Members and MemberPress are often mentioned in the same breath — and for good reason. They’re both built by the same team, they’re designed to work together, and together they cover the full spectrum of what a WordPress site owner needs to run a modern membership business. But they solve very different problems, and understanding the difference makes it much easier to decide what you actually need.
This page walks through what each plugin does, where they overlap, where they don’t, and how to decide which one (or both) is right for you.
The short answer
- Members is a free plugin that gives you a friendly UI on top of WordPress’ built-in roles and capabilities system. Use it when you need to control who can do what on your site.
- MemberPress is a premium, all-in-one membership platform. Use it when you need to sell access to content, courses, coaching, or community — and grow a real membership business around it.
They are complementary, not competing. Many of the most successful membership sites in the WordPress ecosystem run both.
What is Members?
Members is a roles and capabilities editor for WordPress. WordPress has a powerful permissions system baked in — every user has one or more roles (Administrator, Editor, Author, Subscriber, etc.), and every role has a set of capabilities (edit_posts, publish_pages, manage_options, and so on). That system is flexible and well-designed, but historically it’s only been accessible to developers who know how to manage it in code.
Members changes that. It gives site owners a clean, intuitive interface to do things like:
- Create, edit, clone, and delete roles directly from the WordPress admin.
- Assign multiple roles to a single user, rather than being limited to one.
- Grant or explicitly deny specific capabilities for any role.
- Restrict content by role or capability — lock down posts, pages, custom post types, or specific blocks so only the right users can see them.
- Make the entire site private with a single toggle, if you want a closed community or staging-style experience.
- Control dashboard access so clients, contributors, or members only see the parts of WP-Admin they actually need.
- Use shortcodes and widgets to show or hide content based on login status, role, or capability.
Members also includes a growing list of free integrations (ACF, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, GiveWP, Meta Box, and more) that expose those plugins’ capabilities inside the Members role editor — so you can manage everything from one place.
Members does not handle payments, subscriptions, courses, or anything related to monetization. It’s a permissions tool, not a commerce tool. That’s deliberate — it stays small, focused, and free.
When Members is the right choice on its own
Use Members by itself when:
- You need to control access to parts of your WordPress site but you’re not charging for it.
- You’re running a client site and need to give different team members different levels of access.
- You want to restrict certain pages, posts, or blocks to logged-in users or to specific roles.
- You’re a developer or agency that needs a proper roles and capabilities workflow without writing custom code for every project.
- You have a staff or contributor site and need granular control over what each person can do in the admin.
If any of that sounds like you, Members alone will likely cover it.
What is MemberPress?
MemberPress is a premium, all-in-one membership platform for WordPress. Where Members stops at permissions, MemberPress picks up and handles everything involved in actually running a membership business — from taking payments to delivering content to building community.
At its core, MemberPress lets you:
- Sell memberships and subscriptions with one-time payments, recurring billing, free trials, setup fees, and lifetime access.
- Process payments through Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and other major gateways.
- Protect any content — posts, pages, custom post types, categories, tags, files, videos, even feeds — behind any membership you define.
- Drip content on a schedule so new members unlock lessons or resources over time.
- Issue coupons and run promotions with flexible discount rules.
- Manage taxes, invoicing, and refunds out of the box.
That alone would be a complete membership plugin. But MemberPress goes well beyond subscriptions.
Built-in Courses (LMS)
MemberPress includes a full-featured Learning Management System. You can build structured online courses with sections, lessons, categories, and quizzes. Students get a clean classroom interface, progress tracking, and certificates. Because courses are built into MemberPress itself, they plug directly into your memberships — no separate LMS plugin, no awkward integration layer.
CoachKit — Coaching Programs
CoachKit turns MemberPress into a platform for coaches and service providers. It adds structured coaching programs with:
- Milestones that clients work through at their own pace or on a schedule.
- Habits for daily or weekly accountability.
- Check-ins and messaging between coaches and clients.
