The 7 best WordPress membership plugins — and what they cost at renewal

How I compared these plugins

First, so you know where I'm standing: I like WordPress. I've been running blogs on it since 2012 and I still do. This is not a hit piece from someone who's never installed a plugin. It's a pricing audit from someone who has been paying these invoices for years.

Because that's the thing nobody audits. Every roundup ranks these plugins by feature list. Features are easy to tabulate and almost never what goes wrong. What goes wrong is the invoice. Specifically the second one.

So, three rules:

• The renewal price is the price. Nearly every premium plugin here halves your first year. I quote what your card gets charged in month 13.
• Five years, not one month. You're not picking what to try this weekend. You're picking what you'll be migrating away from in 2031.
• Every figure came off the vendor's own pricing page on 6 August 2026, and each one is linked. Where a vendor won't publish a renewal price, the table says so instead of guessing.

One more cost sits on top of every row below and belongs to none of them: WordPress hosting. And no, your $3-a-month shared plan won't do — for a reason I'll get to in the caching section. Budget $20–$50 a month on top of whatever licence you buy.

WordPress membership plugin prices at renewal

The whole list on one axis. Licence cost only — WordPress hosting is extra on every row except the last one, where it's already included.

Prices read off each vendor's own pricing page on 6 August 2026. Five-year figures assume the published renewal price holds. WordPress hosting is extra on every row except SoloStore, whose five-year total already includes about $7 a month of hosting — so if anything the comparison flatters the plugins.

Two things jump out. MemberPress Growth and MemberMouse Pro are identical to the cent, in both years — $349.50 then $699 — which tells you what this category has quietly agreed it's worth. And the cheap tiers are cheap for a reason: MemberPress Launch is the bargain because it takes a cut of your sales.

1. MemberPress — the default, if you buy the right tier

MemberPress tops nearly every list for good reason: memberships, courses, content dripping, coupons and payments in one plugin, with the biggest install base to match. It's a good product. The trap is which tier you land on.

Launch — $199.50 year one, $399 after — is the tier most people click, and the one to think hardest about. Stripe only. And right next to the price, the pricing table prints "+Transaction Fees": on this tier MemberPress takes a slice of every payment you collect. Growth is the first tier that reads 0%. Read that again before you pick the cheap one.

Growth — $349.50 then $699 — is the real product. Zero transaction fees, content dripping, PayPal and Square alongside Stripe, unlimited course quizzes and assignments, completion certificates, community forums and a member directory.

Scale — $499.50 then $999 — adds the affiliate platform, a REST API, Amazon S3 for file delivery, order bumps, corporate accounts and gifting.

• Best for: a recurring membership or paid community that needs to live inside an existing WordPress site.
• The catch: $3,146 over five years on Growth, before hosting — and the tier that looks affordable is the one that charges you per sale.

I've written a longer piece on the renewal maths specifically: the MemberPress alternative comparison.

2. Paid Memberships Pro — the strongest free version

If you want to gate content without paying anyone, PMPro is the answer. The free core on wordpress.org is a real membership plugin, not a crippled trial: levels, recurring billing, content restriction, member management.

The paid tiers are where it gets interesting. Standard is $499 a year — and it doesn't halve for the first year, which makes it look expensive next to MemberPress on day one and cheaper than it by year three. Max is $999 a year and bundles managed hosting; read that in light of the caching section below, because a membership plugin vendor selling you hosting is not an upsell so much as an admission.

• Best for: anyone who wants to validate a paid membership before spending money, and developers comfortable assembling their own stack.
• The catch: the free version expects you to know what you're doing. Add-ons cover the gaps, and wiring them together is your afternoon.

3. MemberMouse — priced like MemberPress, aimed at subscription businesses

MemberMouse mirrors MemberPress almost exactly on price: Basic $149.50 then $299, Plus $249.50 then $499, Pro $349.50 then $699. What's unusual is the honesty — its pricing page states plainly that "all annual renewals are at full price", which is more than most of this list does.

Where it earns its keep is retention: reporting on churn and lifetime value, decision-tree upsells, and dunning for failed payments. If your business is subscriptions rather than courses, that's the right set of features to be paying for.

