A membership plugin turns a WordPress site into something that can gate content and collect recurring revenue, monthly, quarterly, or annual, depending on how you set it up. The mechanics are similar across most of them: restrict content, register members, take payment. Where they differ is in how flexible the restriction rules are, which payment gateways they support, and whether you’re paying once, annually, or per month for hosting bundled in.
Three reasons this matters beyond just “locking content”:
- Email list building, registered members are already a list of engaged users, not just names collected passively.
- Authority, a paywall signals that what’s behind it is worth paying for, which shapes how visitors perceive the free content too.
- Recurring revenue, predictable payments beat one-off sales for planning around.
The plugins, checked against what’s actually still around
Two plugins that used to anchor lists like this one are no longer what they were, one closed for a guideline violation, the other pulled its free listing entirely. Both are called out below instead of silently dropped.
1. s2Member
Still free, still actively maintained (v260508, patched for PHP 8.1+ compatibility this year), with 8,000+ active installs. It restricts WordPress posts, BuddyPress/bbPress content, and even sections inside a post, by URL, custom post type, page, shortcode, or file download. Alternative view types, RSS feeds, search results, comment feeds, nav menus, can be restricted too, and the Pro version adds content dripping.
Payment-wise, the free version handles PayPal Standard; Pro adds PayPal Pro, Stripe, and Authorize.net, plus coupon codes, gift certificates, and unlimited subscription levels.
Cost: Free, with a one-time $89 fee for the Pro single-site license.
2. WP-Members
WP-Members works from the opposite direction of most membership plugins: you mark which content is public, and everything else stays restricted by default. It’s actively maintained (v3.5.6, 50,000+ installs, security-patched as recently as five months ago) and integrates with WooCommerce, BuddyPress, bbPress, and Easy Digital Downloads. Custom registration and profile fields, menu restrictions, post-excerpt teasers, and admin approval for new registrations are all built in, with 120+ hooks for deeper customization if you’re comfortable with code.
Cost: Free with limited functionality; premium starts at $59/year or $499 lifetime.
3. Ultimate Membership Pro
Sold on CodeCanyon rather than WordPress.org, still actively updated (v13.7.5, 41,000+ sales, 4.56/5 across nearly 1,000 reviews). It handles multi-level free or paid access, restricting by post, page, custom post type, category, tag, file, URL, or partial content via shortcode. Payment gateways include Stripe, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and Braintree, and it adds social login, membership badges, a public members directory, and printable membership cards on top of the restriction basics.
Cost: $69 regular license, $129 extended, via standard CodeCanyon licensing.
4. Ultimate Member (replacing ARMember)
ARMember, previously listed here, was closed on WordPress.org in February 2025 for a guideline violation and is no longer available. Ultimate Member is a comparable free alternative that’s actually gaining ground, 200,000+ active installs, updated as recently as this month. It covers custom registration forms, profile builders, content restriction by role or membership level, and a built-in form builder for signup pages without touching code.
Cost: Free core plugin; premium extensions available for payment gateways, courses, and advanced restriction.
5. Paid Memberships Pro
This one changed enough that it’s worth flagging directly: Paid Memberships Pro was removed from the WordPress.org repository in October 2024 (author’s own request, not a violation) and now sells exclusively through its own site. The plugin itself is still 100% GPL and open source, and a free self-hosted download is still available, but the pricing model has shifted toward bundled managed hosting rather than a standalone plugin fee, plans now start at $49/month and go up to $299/month for higher order volumes, with hosting, support, and 60+ add-ons included.
If you just want the plugin without the hosting bundle, the free self-hosted version is still there; if you want Wbcom’s team to have vetted the swap already, the alternatives above cover similar ground without the pricing shift.
Cost: Free self-hosted plugin; paid plans (hosting included) from $49/month.
6. Kadence Memberships (formerly Restrict Content Pro)
Restrict Content Pro was rebranded to Kadence Memberships after Nexcess (part of Liquid Web, which also owns Kadence) took over the product. It’s still the same lightweight, straightforward approach to content restriction, unlimited membership levels, restriction by post type or category, CSV export, and membership performance reports, now listed on WordPress.org under the Kadence name with 9,000+ active installs.
Restriction options cover any subscription level, paid-only levels, specific levels, tiered access above a given level, or WordPress user role, with payment support for PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, 2Checkout, and Authorize.net.
Cost: Check current pricing on kadencewp.com, it’s shifted since the rebrand, so don’t rely on old Restrict Content Pro pricing you may have seen elsewhere.
