WooCommerce Membership Plugins Compared

Most WooCommerce membership plugins can restrict a page and charge a card every month, so the feature lists look interchangeable. What separates them is three things nobody puts on a pricing page: whether the recurring billing you need is a separate purchase, whether the headline price has a percentage of your revenue attached to it, and whether the company selling it to you still exists in the same shape it did eighteen months ago. In this category, that last one has stopped being theoretical.

Below: why memberships and subscriptions are different purchases, what WooCommerce does for free before you buy anything, the seven criteria I judged each option against, two vendor stories from the last two years that should change your shortlist, a table of versions, install counts and prices checked on 2 October 2026 against WooCommerce 11.1.2 on WordPress 7.1.2, and the arithmetic on the one plugin here that takes a cut of every payment.

A membership is access; a subscription is a payment schedule

These get used interchangeably and they are not the same product, which is the single most expensive mistake in this category.

A subscription is a billing arrangement: you charge the same card $29 on the 14th of every month until somebody stops it. A membership is an access rule: this person may read these 40 posts, download these files, see this product category, and get 15% off at checkout. You can have either one without the other. A lifetime membership sold for a single $300 payment has no subscription attached. A monthly coffee delivery is a subscription with nothing gated behind it.

Most real stores want both, and that is where the money leaks. Some plugins here do access control and leave billing to something else you have to buy separately. Others do both but bring their own checkout, so you end up running two carts on one site. Work out which half you actually need before you look at a price. If recurring billing is the whole of your problem and nothing is gated, you are in the wrong article — WooCommerce subscription plugins compared is the one you want.

What WooCommerce does for free

There is no membership feature in WooCommerce core, and there is no content restriction in WordPress core either beyond password-protecting individual posts. So the free baseline here is thinner than in most categories, but it is not nothing.

WordPress gives you user accounts and roles. WooCommerce gives you a customer account area, order history, and the ability to tell whether the person reading a page has bought a given product. Those three facts are enough to build simple gated access with about fifteen lines of code: check wc_customer_bought_product(), show the content or show a buy button. For one course sold to a few hundred people, that genuinely works and costs nothing.

Where it stops working is expiry, tiers and self-service. “Has bought” is permanent — it cannot express “bought, and the twelve months have run out”. It has no concept of a Silver tier that sees less than Gold. There is no renewal reminder, no member-facing page showing what they have access to, and no way to cancel without emailing you. Each of those is a thing you would have to build, and together they are why this category exists.

The seven criteria I judged each WooCommerce membership plugin on

Stated up front so you can reweight them if your store looks nothing like the one I assumed: a US business with an existing WooCommerce shop, selling 2–4 membership tiers to somewhere between 50 and 2,000 members, recurring monthly or annual billing through Stripe, and one person who configures plugins between other jobs.

1. Does recurring billing cost extra? Not “supports recurring payments” — is the billing engine included in the price on the page, or is it a second extension you have to buy. This is the biggest hidden cost in the category and it is never in the comparison tables vendors publish about each other.
2. Is there a percentage fee on top of the licence? One option here charges a share of every payment on its entry tier. That is not a licence cost, it is a tax on your growth, and it changes which plan is cheapest depending on your revenue.
3. One checkout or two? If the plugin brings its own cart and gateway connections, members buy through one flow and shop customers through another, with two sets of order records and two places to reconcile a refund. Sometimes that is fine. It is never free.
4. Does the free tier restrict and charge? Several free tiers do access control well and stop dead at taking money, which is the step that matters.
5. Vendor stability and update path. Membership data is the stickiest data on your site. A plugin you cannot leave, from a company whose ownership or distribution changed last year, is a different risk from a feature gap. Two options below have a live story here.
6. Export of members and their levels. The exit route. Members, levels, start dates and expiry dates live in plugin-owned tables; no CSV export means no migration, ever.
7. Renewal price, not first-year price. Introductory pricing at 50% off is the norm in this category and almost every plan here renews higher. Budget year two.

Two vendor stories that should change your shortlist

Criterion five is doing more work in this category than it would in most, because two of the best-known names here have had their distribution or ownership change since 2024. Neither story means “do not use it”. Both mean “know this before you commit your member database to it”.