• Best for: a subscription business with enough volume that churn reporting changes decisions.
• The catch: same $3,146 over five years as MemberPress Growth, and a smaller ecosystem around it.

4. SureMembers — the cheapest real licence, and the only lifetime option

SureMembers is content restriction done properly rather than an everything-suite: Starter $69 then $99, Pro $149 then $199, Business $199 then $299. There's also a Business Lifetime licence at $599 once, against a $1,299 list price.

If you already have a course plugin, or you sell through WooCommerce, and all you actually need is "members at this level can see this content," SureMembers costs about a third of MemberPress Growth's renewal to do that one job well.

• Best for: gating content on a site whose commerce is already handled elsewhere.
• The catch: it is not an LMS and not a checkout. It restricts; you supply the rest.

5. WooCommerce Memberships — only if you already run WooCommerce

$199 a year, or $318.40 for two. The useful detail buried on its product page: WooCommerce Subscriptions is a separate $279-a-year extension and is not required — Memberships works standalone. You only need Subscriptions if you want recurring billing.

Which sets the real number. One-time course access on WooCommerce: $199 a year. A recurring membership: $478 a year in extensions, before hosting and before the plugins you'll add to make the checkout tolerable.

• Best for: a store that already sells physical or digital products on WooCommerce and wants to add member-only access.
• The catch: if you are not already on WooCommerce, adopting it to run a membership is a large amount of machinery for the job.

6. Kadence Memberships — what actually happened to Restrict Content Pro

This is the one every other 2026 roundup gets wrong. Restrict Content Pro is still sitting in those articles as a live $99-a-year recommendation. It isn't one. It's gone.

As of today, restrictcontentpro.com — root domain and pricing page both — fires a 301 redirect at Liquid Web's Kadence add-ons page. And Restrict Content Pro isn't sold on the page it dumps you on. The successor is Kadence Memberships, which you can't buy on its own at all: it's bundled into Kadence Pro at $299 a year and Elite at $499. The free Restrict Content plugin is still on wordpress.org.

If you're running RCP right now, nothing has broken. But a product that's become a bundled feature of somebody else's suite is on a very different trajectory to one still being sold on its own. And "the plugin got acquired" is the number one reason a WordPress stack ends up needing re-platforming.

7. Simple Membership — free, and honest about being small

A free plugin on wordpress.org that does levels and content protection with no paid core tier waiting behind it. There are paid add-ons for specific integrations, but the thing itself is free and stays free.

• Best for: a members' area with no commercial ambitions — a resource library, a club, an internal site.
• The catch: minimal commerce, minimal course tooling, minimal hand-holding.

The renewal price is the real price

I care about this line more than any other on the page, and here's why.

A while back I woke up to an email I hated: MailerLite, the autoresponder I'd been using for years, was putting its prices up 19%. Same week, my course platform — Teachable — did its own version of the same thing. I'd wanted out of Teachable for three years by then, because of the bugs and the crappy support. Like a good human, I'd been procrastinating year after year. Then the renewal date showed up and made the decision for me.

That's the whole problem with annual software. You don't choose when you re-evaluate it. The invoice chooses for you, usually at the worst possible moment, and by then you have three years of content sitting inside the thing.

So look at the pattern across the table rather than any single row. MemberPress: $349.50 then $699. MemberMouse: $349.50 then $699. SureMembers Pro: $149 then $199. Kadence: $299, then a number they won't print. Most of this category advertises a price that isn't the price.

That's not a scandal. It's just how WordPress plugins are sold. But it quietly wrecks the comparison every roundup makes, because they line first-year prices up against each other — including against products that never discounted at all. Paid Memberships Pro Standard looks $150 more expensive than MemberPress Growth on day one. Over five years it's $651 cheaper.

The bill nobody itemises: WordPress itself

Every number above is the plugin. None of it is WordPress. And WordPress charges its own tax, which no licence comparison has ever put in a column.

So let me say the 2012 thing again, because I want this read the right way. I like WordPress. I publish on it. It is the best writing software on the internet. It is also clunky and slow, and it was never built to run a store. Three costs come with that, and you pay all three on top of whatever licence you bought.

