So you want choose the best membership plugin? There are so many options, what’s the best option? Will the plugin have all of the capabilities that I want to use? After having used multiple membership plugins and researched MANY other plugins, I can say, without a doubt: DigitalAccessPass is the best membership plugin for just about any membership site you have in mind. When compared to Memberpress and Paid Memberships Pro (PMPro or just PMP) or Kajabi, it offers everything that they offer and a whole lot more!
Membership Plugin Reviews
When I decided that I was going to start a membership on my WordPress site, I read all of the WordPress membership plugin reviews that I could find. I didn’t know a lot about membership plugins, and a lot of them seemed pretty similar. I also need to say, I’m not a tech expert. I’m a teacher who has membership site and everything on my website I’ve learned how to do by watching Youtube or reading.
If you’re first starting your membership site, like I was, you might start with a free plugin. There’s nothing wrong with that. You want to see if you can even make money on your membership before putting money down on a plugin.
I would definitely recommend reading all of the reviews for any plugin that you’re planning on using to make sure that it can do everything that you want it to do.
Paid Memberships Pro: Free Membership Plugin WordPress
Paid Memberships Pro was my first membership plugin. It was FREE! That was literally the only reason that I went with it. It offers basic features like content protection, but it really lacks a lot of the premium features that you will pay for but will ultimately make you more money as a membership site owner.
There is a paid version with some more premium features, but it required a lot of extra plugins to integrate certain features that I wanted like forums, email integration, and an LMS.
What did it do for me?
- FREE
- integrated with Stripe
- allowed for multiple membership levels
- allowed coupon codes
- protected content
- kept everything on my website rather than on another website
Why did I stop using it?
- no 1-click upsells
- required a lot of extra plugins
- no order bumps
I’m an educator and a business owner, so I didn’t want to have to manage two different websites: one for SEO and traffic and one for my membership. Other membership options like Kajabi or Membervault require you to build a sort of website on their platform. A wise man once said that it’s not smart to build your empire on rented land. That was why I went with PMP for my first membership plugin: free and all on my website. The free version of PMP did a lot, but I realized pretty quickly that I needed something more robust if I wanted to make more money.
Kajabi Review
After deciding that PMP was not for me anymore, I decided to try Kajabi. A lot of the big membership owners and podcasters were becoming affiliates of Kajabi and had nothing but good things to say about it. I figured I’d try it out. It turns out, it lasted less than a week.
Why did I decide to try Kajabi?
- easy to use (allegedly)
- all-in-one package
- membership
- LMS (learning management software)
- affiliates, sales pages, upsells, order bump, forums, email
Why it never worked out for Kajabi:
- member content could not be organized efficiently
- required me to have my WordPress site and Kajabi site
- EXPENSIVE
- not as easy as advertised
I know a lot of people like Kajabi, but for what I needed my membership plugin to do, it wasn’t for me. Email open rates were lower. It wasn’t the best for SEO. I was going to have to pay to use rented land. Kajabi was going to be a completely new website. For organizing my membership content, it wasn’t going to be the easiest to use and my member experience was really going to suffer.
If I wanted to work on member retention, a hard to use membership that was going to take users off of my website was not going to be the way to do it.
Near the end of my free trial, after I realized that it was not going to work for my membership, I canceled. I never even moved my membership over to Kajabi. I realized halfway through moving my member content over that it was just not going to organize my content the way that I wanted it to. The customer service people tried to help as much as possible, but not even they were able to come up with a way for me to organize my member content and make it searchable.
Digital Access Pass Review
DigitalAccessPass or DAP was the plugin I tried right after Kajabi. What I’d read about it was that it was a little difficult to setup, but that it offered EVERYTHING! They were not wrong.
What did I need from a membership plugin?
- WordPress plugin on my own website
- Easily integrates with ConvertKit and other email CRMs
- 1-click upsells
- Order bumps
- Content protection options
- searchable content
To grow my business, I really wanted to start improving my marketing game and that required advanced marketing techniques like 1-click upsells and order bumps. Other membership owners that I was in a mastermind with were in the same boat as me and were trying to incorporate upsells and order bumps. Some were using Kajabi and could do that easily. Others were using Memberpress, but they realized that that wasn’t possible with Memberpress.
Why DigitalAccessPass?
DigitalAccessPass offered all of the things that I needed for my membership AND MORE! It has allowed me to grow my membership and given me lots of opportunities for future growth. I’ll get to that later, though.
Is DigitalAccessPass hard to set up?
No! This was the thing that I’d read from other Digital Access Pass reviews that worried me the most about DigitalAccessPass. It was not difficult to setup. They now have a Setup Wizard that they say is now so easy that it can be completed in 30 minutes.
Is transferring to DigitalAccessPass from another plugin hard?
No! For me, since I needed to not only setup but also transfer over from Paid Memberships Pro, it took about a day. In that time, none of my members lost access. I kept PMP active for a few days after I had finished setting up DAP just to make sure everything still worked. When I tested and made sure everything was working and everything from Stripe had mapped over to DAP, then I deactivated PMP and all of the other plugins I had needed.
What Makes DigitalAccessPass better?
- 1-click upsells (unlimited upsells and they can be chained!)
- order bumps
- built-in cart plugin
- built-in LMS
- custom member page builder
- integrations with various email CRMs, payment processors, and Zapier
- Gamification capabilities
- Pay-Per-Post (like WooCommerce)
- Content Protection Variety: tag-based, sneak peek, partial content protection
- Quiz Builder for LMS and lead generation
- DIRECT access to plugin developer
- New features constantly being added with app updates
As I was getting DAP setup, I had access to the setup wizard. I was also able to directly access the developer Veena through a Facebook group and through video call (this cost extra). I’ve been on DAP for 2 years now, and I’m still not fully utilizing all of the things that DAP has to offer like the LMS, the quiz builder, or Pay-Per-Post. They also just keep adding more features that allow you to fully customize your membership site.
Here’s an example of how responsive they are: I wanted logged in members to see one navigation menu and logged out members / non-members to see a different menu. They added that feature on the next update less than a month later! Now, I’m not saying that anything you ask for is going to get added just like that, but the developers are REALLY responsive.
Best Feature of DigitalAccessPass?
For you, it might be something different, but for what my site needed, hands down it was the variety of content protection options. With my content, I opted for tag-based content protection which allowed me to tag content with several tags and any member type that had access to that product could access that content.
It also has a pay-per-post capability that allows users to pay for one piece of content and have access forever or for a limited time. Then, you can upsell to your full membership or even offer a free trial as an order bump!
DigitalAccessPass Pricing
DAP isn’t PMP, so it isn’t free. For my low cost membership, though, having the 1-click upsells and order bumps, DAP literally paid for itself and then some.
You can find the the most current pricing options here. I’d recommend getting the Platinum option at least because it gives you 30 minutes of consultation time to help you more quickly get your site setup.
Best Membership Plugin in WordPress
Without a doubt, after reading all of the Digital Access Pass reviews and trying it and several others, DAP is by far the most customizable membership plugin. It has more features built in than any other membership plugin currently out there, and they just keep adding more! I could literally write pages and pages about all of the features that DAP and its suite of plugins has, but it’d only overwhelm you.
Bottom line: I’m a Digital Access Pass user for life.
Don’t take my word for it, though, check out some other testimonials!
Is there a better membership plugin that somehow does more easier and cheaper than DAP? Did you try DAP? Let me know in the comments!