- Cohort-based programs for running groups of clients together.
It’s the tool you’d reach for if you’re running 1:1 coaching, group coaching, accountability programs, or any kind of transformation-based offer.
Community Circles
Memberships are more valuable when members can talk to each other. MemberPress Circles adds private, members-only discussion spaces directly to your site — no need for a separate forum plugin, Discord server, or Facebook group. Groups can be tied to specific memberships, so your premium tiers automatically get access to the right spaces.
Member Profiles and Directories
MemberPress lets members have customizable front-end profiles and lets site owners build searchable member directories. This is a huge deal for associations, networking sites, professional communities, and any membership where members want to find and connect with each other.
Everything else
MemberPress also includes (or integrates deeply with):
- Email marketing integrations for Mailchimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Drip, ConstantContact, and more — with automatic tagging based on membership status.
- Affiliate program support via MemberPress Affiliate Royale / Easy Affiliate.
- Downloads protection for gated files and digital products.
- Gifting so customers can buy memberships for others.
- Corporate / group accounts for B2B memberships.
- Developer-friendly hooks, REST API endpoints, and a Zapier integration to connect it to the rest of your stack.
This is why we call it “all-in-one” — most membership sites can run entirely on MemberPress without bolting on a dozen extra plugins.
When MemberPress is the right choice
Use MemberPress when:
- You want to charge for access to content, courses, coaching, or community.
- You’re running (or planning to run) a membership business and need subscriptions, billing, and member management.
- You want to sell and deliver online courses without stitching together a separate LMS.
- You’re a coach and need structured programs with milestones, habits, and client accountability.
- You want a private community tied directly to your paid memberships.
- You want member profiles and directories for networking or association-style sites.
- You want one plugin that handles payments, content protection, courses, community, and member management instead of five.
How they work together
Here’s the part that surprises a lot of people: Members and MemberPress are designed to be used together, and they solve different layers of the same problem.
- MemberPress decides what memberships someone has purchased and what paid content they can access.
- Members decides what roles and capabilities each user has inside WordPress itself.
Those are different questions. A member on your site might have purchased your “Pro” membership (a MemberPress concern), but also need a custom role that lets them contribute guest posts or moderate a specific section of the site (a Members concern). Running both plugins lets you handle both cleanly, and they’re built to play nicely with each other.
A common setup:
- MemberPress handles the paid tiers, checkout, subscriptions, content protection, course delivery, and community.
- Members handles the staff side — editor roles, contributor roles, client roles, moderator roles — plus any fine-grained capability tweaks you need on top of WordPress’ defaults.
You don’t have to use both. But if you’re running anything more than a simple paid content site, you probably want both.
Which one should I use?
Here’s a simple decision guide.
| Your situation | What to use |
|---|---|
| I need to manage roles, capabilities, or permissions on a WordPress site — no payments involved. | Members |
| I need to restrict parts of my site to logged-in users or specific roles — no payments involved. | Members |
| I want to sell access to content, courses, or a community. | MemberPress |
| I want to run an online course business. | MemberPress (Courses is built in) |
| I’m a coach and want to run structured coaching programs. | MemberPress (with CoachKit) |
| I want a private, paid community tied to my memberships. | MemberPress (with Communities) |
| I want member profiles and a searchable directory. | MemberPress |
| I’m running a paid membership site and need fine-grained WordPress permissions for staff and contributors. | Both |
If you’re still unsure: start with Members (it’s free) and add MemberPress whenever you’re ready to monetize.
Summary
- Members is the best free WordPress plugin for managing roles, capabilities, and access control. It’s focused, lightweight, and stays out of your way.
- MemberPress is the most complete membership platform for WordPress — payments, subscriptions, courses, CoachKit, communities, profiles, directories, and much more — all in a single plugin.
- They’re built by the same team, they’re designed to work together, and together they give you everything you need to run a serious membership business on WordPress.
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