Picking one
Free and actively maintained (s2Member, WP-Members, Ultimate Member) covers most standard content-gating needs without a recurring plugin cost. Paid options make more sense once you need deeper payment gateway support, drip content, or a polished members-only experience out of the box, Ultimate Membership Pro and Kadence Memberships both fit that case at a one-time or modest annual cost. Paid Memberships Pro is worth a look specifically if bundled hosting appeals to you, less so if you just want a plugin.
What separates the free options in practice
On paper, s2Member, WP-Members, and Ultimate Member solve the same problem: keep some content locked, let paying or registered users through. The differences show up once you actually configure a site. s2Member leans toward per-content restriction, you can lock a single paragraph inside a post rather than the whole page, which suits sites where free content and paid content sit on the same URL. WP-Members flips the default so almost everything requires registration unless you mark it public, a better fit for membership sites where the free tier is genuinely thin. Ultimate Member was built around community features first and payment gating second, so if your site already has member profiles and a directory, the restriction rules bolt onto infrastructure that’s already there instead of adding a parallel system.
None of the three ships with recurring billing fully built in at the free tier. s2Member’s free version only handles PayPal Standard, which means no subscription retries or dunning management if a card fails. WP-Members needs a companion plugin, WooCommerce Memberships or Easy Digital Downloads, to actually charge anyone. Ultimate Member’s payment handling lives in paid add-ons. If recurring revenue is the actual goal rather than just content gating, budget for at least one paid extension no matter which free core plugin you start with.
Membership gating on a BuddyPress-powered community
A lot of the traffic landing on this page is running BuddyPress or a BuddyPress-based theme already, so it’s worth separating two different jobs that get conflated: restricting content, and running a community. A membership plugin handles the first job. It doesn’t give you activity feeds, member profiles, groups, or private messaging, those come from BuddyPress itself or from whatever’s built on top of it.
Wiring a membership plugin onto a BuddyPress community usually means stitching together two separate systems: mapping subscription levels to BuddyPress roles, hiding activity streams from non-members, syncing profile fields between the two. It works, but it’s integration work you’re doing yourself. BuddyNext Pro takes a different approach: it’s a community platform with native Stripe memberships built into the same system as the feed, groups, and profiles, so paid tiers and community access rules live in one place instead of two plugins negotiating with each other. Worth a look if you’re setting up a new community from scratch rather than retrofitting membership onto an existing BuddyPress install.
Setup basics before you flip the switch
Whichever plugin you land on, a few things are worth testing before members start paying:
- Restriction rules on every content type you actually use, posts, pages, custom post types, and any shortcode-based partial restriction, tested while logged out and while logged in as a non-member.
- Payment gateway sandbox mode. Run a full test transaction through Stripe or PayPal’s test environment before switching to live keys.
- Registration and confirmation emails. Check spam folder delivery, not just inbox delivery, since transactional email from a fresh WordPress install often lands in spam.
- Cancellation and refund flow. Confirm what happens to a member’s access the moment they cancel versus at the end of their paid period.
Tax handling deserves a separate mention. None of the plugins above calculate VAT or sales tax automatically at the free tier, that’s either a paid add-on or something handled through the payment gateway’s own tax tools. If you’re selling to the EU or UK, check this before launch rather than after the first support ticket about a missing VAT invoice.
Free tier vs paid tier: when to upgrade
The free versions of s2Member, WP-Members, and Ultimate Member are genuinely usable for a real membership site, not just a crippled demo. Where they stop being enough is usually one of three triggers: needing more than one payment gateway, needing content dripping, or needing multiple membership tiers with different pricing. A single-tier site charging one flat fee through PayPal can often run indefinitely on a free plugin. The moment you want a monthly and annual price option, or a free tier alongside two paid tiers, most of the free versions start pushing you toward the paid add-on.
It’s worth building your membership structure on paper first, how many tiers, which gateways, whether content drips, before picking a plugin rather than after. Retrofitting a second payment gateway or a new membership tier onto a site that’s already live and has paying members is more disruptive than deciding upfront and picking the plugin tier that already covers it.
What a year of this actually costs
Sticker price on a membership plugin rarely reflects the full annual cost. Payment gateway fees run 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction on Stripe and PayPal regardless of which plugin processes it, so that cost is constant across every option above. Where plugins actually diverge is renewal pricing: s2Member Pro is a one-time $89 fee with no forced renewal, Ultimate Membership Pro is a one-time CodeCanyon purchase with optional paid support renewals, and WP-Members’ premium tier is a genuine annual subscription starting at $59/year. Paid Memberships Pro’s hosting-bundled plans run $49 to $299 a month, which is a materially different cost structure than a one-time plugin fee and only makes sense if the bundled hosting itself has value to you.