Paid Memberships Pro left WordPress.org

On 17 October 2024, Paid Memberships Pro withdrew from the WordPress.org plugin repository at the author’s request, citing concerns about the repository’s governance. The plugin is still free, still open source, and by their own account still runs on unlimited sites with no licence — but you now get it from their website or their GitHub repository rather than from your WordPress dashboard’s plugin search.

The practical consequence is the update path. PMPro states that copies installed from WordPress.org before the withdrawal retain the code needed to keep updating from their servers, and they publish an Update Manager add-on to make that reliable. What you should not do is judge the plugin by its WordPress.org listing, which is frozen at v3.2.2, tested to WordPress 6.6.9, and marked closed. That page makes an actively maintained plugin look abandoned, and more than one shortlist has quietly dropped it for that reason.

Restrict Content Pro is now Kadence Memberships

In a blog post dated 14 May 2026, Liquid Web announced it was retiring the StellarWP brand and consolidating the plugins it had acquired. Restrict Content Pro was renamed Kadence Memberships; SolidWP’s security tools became Kadence Security; Iconic’s WooCommerce plugins became Kadence Shop Kit; MemberDash was folded into LearnDash. Seven product domains were redirected to Liquid Web landing pages.

The rollout went badly enough to be reported on. Lifetime-deal holders found they could not reach their downloads or API keys; documentation URLs returned 410s; and a “Liquid Web” item appeared in the WordPress admin menu of affected sites, which drew criticism as something a plugin should not add unasked. Existing plans were described as grandfathered, and the retired tools were said to receive critical security patches through April 2027, after which they are discontinued.

Read that last date carefully if you are buying in October 2026, because “critical security patches until April 2027” is roughly six months of runway, and it applies to the retired product names rather than to the Kadence-branded successors. If you adopt Kadence Memberships now you are adopting the renamed, continuing product — but you are doing it six months after a consolidation that locked some paying customers out of their own downloads. That belongs in your decision alongside the feature list.

WooCommerce membership plugins compared

Versions, install counts and ratings come from WordPress.org and the vendors’ own listings; prices come from each vendor’s pricing page. All checked on 2 October 2026, against WooCommerce 11.1.2 and WordPress 7.1.2. On a narrow screen this table stacks into one card per option rather than scrolling sideways.

The short read on that table: if you have an existing WooCommerce shop and want one checkout, start with Paid Member Subscriptions’ free version, because it is the only free tier here that restricts content and takes recurring payments and integrates with your products. If you want the deepest free feature set and will accept an off-repository update path, Paid Memberships Pro is unmatched at $0. If you want first-party Woo support and have budget, price WooCommerce Memberships plus WooCommerce Subscriptions together before you decide.

The 4.9% problem: why the cheap plan is the expensive one

MemberPress Launch is $199.50 for the first year and charges 4.9% of every transaction. Growth is $349.50 and charges nothing. The $150 difference looks like an upsell until you do the division.

The fee overtakes the price difference at $3,061 of annual membership revenue — about $255 a month. Above that, Launch costs you more than Growth. A store collecting $5,000 a month in memberships pays $245 a month in platform fees, or $2,940 a year, on top of the $199.50 licence and on top of whatever Stripe charges separately. That is eight times the licence cost, for the same software.

Year two is worse, because both plans renew at full price. Launch renews at $399 and Growth at $699, so the $300 gap now needs $6,122 of annual revenue — about $510 a month — before Growth wins. Below that, the fee really is cheaper. The point is not that one plan is a trap; it is that the ranking depends entirely on a number about your business that no pricing page knows.

Membership sites break caching, and caching breaks membership sites

This is the operational problem that catches people two weeks after launch, and it is worth understanding before you choose, because it is not a plugin bug you can report.

A full-page cache works by serving one stored copy of a page to everybody. A membership site’s whole purpose is that the page differs by who is asking. Those two facts cannot both hold, so every caching setup resolves the conflict by not caching for logged-in users — which means your members, the people paying you, get the slow uncached experience while anonymous visitors get the fast one. That is backwards from what you would want, and it is the correct behaviour.

Two things follow. First, your hosting needs to actually serve dynamic PHP quickly, because for members it always will be: object caching with Redis or Memcached, and enough PHP workers to handle concurrent logged-in requests, matter far more here than page-cache hit rate. Second, any page that shows restricted content must be excluded from the page cache explicitly, and a plugin that gates content via a shortcode or block inside an otherwise normal page is exactly the case a cache will get wrong — it will happily store the version rendered for a logged-out visitor and serve it to a member, or worse, store a member’s version and serve it to the public.

