Nowadays using membership site platforms is regarded as the best way to keep your audience engaged and updated. They not only bring stable and recurring revenue for the business but also contribute to building brand value.
It is estimated that the subscription model and online learning market (LMS) to grow to $28 million by 2025. However, choosing the best membership site involves a couple of factors such as its design and your business requirements.
In this guide, I have ranked and reviewed the best membership site platforms based on pricing, features, support, integrations, ease of use, and more.
So now let’s get started.
What Are the Best Membership Site Platforms?
Here are the best membership site platforms that you can use this year.
1. Wild Apricot
Wild Apricot is a cloud-based membership site platform for simplifying all your membership tasks. It has an easy drag-and-drop website builder through which you can develop your own platform. Additionally, it automates all the repetitive tasks, saving you lots of time.
Wild Apricot is not only confined to courses, you can even create events and conferences and accept direct payments. Moreover, you can also accept donations for your organization. All of these can also be done using their mobile app as well. Plus, you can add members and set permissions for them and they can even access the permitted content from the app.
Recently Wild Apricot was acquired by Personify family which is a Constituent Management and Engagement platform. Wild Apricot is certainly the best option for non-profits and small to medium-sized associations. Furthermore, they also provide volume discount rates for organizations with multiple branches requiring separate websites and databases.
Key Features
- Cloud Storage: All your member databases are stored securely over the cloud allowing you to access and share from any device.
- Website builder: This helps you to create the best-customized website with a drag-and-drop tool and professionally designed templates.
- Event management: You can even conduct events and conferences with Wild Apricot. People can register and pay for it online.
- Integrations: Wild Apricot connects with all your tools and automates other stuff as well.
- Online store: you can not only sell your knowledge but also sell other products as well. Basically, the built-in online store lets you generate and manage sales all in one platform.
Pros
- A mobile application is available that lets you access your business from any device.
- You can accept donations and even set donation goals for your organization.
- You can set automatic email confirmations and reminders for your members saving you a lot of time.
- They provide a 30-day trial period on all plans without any card details required.
Pricing Plan
Wild Apricot has seven plans to best suit all your requirements in your budget. And if you pre-pay for 1 year you save 10% and for 2 years you save 15%. Plus, they also offer a FREE plan with 50 contacts/members limitations. Below mentioned are the monthly billed plans with their pricing:
- Personal: $48/month
- Group: $60/month
- Community: $110/month
- Professional: $190/month
- Network: $350/month
- Enterprise: $420/month
- Global: $720/month
2. Teachable
Teachable is the software that is best for creating courses and coaching. It highly emphasizes sharing what you know to transform your knowledge into a thriving business. Additionally, you can entirely customize and personalize your business for you and your members.
You can bring up your team on teachable and provide them with their custom space to teach. You can set their roles and permissions. Furthermore, you can also track the quality of the course you and your team offer with feedback from your members. Teachable provides third-party forms and surveys to accumulate feedback.
Teachable has an amazing support feature with Zapier integrations. Moreover, they even have a team dedicated to security monitoring to fight bad guys 24/7. Plus they only deal with PCI level-1 compliant payment providers to keep your transaction secure and also possess a 2048-bit SSL certificate that keeps your students’ information secure.
Key Features
- Comprehensive Dashboards: These dashboards help you to understand what’s going on with your business. You can track sales, student progress, and other analysis.
- Team: Get your team on board, give them roles, set permissions and teachable will pay them on behalf of you.
- Schedule: They provide integration with Calendly, using which plan and schedules calls and one-to-one sessions with your students.
- Affiliate Marketing: You get an amazing affiliate marketing tool that pays others to spread the word about you.
- Funds: They help you make the most out of your funds. Their tax management system takes care of all the payments, chargebacks, affiliate payouts, and everything including EU VAT taxes as well.
Pros
- Teachable provides a custom domain under which you can easily link your existing website.
- They have an exhaustive list of integrations available. Therefore you can easily link all your stuff in one place.
- Everything is unlimited with paid plans. You get unlimited students, unlimited courses, unlimited video bandwidth, and many more.
- Using Teachable, you can accept international payments in 130+ currencies.
- They provide affiliate marketing options that help you reach a wider audience.
Pricing Plan
Teachable provides three subscription plans with monthly and annual payout options. Plus, they also provide a free plan to get started with and know the platform first. The monthly prices are:
- Basic: $39/month
- Pro: $119/month
- Business: $299/month
3. Thinkific
Thinkific is a membership site platform that enables entrepreneurs to create, maintain and sell their knowledge in the form of online courses. They provide all the required features and tools to turn your expertise into a sustainable business. Plus, they also help you make business decisions that are best for you and your target audience.
Thinkific’s features help you to make the most out of your knowledge and spread it. You can make your own course, market them, set your own pricing, and discounts and get the best audience. Furthermore, every piece is customizable helping you create the brand image the way you want.
Thinkific also thinks about your audience and their learning experience with you. Therefore, every feature is built around both parties. A good audience experience is certainly going to result in your ultimate success.
Key Features
- All-in-one course builder: It comes with all the features to create the best course for your students. It provides live sessions, student assessments, and certificates, progress tracking, communities, and memberships as well.