1. Speed you have to buy back. There is an entire hosting industry built on the phrase "fast WordPress hosting," charging you $30 a month and up to make one miserable blog load quickly. That industry exists because the default is slow. On a membership site you pay that tax on the pages that matter most: a sales page that takes four seconds converts worse than one that takes one, and every sale you make is downstream of that page.

2. Gutenberg. You are going to build lesson pages and sales pages in the block editor, and you are not going to enjoy it. Which is why almost nobody does — they buy Elementor or Bricks or Divi instead. That's another licence, another renewal, and another few hundred kilobytes loaded onto the page you just paid a premium host to make fast.

3. It was never a store. WordPress is publishing software with selling bolted onto the side. So you duct-tape it together:

• WordPress itself, plus a host quick enough to run it uncached
• a theme — then a page builder, because the theme won't make sales pages
• the membership plugin, plus a checkout plugin, plus something to run the funnel
• and Zapier, to make any two of them speak to each other

Every one of those updates on its own schedule. Keeping them compatible is now your job: unpaid, forever, and always on the morning you meant to record a lesson.

There's a fourth thing too, which isn't a cost until it very suddenly is. WordPress runs something like a quarter of the web, which makes it the most attacked software on it. A newsletter marketer I know woke up to over 2,000 fraudulent signups on his WordPress site in a single weekend. On a brochure site that's an afternoon of cleanup. On a membership site, where "user account" means "paid access," it's your product.

Why membership sites break your caching

Which brings us to the specific technical reason that hosting bill is bigger than you think.

Page caching works by storing one copy of a page and handing it to everybody. A membership site can't do that. A logged-in member has to see their dashboard, their courses, their progress. WordPress sets a logged-in cookie, and every sane cache takes one look at that cookie and steps aside.

So for your members — the only visitors you're actually getting paid for — the cache is off. Every single page view runs PHP and hits the database. Three consequences:

• You need real hosting — this is the reason that $30-a-month industry exists. Cheap shared plans are priced on the assumption that nearly every request comes out of cache. Yours won't.
• Exclude account, login and checkout pages by hand. Miss this and you get the classic membership-site bug: a cached dashboard served to the wrong logged-in person. It is exactly as bad as it sounds, and it happens all the time.
• Object caching beats page caching here. Redis or Memcached cuts the database work that logged-in requests actually generate. Page caching mostly can't help you.

It's also the honest answer to why Paid Memberships Pro sells a tier with hosting bundled in. And it's the line missing from every "but WordPress is cheaper" calculation you've ever read.

You may not need a membership plugin at all

A membership plugin solves exactly one problem: recurring access that has to be switched off when payment stops. Paid community, subscription library, monthly cohort — you need one. Buy MemberPress or Paid Memberships Pro and stop reading, genuinely.

But if you sell a course once, for a one-time price, you don't have that problem. You have a much smaller one: give this buyer permanent access to this content. That's it.

Solving that with a membership plugin means renewing a subscription-management engine every year for a business with no subscriptions in it — and then paying the whole WordPress tax from two sections ago on top: the hosting, the page builder, the glue, the updates.

The question isn't whether you can build a course platform out of WordPress. Of course you can. The question is whether you should.

That's the gap SoloStore exists for. It isn't a plugin. It's one application you deploy to your own hosting in about five minutes, with courses, funnels, checkout and delivery already inside it, running on your own Stripe account. $497 once, no renewal, no cut of your sales, and about $7 a month to host. No page builder to buy, no Zapier in the middle, and the sales pages load almost instantly because there's no plugin stack in front of them. I built it on purpose not on WordPress, and I built it because I got tired of the invoices in the section above.

And the honest other side, because a page that only flatters itself is an advert: SoloStore is not WordPress. The plugin ecosystem isn't available to you. No affiliate programme, no gradebook, no corporate accounts, no freelancer on every corner who already knows the admin. If you need any of that, buy MemberPress Scale and don't look back. The five-year difference is real money — but so is shipping the thing you actually meant to sell.