<?php
// wp-content/plugins/wpfairs-store-snippets/membership-cache.php
// Tell page caches never to store a response that contains restricted content.
// Most caching plugins and hosts honour DONOTCACHEPAGE; set the headers too
// so a CDN in front of the origin does not cache it either.

add_action(
	'template_redirect',
	function () {
		// Never cache anything rendered for a logged-in member.
		if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {
			if ( ! defined( 'DONOTCACHEPAGE' ) ) {
				define( 'DONOTCACHEPAGE', true );
			}

			nocache_headers();
			return;
		}

		// Also skip the cache on pages that mix public and gated content,
		// because the stored copy would be wrong for one audience or the other.
		if ( is_singular() ) {
			$post = get_queried_object();

			if ( $post instanceof WP_Post
				&& has_block( 'bloqra/alert', $post ) === false
				&& has_shortcode( (string) $post->post_content, 'pms-restrict' ) ) {

				if ( ! defined( 'DONOTCACHEPAGE' ) ) {
					define( 'DONOTCACHEPAGE', true );
				}

				nocache_headers();
			}
		}
	},
	0
);

Swap pms-restrict for whichever shortcode your plugin uses — every one of them has a different name, and you can find yours in the plugin’s documentation or by looking at a restricted post’s content. Put this in a small site-specific plugin rather than your theme’s functions.php, so switching themes does not quietly start caching members’ pages. WooCommerce caching plugins: what breaks and what works covers which plugins set logged-in exclusions for you and which need the rule written by hand, and slow WordPress admin dashboard: diagnose and fix it is the same underlying problem seen from the other side, since wp-admin is uncached by definition too.

Member email is the half nobody budgets for

A membership site sends far more transactional mail than a shop does. A shop emails you when you order and when it ships. A membership emails you on signup, on each renewal, when a card is about to expire, when a payment fails, when a retry succeeds, when access is about to lapse, and when it has lapsed. The payment-failed and renewal-reminder messages are the ones that are worth actual money: a member who never sees “your card was declined” becomes a cancellation you did not have to lose.

WordPress sends through PHP’s mail() by default, straight from your web server with no authentication, which is the exact pattern mailbox providers treat as suspicious. Route membership mail through authenticated SMTP with SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your sending domain before you take your first payment, and check that your plugin’s emails are actually enabled — several ship with the dunning messages switched off.

Test with a real inbox at a real provider — Gmail and Outlook.com both, from an address that has never emailed you — and check the spam folder explicitly rather than concluding it worked because something arrived. WordPress emails not sending has the full diagnostic sequence if nothing is arriving at all.

Five things to test before you charge anyone

• Expiry, by moving the clock rather than waiting. Create a membership that ended yesterday by editing its expiry date directly, then load a restricted page as that user. The failure mode you are looking for is access that persists after expiry because the check runs on “has a membership record” rather than “has a current one”. Do not discover this a year after launch, which is when it would otherwise surface.
• A failed renewal, end to end. Stripe’s test cards include ones that decline on the recurring charge rather than the first one. Use it and watch what happens: does access get revoked, after how long, does the member get an email, and can they fix their card without contacting you. This sequence is your churn rate and most people never test it.
• A member who is also a customer. Buy a normal product while logged in as a member with a 15% member discount active, and check the tax line. Member discounts and tax interact, and if the discount is applied after tax is calculated you will over-collect and not notice until a return is filed.
• Restricted content in search, feeds and the REST API. Gating the page template is not gating the content. Check that a restricted post does not appear in on-site search results with an excerpt that gives away the body, does not appear in /feed/, and returns nothing useful from /wp-json/wp/v2/posts/<id> to an unauthenticated request. The REST endpoint is the one that gets missed.
• Cancellation, by the member, without you. Log in as a test member and cancel. If you cannot find the button in under a minute, neither can they, and that becomes a support ticket and a chargeback. Confirm access continues to the end of the paid period rather than ending instantly, unless you intend otherwise.

Once you are live, reconcile monthly. The query that matters is the one that finds people whose access and whose billing disagree — members with no active subscription, and subscribers with no access.

