What is the Best Membership Plug In to buy?

Have you considered all your integration needs?

I recently built a membership site. The script had to integrate with WP Courseware and Clickbank. That left me with only three or four potential membership plugins to choose from.

It also depends on your aims. If you are running a monthly membership, say, and you need a heavy duty and dependable plugin, then something like MemberMouse is very good. It's solid and clean, and allows a great deal of self-service from the members (e.g. upgrade/downgrade plans, cancel, change usernames). But if you need something just to arbitrarily protect content, you could go for a cheaper option like Wishlist.

Membermouse and Wishlist integrate fine with Clickbank. MM has a free trial, so you can try it out for yourself. Wishlist doesn't, but it is an official partner of Clickbank and is well battle-tested over the years.

But their features, like those of most membership plugins, do vary from each other. You need to be clear on how you want your site to operate before taking the plunge. I spent far longer than I'd have liked trying to find a combo of host, membership plugin, and courseware plugin which all played nicely with each other, whilst also giving all the features I wanted.

For example: one of the downsides with Membermouse is that it does not do full translation; if you're running a non-English website, that can be a dealbreaker. It also costs a fair chunk of change each month, and may be unnecessarily robust if you're just looking for a way to protect content rather than handle a membership infrastrcture.