.

It has tons of advanced functionality, a beautiful UX, and is fairly easy to work with.

The MM support team is also very responsive and helpful.

PROS:

• Great UX
• Plenty of integrations
• Advanced reporting on membership metrics
• Responsive support
• Straightforward pricing
• Easy for developers to customize (and additional developer tools coming soon!)

CONS:

• Cumbersome products system
• License only good for one domain (additional licenses cost extra)
• No ActiveCampaign integration out of the box
• Core pages system can get messy

For the full scoop, make sure to check out my very extensive MemberMouse Review.

4 – Restrict Content Pro

I’m a big fan of Restrict Content Pro because it’s so easy to use while at the same time being very powerful.

I would say RCP is one of the most intuitive WordPress plugins.

It’s also built in a modular fashion so you can activate only the extensions you need, thus keeping your site lean.

Restrict Content Pro also offers granular reports, although I’ve found them to be a bit unintuitive (though serviceable).

PROS

• Very easy to use and work with
• Modular
• Reporting

CONS

5 – ActiveMember360 / iMember360

ActiveMember360 and its sister plugin, iMember360 are a different breed of membership plugin.

They work by reading tags directly from your ActiveCampaign and Keap (formerly InfusionSoft) accounts, respectively.

Based on the information in a user’s contact record within ActiveCampaign or Keap, ActiveMember then takes the specified action.

This means that your email marketing tool effectively becomes the control center of your membership.

Personally, I love this approach and wrote about it in my post about the Deep Integration Movement.

If you’re using ActiveCampaign or Keap, and you’re building a substantial membership site where you want to have total flexibility and control, then ActiveMember / iMember is the best solution on the market, period.

There’s a ridiculous amount of cool stuff you can do when you’re pulling info on your members directly from your email marketing app.

Check out some real examples of my friend Lesly doing cool stuff with ActiveMember360 below:

6 – Memberium

Memberium is basically the same thing as ActiveMember / iMember.

They’re direct competitors.

Personally I’ve always preferred ActiveMember because the developer Bob Keen has been amazing with support.

Bob’s plugin has also been around longer and is generally ahead of the curve.

However, Memberium seems to work great too.

In fact, Gael and Mark over at AuthorityHacker use it for their AH Pro membership and it’s been pretty reliable.

Gael and Mark have engaged us from time to time via our MemberFix service and we never found anything to complain about with Memberium for ActiveCampaign.

7 – WP Fusion

WP Fusion is a very cool plugin from developer Jack Arturo (who happens to be a very nice guy).

What it does is allow you to use any membership plugin and hook it up with your CRM.

But you can also use WP Fusion in a similar way as you would use ActiveMember or Memberium.

That’s because WPFusion allows you to protect your content with tags.

In fact, WPFusion is an insanely useful plugin because it allows you to “glue” together your various WordPress components with your CRM, sync tags, trigger automations, etc., all based on actions within WordPress.

8 – AccessAlly

AccessAlly also belongs to the Deep Integration category of membership plugins.

You can integrate with ConvertKit, ActiveCampaiagn and Keap.

Just like ActiveMember it will perform actions in your membership based on the data in a member’s contact record.

What makes AccessAlly unique is that it has a built in LMS and a beautiful theme.

In fact, AccessAlly is a UX and design centric product which is marketed primarily to women (though you don’t have to be a woman to use it 😉

I’ve had the founder of AccessAlly, Nathalie Lussier, on my podcast and she made no bones about the necessity of our apps to be beautiful in order for us to enjoy using them.

I didn’t realize how much even the back-end design of a membership plugin could affect users because I’m not too fussed about it as long as it works.

But when some of our memberFix customers asked us to migrate them away from DAP—citing fugliness and technical issues as their main reasons—I realized that presentation and user experience are paramount, and women seem to feel this more acutely than men.