# Which tables does your membership plugin own? Start here before anything else,
# because this is also the answer to "can I ever migrate off this".
wp db query "SHOW TABLES LIKE '%member%';"
wp db query "SHOW TABLES LIKE '%subscription%';"

# Then read the columns so you know what is exportable.
# Substitute the table name you found above.
wp db query "DESCRIBE wp_pms_member_subscriptions;"

# Active members by plan -- the number you report, and the number
# that should match your gateway's active subscription count.
wp db query "SELECT subscription_plan_id, status, COUNT(*) AS members
  FROM wp_pms_member_subscriptions
  GROUP BY subscription_plan_id, status
  ORDER BY subscription_plan_id;"

# The reconciliation that finds silent failures: access that has
# outlived its expiry date. Should return zero rows.
wp db query "SELECT user_id, subscription_plan_id, status, expiration_date
  FROM wp_pms_member_subscriptions
  WHERE status = 'active'
    AND expiration_date < CURDATE()
    AND expiration_date != '0000-00-00 00:00:00';"

Table and column names differ per plugin — run the SHOW TABLES and DESCRIBE lines first and adjust, and change the wp_ prefix if yours differs. Run these against a copy or a read replica where you can. Keep the active-members-by-plan figure each month: it is the number that tells you whether the business is working, and the gap between it and your gateway’s count is the number that tells you whether the plumbing is.

Back it up properly too. Membership tables are not standard WooCommerce tables, and a backup that captures uploads and posts but misses plugin-created tables will restore a site where nobody has access to anything they paid for. WooCommerce backup plugins compared for store owners covers getting the database half right, which matters more here than for most store data.

What to pick for your situation

• One tier, no expiry, under a few hundred people, and you can write a function. Build it on wc_customer_bought_product() and spend nothing. Revisit the day you want a second tier or an expiry date, because that is the day this stops being cheaper.
• Existing WooCommerce shop, want one checkout, have not bought anything. Paid Member Subscriptions, free tier. It restricts content, takes recurring Stripe and PayPal payments, and integrates with your products — the only free tier here that does all three. Budget for Basic if you need content dripping or group seats; note the price is in euros.
• You want the deepest feature set for $0 and will manage updates yourself. Paid Memberships Pro. Unlimited sites, all gateways, 28 restriction types, no licence required. Install from their site or GitHub, set up the Update Manager, and verify your host’s auto-updater can see it.
• First-party Woo support matters more than price. WooCommerce Memberships at $199/yr, with its 30-day refund window. Price WooCommerce Subscriptions alongside it before you commit, because recurring billing is not included and that changes the comparison with everything else here. The two-year plan at $159.20/yr is the better buy if you are confident.
• Courses are the product and the shop is incidental. MemberPress, on Growth rather than Launch unless you are confident of staying under roughly $255 a month in membership revenue. Its course tooling is the strongest here. Accept that you are running a second checkout alongside WooCommerce.
• You want profiles, directories and a community, and payment is secondary. Ultimate Member, which is the best tool in this table for that job and the wrong one for billing. Pair it with something else for payments rather than buying extensions to turn it into a membership platform.
• You are already on Restrict Content Pro. You are on Kadence Memberships now whether you moved or not. Confirm your licence, confirm where updates come from, and read the April 2027 patch date on the retired product names before you plan next year. How to troubleshoot a WordPress plugin conflict step by step is the method if the rename broke something on your site.

Frequently asked questions

The short version

Work out whether you are buying access control, billing, or both, and then price the whole stack rather than the headline. Two of the options here look cheaper than they are — WooCommerce Memberships because recurring billing is a separate extension, MemberPress Launch because 4.9% of your revenue is not printed next to the $199.50 — and one looks worse than it is, because Paid Memberships Pro’s WordPress.org page has been frozen since it left the repository in 2024.

If you already run WooCommerce and want one checkout, install Paid Member Subscriptions’ free version and run it for a quarter before paying anyone. If you want maximum capability at zero licence cost and will own the update path, that is Paid Memberships Pro. Either way, spend the first afternoon on the four things no feature list covers: a membership that expired yesterday, a renewal that declines, authenticated SMTP with the payment-failed email switched on, and your restricted posts checked against /feed/ and the REST API.

Then write down your active members by plan once a month, and check it against your gateway’s count. When those two numbers disagree, the difference is either access you are giving away or money you are not collecting, and it is always cheaper to find in a spreadsheet than in a support queue.