An imposing WordPress community website delivers more than just steady revenue. It boosts your brand's credibility. It builds a more effective and meaningful relationship with your community.

Your community website must have relevant features and functionality for the success of your entrepreneurship, business, or passion. The right WordPress membership tool plays a stellar role at this point. It empowers you to set user permissions for exclusive content, multi-level subscription plans, various payment methods, and renewal reminder automation features.

Here is the ultimate list of 10 WordPress tools which you can choose from to build a powerful community website:

MemberPress: One of the easiest-to-use membership plugins that offer rich features, it integrates seamlessly with WordPress. MemberPress accelerates the transformation of your website into a robust community site. Its visual courses builder add-on (available in all three plans) simplifies online courses' creation, management, and sale using quizzes and certificates. 

Core features: Payment gateways, membership levels, content restrictions, multiple integrations, and a drag-and-drop builder to quickly build your course curriculum.

Pricing: Basic – $179.50/year for one site, Plus – $299.50 for 2, and Pro – $399.50 for 5.

Paid Memberships Pro: This is a popular WordPress collaborative tool that you can use to offer extraordinary experiences for your WordPress-based community. The plugin lets you restrict content and offer a quick peek to users for subscription boosts. Its massive library of over 80 free and paid extensions lends enormous flexibility to meet your needs. Another vast library of premade code snippets, "recipes," offers even more customization options. Memberpress' free version, with more than 31 add-ons, is also quite functional. 

Core features: Unlimited membership levels, flexible paid subscriptions, sales and revenue reports, AffiliateWP integration to turn members into partners, unlimited support tickets, and access to excellent customer service. 

Pricing: Freemium offers Standard – $247/year for 1, Plus – $397 for 2, Builder – $697 for five sites.

AtomChat: A versatile chat solution, AtomChat easily integrates with your WordPress membership website to help you better engage your community. The tool allows your members to communicate and collaborate using private and group chats, text chats, HD audio-video chats, collaborative tools, real-time translations, stickers, and emojis.

Core features: A power-packed admin panel, role-based access control, and multilingual functionality. AtomChat helps members across the globe to interact efficiently in their respective languages. It also offers credit-based billing and ads to monetize your website.

Pricing: Lite – $16/month, Startup – $32, and Mega – $76 for one site and different numbers of active users.

Paid Member Subscriptions: This simple plugin offers comprehensive membership features that let you manage members, accept payments, create subscription plans, and more. Members can renew, upgrade, or cancel their subscriptions. Paid Member Subscriptions integrates with your WordPress website and WooCommerce seamlessly so that you can customize visitors' access. Its content restriction feature helps you regulate access to posts and pages, and integration with Elementor helps you restrict content to specific sections.

Core features: Group or corporate memberships, restrictions on bulk or pieces of content, hierarchical subscription plans, and one-time or automatic recurring payments.

Pricing: €99 for 1, €169 for 3, and €299 for unlimited sites for one-year updates.

Restrict Content Pro: This powerful content restriction plugin equips newbies with user-friendly tools to create a professional WordPress community site from scratch. You can give premium members more access based on membership level, access level, and WordPress user role. The tool offers a superior experience through a customer dashboard, which displays each member's account details.

Core features: Front-end user registration, login, and profiles; unlimited membership levels; and drip content functionality.

Pricing: $99/year for one site, $149 for 5, and $249 for unlimited sites, all with 34 valuable add-ons.

Ultimate Member: A popular and robust WordPress community plugin with extensive features, it helps you create a personalized member registration and login page. These capabilities simplify the process for you and your members. The tool also provides forum and job board functionality via JobsBoardWP and ForumWP integrations. It ensures more effortless possibilities to expand site functionality and help your users.

Core features: A drag-and-drop form builder, member directories, and content restrictions.

Pricing: Freemium that lets an upgrade to premium features such as real-time notifications, private messaging, and member bookmarks costs $249/year.

LearnDash: This is your go-to tool if you want to create advanced online courses and sell them on your WordPress community site quickly. LearnDash's drag-and-drop course builder helps you design multi-layer courses with categories, lessons, topics, assignments, and quizzes. This popular LMS platform offers powerful integrations, membership modules, and robust administration capabilities. 

Core features: Drip-feed content, bulk access, Focus Mode feature to develop a distraction-free environment, detailed reporting, automatic email notifications, 300-plus payment gateways, and more.

Pricing: $199/year for one site, $399 for 10, $799 for unlimited sites.

Magic Members: This is an impressive WordPress membership tool with years of experience. It offers crucial features like content restriction, payment integrations, and flexible memberships to build a powerful WordPress community site. The plugin supports integrations with WordPress autoresponder plugins and enables restricted access to published and downloadable content. Its pay-per-post and pay-per-view features allow non-members to use your content.

Core features: Login redirection, custom error pages, guest purchases, and unlimited coupon codes to attract newcomers.

Pricing: One-time payments for one-year support and updates of $97 for 1, $197 for 3, and $207 for unlimited sites.

ARMember: It is your go-to tool if you plan to build a full-blown WordPress membership site on a limited budget. This free, open-source plugin helps you create unlimited membership levels with trial periods and multiple payment cycles. ARMember offers drip content functionality on a set schedule. You can earn revenue from guests by monetizing posts or courses outside of subscription plans. 

Core features: Unlimited membership levels, email notifications, membership setup wizard, front-end user registration, login, and profiles

Pricing: Freemium – $35 for 1, $69 for 5, and $139 for 20 sites based on various time cycles.

Simple Membership: This simple-to-use, cost-effective membership tool lets you monetize your WordPress website using its membership system. Even if you're a newbie, the Simple Membership option lets you create a membership site easily. 

Simple Membership comes packed with essential features and a user-friendly interface. The plugin lets you set free and paid unlimited membership subscription levels. It also enables you to sell digital content, including online courses, for a one-time price or recurring payment.

Core features: Unlimited member access levels, multiple payment gateways, teaser campaigns, member filter, translation-ready, and custom post types protection.

Pricing: Free

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To wrap up

Selecting the right collaborative tool for your WordPress community website requires you to meticulously consider its features and benefits. Your choice is suitable if the plugin ticks all or most boxes. It must meet your unique needs and security standards. 

The shortlisted collaborative tool features must enable you to set comprehensive management controls. For example, these can be customizable member dashboards, content restrictions, support for popular payment gateways, subscription billing, and a robust checkout system.

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