MemberPress vs ARMember: Which Membership Plugin is Right for You?

MemberPress vs ARMember: which WordPress plugin will satisfy your need for a powerful and beautiful membership platform? Both are well-known plugins used for:

• Easily handling paywalled content.
• Creating online courses.
• Running membership subscriptions and registrations online.

If you are considering these two well-established WordPress solutions, MemberPress vs ARMember, we’re here to help you read a 10-minute detailed comparison and overview! Let’s get started.

MemberPress vs ARMember – Payment Processors & Subscription Management

Create various subscription levels and customize the ways clients can purchase and manage them. ARMember vs MemberPress solutions provide pretty similar options in this case.

ARMember has the flexibility you need to create and monetize your membership with powerful subscription management options. The 21+ payment gateway integration ensures that your members have the utmost flexibility with online payments.

• Assign and track membership plans via the admin dashboard.
• Handy toolkit to view subscriptions with user ID, membership details, payment type, transaction history, and status.
• Easily cancel plans or process full/partial refunds with confirmation prompts.
• Monitor past transactions, payment statuses, and failed payments.
• View future scheduled payments for auto-debit or semi-automatic billing methods.
• Approve or reject manual payments received via bank transfer.

MemberPress also gives you many ways to manage subscriptions:

Select specific payment methods for each membership.

• Give members partial refunds using the gateway and manual updates in the plugin.
• Add transactions manually for offline payments or free access.
• Change user subscriptions for one-time subscriptions (recurring ones require manual re-registration).
• Members can update cards via their account page; admins can do so using the User Switching plugin.
• Enable various tax rates for plans (Stripe, VAT, TaxJar support for the US).

Payment Methods & Management Features Visualized

Content Restriction and Access Control for ARMember vs MemberPress

Content restriction is central to properly monetizing and creating subscription levels for your membership site in WordPress. It has a direct influence on your sales and membership site revenue.

• Multiple membership tiers with varying levels of content access help you upsell users and encourage them to upgrade.
• Create limited-time offers, pay-per-view content, or exclusive premium content to diversify your membership site income.
• Cater to both free and paid members.

In this category, you have numerous tools with both WordPress membership plugins. Here is how MemberPress vs ARMember content restriction features compare.

Member Experience, Onboarding, and Engagement

It’s important to understand what member experiences and engagement solutions are created with MemberPress and ARMember. This is where the member meets your solution and interacts with it.

Such things as public member profiles, private messaging, and achievements signs are delivered by both tools  in our ARMember vs MemberPress review.

In addition to creating paywalls for your membership content, both membership solutions allow you to employ course creation features so that you can build a powerful LMS without resorting to any extra plugin.

ARMember’s course creation addon provides a solid framework to build online courses, including structured content, interactive assessments, and certifications. Thus, it will perfectly serve your needs in building a membership-based e-learning platform or website offering limited yet effective online training programs.

ARMember’s Online Course (LMS) Features

• Create and manage free or paid courses (text, video, and audio lessons, with preview options).
• Set lifetime or fixed-duration access to your courses.
• Flexible content dripping (release lessons based on schedule, completion, or time intervals).
• Multiple question types, grading, retakes, and negative marking options.
• Auto-generate certificates with custom branding upon course completion.
• Works with membership plans and supports pay-per-course options.
• Courses can be bundled with membership plans.

ARMember’s alternative, MemberPress, also has a good range of features to offer when you need to create a full-scale course. In addition to unlimited courses and unlimited lessons in every plan, MemberPress allows you to have these capabilities:

• Pro plan: Unlimited course assignments, quiz and assignment gradebook.
• Plus plan: Unlimited course quizzes, unlimited certificates.
• Basic plan: Basic LMS features.

Integration with Existing Tools

Unlocking more zero-code capabilities for your membership site is only possible with ready-made integrations. They solve numerous tasks, from sending automated promo emails to setting up an affiliate system (to create partnerships and generate even more membership subscriptions).