Add hosting costs on top regardless of plugin choice. A membership site with active payment processing, member logins, and gated downloads needs hosting that can handle authenticated traffic reliably, a shared hosting plan built for a brochure site tends to struggle once real member accounts and payment webhooks are running through it daily.
Content dripping and why it changes retention
Content dripping releases material on a schedule instead of unlocking everything the moment someone pays. A new member sees week one’s content on day one, week two’s on day eight, and so on. It sounds like a minor feature, but it changes the shape of your churn curve. Members who get the entire library on day one often binge it in a weekend and cancel before the next billing cycle. Members on a drip schedule have a reason to stay subscribed past the first month, because next week’s content isn’t available yet.
Of the plugins covered here, dripping is a paid-tier feature everywhere it exists, s2Member Pro, Ultimate Membership Pro, and Kadence Memberships all support it, WP-Members and the free tier of Ultimate Member don’t. If retention matters more to your business model than upfront conversion, that’s worth weighing against the plugin’s base price, a $69 one-time cost that meaningfully improves month-two retention pays for itself faster than most other membership features.
Matching the plugin to your actual traffic
A ten-member paid newsletter and a two-thousand-member course platform have different needs even though both are technically “membership sites.” At small scale, almost any of the plugins above works, the differences in restriction granularity and payment gateway support rarely matter when you’re managing memberships by hand anyway. At larger scale, database performance starts to matter: membership plugins that check user permissions on every page load can slow down a site once you’re past a few thousand registered users, particularly if restriction rules are checking multiple conditions per request.
If you’re planning for real growth rather than testing an idea, ask each plugin’s support forum or documentation directly how it performs at scale before committing. Most vendors will answer honestly, and a plugin that’s fine for 200 members might need caching adjustments or a different hosting tier once you cross a few thousand.
Mistakes worth avoiding
The most common one is picking a plugin based on its restriction features and only checking payment gateway support afterward. If your business already runs on Stripe for other products, confirm Stripe support exists at the tier you’re planning to buy before comparing anything else. Switching payment processors after launch means re-entering every existing subscriber’s payment details.
The second is under-testing the free-to-paid conversion path. A membership funnel usually has several steps: view locked content, hit a paywall message, register, pay, get access. Each step is a place visitors drop off, and a plugin with a clunky checkout page loses signups that a smoother one wouldn’t. Test the entire path as an actual visitor, not just as an admin checking that restriction rules technically work.
The third is assuming a plugin abandoned by its original developer stays secure. ARMember and the pre-rebrand version of Restrict Content Pro both changed hands or disappeared for reasons unrelated to code quality, but an unmaintained membership plugin handling payment data is a bigger security liability than most other plugin categories. Check the “last updated” date on WordPress.org before installing, not just at initial setup.
Frequently asked questions
Can I run a membership plugin without BuddyPress?
Yes. All six plugins above work on a standard WordPress site with no community plugin installed. BuddyPress adds member profiles and social features on top, but content restriction and payment gating function independently of it.
Which one is easiest for a first-time membership site?
WP-Members or Ultimate Member. Both have a gentler setup curve than s2Member’s more granular restriction options, and both have active free-tier communities on the WordPress.org support forums if something breaks.
Do I need a separate LMS plugin for course content?
Only if you need progress tracking, quizzes, or certificates. A membership plugin alone can gate a page of downloadable course files, but it won’t track which lessons a student has completed. If course structure matters, pair a membership plugin with a dedicated LMS rather than trying to force course logic into content restriction rules.
What happens to existing members if I switch plugins later?
Migration is possible but not painless. Membership level data, payment history, and subscription status all need exporting from the old plugin and importing into the new one, and payment gateway subscriptions often need to be recreated rather than transferred automatically. Budget real time for this if you’re migrating a site with an active paying membership base, and test the migration on a staging copy first.
Is a membership plugin GDPR compliant out of the box?
None of them are automatically compliant just by installing them. GDPR compliance depends on how you collect consent, what data you store, and how you handle deletion requests, all of which are configuration decisions you make, not something a plugin guarantees by default. If you’re processing EU member data, review each plugin’s data handling documentation and confirm your privacy policy matches what’s actually being collected before launch.
Can I offer a free trial before charging?
Most of the paid-tier plugins support trial periods through their payment gateway integration, Stripe and PayPal both handle trial-then-charge subscriptions natively, and the plugins that support recurring billing generally expose that option in their membership level settings. Check the specific plugin’s subscription configuration before assuming trial support exists, since it varies more than the core restriction features do.
Interesting Read:
How to Create Your Own Social Networking Website?
Take The Stress Out Of Best Online Community Platforms
Building an Online Community From Scratch: The Definitive Guide