Hi everyone,
I’m in the planning stages of a subscription-based membership website where we’ll offer digital content such as videos, podcasts, and PDFs. Here’s a brief overview of our setup:
1. **Content Offerings:** Our digital content will cover a variety of topics, bundled into packages that include one or more videos, at least one podcast, and one PDF. Videos will be hosted on Vimeo to ensure security and will be accessible only to paying subscribers via individual pages on our website. Podcasts and PDFs will follow a similar access model, with PDFs available for direct download.
2. **Website Structure:** The public section of our site will feature a media library displaying all content, organized and filterable by package, topic, and media type (video, podcast, PDF).
3. **Membership Levels:**
1. **Free:** Access to download and share all PDFs.
2. **Normal Subscribers:** Access to all content, including videos, podcasts, and PDFs.
3. **Premium Subscribers:** Ability to create sharing links for specific content, with limitations on views or duration.
4. **Package Subscribers:** This option will be available once we have sufficient content and demand, allowing users to purchase content packages separately.
4. **Technical Considerations:** I have experience with WordPress and prefer the Enfold theme by Kriesi, but I’m open to switching if necessary for better functionality. I’m currently considering WooCommerce and Paid Memberships Pro for the subscription management. However, since free trials aren’t available for these functions, making a decision is challenging.
5. **Questions for the Community:**
1. Are there other membership service providers I should consider?
2. Can anyone offer insights or recommendations on choosing between WooCommerce and Paid Memberships Pro?
3. Are there examples of similar setups that I could look at, perhaps from a user perspective?
I appreciate any advice or information you can provide to help me choose the best options for our needs.
Thank you!
Business consultant and occasional WordPress pundit Chris Lema did his last exhaustive review of membership plugins back in 2021. The landscape hasn’t changed that much since so it’s still worth reviewing. Especially the comparison chart at the end. (Hint, Lema really liked AccessAlly.). Here’s the link: https://chrislema.com/comparing-wordpress-membership-plugins/
That said! Almost all the plugins will do those things for you more or less gracefully, with more or less hassle, and for more or less money.
In my experience I’d only choose WooCommerce + Memberships if I want to have an attached online store and/or if you also offer events with paid tickets. It’s pretty complicated to setup and maintain, and (naturally!) there are almost certainly going to be other WooCommerce plugins you’ll have to buy to connect things or to make everything run smoothly.
Otherwise I’d look at Paid Membership Pro or other options including (Lema’s choice but unfamiliar to me) AccessAlly, or MemberPress (more familiar to me.)
The big consideration for me is that you’ll eventually want to offer bundles. Memberpress lets you offer bundles by combining access rules and subscriptions but it can get cumbersome to expire them.
You might want to look at Joomla. It has user access levels built in to the core. WordPress does not access levels built in, you have to add them with an extension. In addition to the standard access levels, you can define as many access levels as you want with specific permissions and accesses. And as a general purpose content management system, it can easily handle all the issues you have mentioned. It is built on the same platform as WordPress, ie, PHP and MySQL on Linux. You can look a a showcase of Joomla sites here: [https://showcase.joomla.org/](https://showcase.joomla.org/)
I used to run a site with a similar type of offering.
We used WooCommerce Memberships and WooCommerce Subscriptions.
We used Vimeo for hosting videos.
Edit: Wanted to add that if you need video galleries, Vimeography worked well for us:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/vimeography/
For package buyers, we used Pay For Post with WooCommerce:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-pay-per-post/
Audio streaming & downloadable content was served from S3 and protected with S3 Media Maestro:
https://flyplugins.com/s3-media-maestro/
Filtering was done with FacetWP:
https://facetwp.com/
This setup worked well for us.