The list of integrations for membership sites is huge by MemberPress as well as ARMember.

Following are some of the great MemberPress add-ons:

• Active Campaign (Plus plan)
• CoachKit™ (Basic plan)
• ChatGPT (Plus plan)
• Easy Affiliate plugin and Affiliate WP integrations (Basic plan)
• Elementor integration (Basic plan)
• MonsterInsights (Basic plan)
• Uncanny Automator plugin integration (Plus plan)
• Zapier (Plus plan)
• Amazon Web Services (Plus plan)
• Asana / ClickUP (Plus plan)

ARMember puts only major integrations in the spotlight, for example, you can easily connect 15+ email marketing tools as listed below. This automates your mail marketing efforts and keeps the communication in check :

• Active Campaign
• Affiliate WP plugin integration
• Zapier
• Keap
• MailPoet
• Mautic
• Aweber
• Omnisend
• Zoho
• HubSpot CRM
• WhatsApp
• Elementor, Oxygen, SiteOrigin and other Standard Page Builders.

As you see, all on-demand integrations, such as Zapier, ActiveCampaign or Elementor are supported by both plugins; we see some differences when it comes to more specific tools, e.g. for external analytics or automation.

Addons and Functionalities with ARMember

Exclusive In-built Addons 

Apart from third-party integrations, ARMember comes with a set of exclusive in-built addons. These features help extend the functionality of your membership site without depending on external integrations. Checkout the following list for exploring such functionalities. 

• Drip Content: This inbuilt addon allows you to schedule your content and drip it gradually to retain member’s attention. 
• Pay Per Post: Just as the name suggests, you can sell individual posts using ARMember’s Pay per Post setup. 
• Proration (Pro-Rata): Membership upgrades/downgrades midway is an essential feature for your members. With the proration feature, members are billed the difference amount whenever they upgrade or downgrade their plan. 
• WooCommerce Integration: Using the WooCommerce addon, you can assign plans through product purchase at WooCommerce or allow plan purchase through WooCommerce checkout. Thus, you can easily set up membership and subscription for WooCommerce products. 
• Tax & Invoice: Using ARMember, you get the tax integration to calculate tax as per requirements. Further, digital or PDF invoices can also be generated for record keeping. 
• Coupon & Discounts: Create multiple coupons to offer discount codes to potential members. Encourage more signups to build your member base. 
• 9+ Page Builders: No matter the comfortable page builder for you, ARMember has got it covered. It supports 10 page builders like Elementor, Gutenberg, Bricks Builder, Beaver Builder, Divi Builder, Oxygen Builder, etc. 
• Migration Tool: With the free ARMember migration tool, you can import your data from MemberPress, Ultimate Membership Pro, and Paid Memberships Pro. 
• Profiles & Directories: ARMember provides customizable templates for creating member profiles. It also supports a directory feature for easy lookup and engagement between members. 
• User Private Content: You can even offer personalized, private content for each user. This helps you build a specific members-only area to offer exclusivity and value to your members. 

Advanced Premium Addons

It doesn’t end here as ARMember offers a huge horde of Addons that are specifically built for extending membership site functionality. Check them out right below. 

• Affiliate Addon: Using this addon, you can setup, track, and manage Affiliates for your membership site. That too, without needing any extra plugin or tool. It sets perfectly well with ARMember and helps you expand your network. 
• Social Community: Bring your members together for internal communication and engagement by building a social community. Allow following, friending, posting, commenting, direct messaging, and so on for a private social media platform for your membership site. 
• Group/Umbrella Membership: With this MemberPress alternative, you can offer group memberships and create multiple child seats. Thus, with group access, multiple people can hop on a single membership. 
• Conversion Tracking: Using this tool, you can check the Analytics of your membership site right on your WordPress dashboard. 
• Multi-language Feature: If you are dealing with localities with different languages, the multi-language addon helps you translate your site for visitors and supports 12+ languages. Using this, you can set up a truly global membership business. 
• Gift Memberships: If your membership plan is worth it, members would like to buy it as a gift for someone else. It is possible to do so using the ARMember Gift Addon. 