- Site Administration: you get a site monitoring dashboard with detailed analytics.
- Design customization: you can build your own course and even a website fully customized with its easy drag-and-drop website builder.
- Product flexibility: you can build any product you like from downloadable videos to courses and memberships to sell your knowledge.
- Market and sales: you can advertise your way, and set your own pricing and discount.
Pros
- The drag-and-drop course builder works wonders to create the best product for your students.
- It has secure cloud hosting with a built-in SSL certification.
- It is compatible with your existing website. Plus, you can easily embed other 3rd party tools and sites with Thinkific.
- Thinkific has the best email & phone support. They answer 90% of their questions in less than 5 hours.
Pricing Plan
Thinkific provides three subscription plans with monthly and annual billing options. Furthermore, all of these plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee. The monthly prices are as below and you can save 20% with the annual plans.
- Basic: $49/month
- Pro: $99/month
- Premier: $499/month
4. Kajabi
Kajabi is the all-in-one membership site platform that you need for your business. Though it is a bit expensive among all their features and services compensate for it. You can build any product from courses, memberships, podcasts, websites, newsletters, and many more.
There is no need for any integrations with Kajabi as they provide all the required services including CRM. You manage all your members and affiliates effortlessly. Just set some simple rules and schedules and Kajabi will trigger emails, coupons, and product access to your customers.
After all this talking about payments, Kajabi integrates with Paypal and Stirp for ways payments. There is no cut down from your revenue as well. Your earnings are your own.
Key Features
- Products: You can turn your knowledge into polished content with Kajabi. You can build any product from a small video to podcasts to courses.
- Website Builder: Build a fully customized and integrated website on the go without depending on professionals. Plus, you can even get your own custom domains.
- Email Integration: Their email marketing tool integration is a boon for email marketing. Using their visual editor, you can design personalized emails with integrated videos, times, and more.
- Pipelines: This is what sets Kajabi different from other membership site platforms. This pipeline feature helps you with lead generation, marketing, sales, and many more without being funnel experts. You get ready-made blueprints and just takes a few clicks to get started. You can even connect different sales and marketing channels into Multi channels funnels.
- Analytics: Kajabi understands that giving you just data is not enough. They provide the best analysis and insights on your business with the right metrics.
Pros
- The Kajabi mobile application makes all your products easily accessible to anyone through any device.
- They are a team of experts knowing everything and therefore, you can get support at any step any time you require.
- Serves like CRM and pipelining are made easy with custom blueprints. Therefore, you can get started with it without spending hours learning about it.
- They provide a 14days free trial without any requirements of card details.
Pricing Plan
Kajabi provides three plans with both monthly and annual billing options. A 14-day free trial with all the features is also available so that you can decide on the best plan. Plus, all their plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee. The Monthly prices are as below and you can save 20% with their Annual plans.
- Basic: $149/month
- Growth: $199/month
- Pro: $399/month
So now let’s cover the basics.
What Are Membership Site Platforms?
Membership management software or membership management platforms is basically used to create, manage, and promote your membership websites. They allow you to engage with your audience with exclusive content and accept multiple payment options for subscriptions to any service.
Most of these contents are in the form of newsletters, coaching, emails, courses, events, etc. Additionally, they are geared to give special access and discounts to their engaged users.
This Membership Management Software usually offers the following features:
- Membership Analytics on member activities
- Allows sending automated emails and invoices to specific members
- Supports multiple payment processing partners
- Engage users with automation features such as event setup, reminders, and more.
- Provides translation facility for users across different geographies
What Features You Should Look at in Membership Site Platforms?
Here are some of the essential features that you should look for in a membership site platform.
1. Contact Segmentation
The Membership platform should be able to sort the contacts of members and non-members automatically and effectively. Moreover, it should provide basic CRM tool services and functionality for the desired analytics.
2. Automation Features
The primary purpose of this feature is to retain existing users and convert potential members seamlessly. Additionally, it should perform tasks such as retargeted ads, email reminders, welcome notes, discount offers, and more automatically.
3. Exclusive Contents
A good membership platform caters to both the members as well the people visiting your space for the first time. Therefore, the platform should be capable of showing gated content to members and a glimpse of offerings to regular visitors.
4. Payment Gateway Integrations
This feature is essential if you are providing any sort of coaching or service to your members. However, if you are running a free membership site then it does not really matter.
Make sure the platform supports multiple payment partners with various payment options such as payment via card and wallets.
5. Membership Profile Tiers
An ideal membership site builder provides multilevel profiles apart from just a profile page for each member. This allows you to segregate what features need to be shown to which member and when.
Additionally, features like one-off payment options, recurring payments, and more will be there for premium users but not for normal users.
Best Membership Site Platforms – Final Summary
This wraps up my list of the best membership website platforms to use this year. I will keep updating the list with other good membership site platforms available in the market.
Remember membership options are used to enhance customer experience and earn more revenue from the engaged audience. Therefore, make sure all your business requirements are met thoroughly by the platform you are going to choose.
Finally, do a test and research all the available options on the list before making the final purchase decision.
Which one of these membership tools are you planning to use? Let me know in the comment section below.
More from Smashitbuck: Do check out my other articles on the business continuity plan software, best URL shortner, and migration software to read this year.
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