All these features and functionalities provided by exclusive ARMember addons gives you a full package. Using this, you can scale up your membership site. This flexibility of scaling up and extending functionalities without third-party integrations gives ARMember an edge over MemberPress. Additionally, you also get support for 50+ external addons! 

Further, you also get features like personalized image cropper, conditional landing page restriction, plan wise member profile support, lock system for failed login attempts and so much more. That too, inbuilt with ARMember.

Branding, Layout, and UI Customization

Do you have enough tools to take care of the various sides of the membership platform? There are so many pages, user profiles, lesson environments, sign-up pages, etc. And all of them should look awesome.

Some users report limited styling in MemberPress, however, the key elements are easy to customize, including: 

• Registration button text
• Thank you page message
• Payment methods
• Price box
• Welcome emails
• Membership access URL
• Login redirect URL

To go an extra mile, for those not satisfied with the default customization templates, there is a special integration with ReadyLaunch (more pages are unlocked based on the MemberPress extensions you use), which gives even more custom templates to customize MemberPress:

• Pricing Page
• Registration Page
• Thank You Page
• Login Page
• Account Page

On the contrary, the ARMember membership plugin for WordPress gives you the out-of-the-box solution for customizing the UI and layout of your membership site, including member pages, login pages and more.

In general, you can tweak:

• Form display and styling: form direction (horizontal/vertical), width, and color schemes.
• Form actions and opt-ins: submit actions, hidden fields, and opt-in features.
• Security and user experience: Google reCAPTCHA (V3), register/login page links, user redirection after form submission.
• Profile shortcode and slug: shortcodes to embed profiles and adjust URL slugs for profile pages.

Moreover, in ARMember, you will have tons of settings to customize borders, opacity, background images, fonts, and form titles. You can fully modify field colors, button backgrounds, validation messages, adjust date formats, font styles, and more. Thanks to specific add-ons, you can create and assign different profile templates for various membership plans.

ARMember vs MemberPress Pricing

What is the best value for money? The first thing to consider is the overall user experience, secondly, the specific features you need to use, and finally, the plugin support and updates.

MemberPress Pricing offers 3 license levels:

• Basic: Starts at $179.50/year
• Plus: Starts at $299.50/year
• Pro: Starts at $399.50/year
• Free version: No

ARMember Pricing also delivers tools based on the subscription plan:

• Standard: Starts at $69/year
• Professional: Starts at $129/year
• Enterprise: Starts at $299/year
• Free lite version: Yes

In both WordPress membership plugins here, the add-ons are available based on license level: ARMember unlocks more payment-related add-ons, while MemberPress, unfortunately, sometimes limits the core features in the cheaper plans (e.g. zero-code WooCommerce connection is unlocked starting from the Plus plan).

MemberPress vs ARMember Comparison: Final Verdict

You can make the right choice only if you are well prepared to choose the best membership WordPress plugin for your business; then you can quickly compare whether the features are available.

Meanwhile, taking into account the key features that we’ve just revised in our MemberPress vs ARMember comparison, the conclusions come as follows:

1. ARMember offers your membership site more features for payment management in all plans, while MemberPress unlocks them only when you upgrade a plan.
2. While both WP membership plugins can boast extensive integrations, MemberPress offers a longer list of connections with third-party apps, e.g. ClickUP or ChatGPT (most in more expansive plans).
3. No matter which plan you choose, ARMember is significantly affordable, offering the same set of features for a lower cost and a free version for a full-scale test drive.
4. ARMember provides more layout and UI customization options without extra tools, allowing you to create the desired style and user experience on your membership site.
5. Both plugins have been around for a long time and are trusted by large community sites.

Related articles:

• How to Create a Membership Site with ARMember?
• Best MemberPress Alternatives: Which One Is Right for You?
• What is the Difference Between Subscriptions vs Memberships?
• 50+ Subscription Business Ideas for Digital Products (with Examples)