AccessAlly vs. Memberium: a comparison
Our fans tell us AccessAlly allows them to earn more from their online courses and membership sites. We think you’ll love AccessAlly’s power features, along with its’ sophisticated interface.
If you’re curious to see how AccessAlly really stacks up to Memberium, read on!
We've been in the Keap and ActiveCampaign space for over a decade...
And we’ve tested a lot of different membership and course solutions.
When we couldn’t find a solution that would do what we needed, we dusted off our Software Engineering chops and developed AccessAlly.
And to this day, we continue to test and review the options on the market so we can share that knowledge.
How do AccessAlly and Memberium Differ?
AccessAlly and Memberium both offer a WordPress membership plugin with built-in integration with Infusionsoft and ActiveCampaign.
This is where the similarities end, and where the differences begin.
How many plugins does it take to run a course...
This might sound like the start of a joke, but it’s no laughing matter.
Memberium handles basic integration and membership levels, but you need to buy additional plugins to have a fully functioning course or membership website.
It’s not unheard of for Memberium users to install 6 or more different plugins to handle everything from payments, deeper integrations, learning management systems (LMS), member directories, and other connectors to make everything work together. This is one of the main reasons Memberium users start to look for a Memberium replacement.
With AccessAlly, you sign up for one tool that seamlessly handles everything from payments, course creation, LMS functionality, deep integrations, and member management.
Styled Member Directories & Fully Integrated Member Profiles in ActiveCampaign & Keap
While AccessAlly started off as an “access management” tool for online courses, it quickly developed into a full fledged membership plugin for WordPress.
That means you can create beautiful searchable member directories, sorted by your marketing automation platform tags. This allows members to opt in or out of your member directory, and even to purchase a premium listing.
You decide what you want to include in your member directory — like a biography, or even points earned, and course progress. Memberium offers no member directory.
Plus, with AccessAlly’s profile editing functionality, a member can update their name, email, address, and password… or any other custom field inside of your marketing automation platform.
All with one click, and everything gets synced between your membership site and your CRM. Memberium’s member profile editing functionality does not offer this in-depth integration, or easy to use interface for the member.
Take Payments Directly with Abandoned Cart Follow-up, Coupons, & Trials
If you’re using ActiveCampaign, then you’ll quickly realize that with Memberium you’ll need to purchase another shopping cart or payment tool. These additional tools can run you another $99/month on top of your existing expenses.
With Keap, you can use the built-in order forms and shopping cart functionality with either Memberium or AccessAlly. And if you decide to use AccessAlly’s order forms, because they’re beautiful, mobile-friendly, and they offer shopping cart abandonment functionality… you’ll be happy to know that all of the affiliate tracking and order data is passed back to and saved inside your Infusionsoft account, too.
With AccessAlly’s order forms, you can offer subscriptions, individually triggered time-sensitive coupons, trial offers, and 1-click upsells for past customers.
And unlike other platforms, AccessAlly doesn’t take a commission on any of your sales, and it integrates with Stripe and PayPal out the box.
If you want to use something other than ActiveCampaign or Keap’s built-in payment processing with Memberium, you’ll need to purchase an additional plugin.
Build Your Own Teaching Ecosystem, Customized to Reflect Your Teaching Style.
With AccessAlly, you’re creating your own platform to run courses, memberships, and communities on.
See it in actionWhat AccessAlly Customers Are Saying...
"We moved them over from Kajabi to Access Ally and every single member loves the new site!
Access Ally is SO easy to use and integrates perfectly with Ontraport. We’ve had ZERO issues with it, which I don’t think I can say about any other software or tool or plugin we use. Plus the interface is beautiful.
We moved them over from Kajabi to Access Ally and every single member loves the new site. It’s extremely user friendly for our clients, and for us. AccessAlly is a brilliant, beautiful, user friendly platform that has had a direct positive impact on our bottom line.” – Heidi DeCoux, HeidiDeCoux.com
"AccessAlly is the better option, hands down
“Honestly, Teachable, Thinkific, or Kajabi would have been the *easier* option, but AccessAlly with my WordPress theme is hands down the *better* option. It’s going to grow and scale with me over time, and that’s unbeatable.
AccessAlly allows me to provide a dashboard for all members, and it also allows me to create a member-directory (great for forming that community), an editable profile, plus lots of gamification features that can help members track their progress and reward them for their achievements.
AccessAlly integrates directly with my ESP, which gives me the functionality to track progress, send reminder emails. That’s priceless.” -Eden Fried, EdenFried.com
Licensing Courses, Teaching Assistants, & Students Submitting Homework
Memberium offers group or team memberships, which allows a group leader to assign sub-accounts, say for a corporate training team.
AccessAlly offers the same umbrella account functionality, included for all accounts. It’s called bulk course enrollment through Teams.
But AccessAlly takes it even further, allowing you to design the “member management” dashboard to your liking, including custom operations to kick off automations directly by group administrators.
If you’d like to run your courses through teaching assistants, or have someone monitoring participant progress, with AccessAlly Pro you can build a more robust high level teaching center. In this case, a team leader would be able to see student progress, quiz results, and even notes or questions asked.
AccessAlly Pro also makes it easy for students to upload homework attachments, like PDFs, Word documents, or other files for the administrator.
Memberium offers no homework submission, course progress tracking, or any course functionality. You need an additional plugin like LearnDash or LearnPress to run courses.
Ease of Use, Shortcodes, & Course Creation
Under the hood, most WordPress membership plugins work the same… you’ve got code that provides functionality, and you call upon that functionality using WordPress’ shortcodes.
In the case of Memberium, shortcodes are all you get. Once you’ve installed the plugin, you need to look up any functionality you might want to add from their documentation and copy and paste shortcodes into the WordPress editor. This is not only cumbersome, but it’s also error-prone and not ideal for non-coders.
AccessAlly approached building membership sites from a different perspective: from the user perspective.
From the get go, AccessAlly does all of the heavy lifting from automatically creating course tags inside of your automation marketing platform, along with the pages, menus, and permissions.
You can easily organize core pages, courses and modules, and how they’ll look on your dashboard within the step-by-step course creation wizard.
AccessAlly also provides a simple shortcode adder built into WordPress, so you don’t need to dig through thousands of lines of documentation to find the right shortcode.
Looking for something that integrates both ways?
Marketing automation tools are here to stay.
Use your marketing automation tool to power your course and membership program by taking advantage of AccessAlly’s deep 2-way street integration.
It’s built to help you sell more, teach better, and engage with your students longer.
Gamification, Automation, & Cross-selling Dashboards with 1-Click Upsells
Memberium can manipulate custom fields inside of your marketing automation platform. It can even apply tags and do other types of automation inside of your membership site.
It allows you to show different content inside of a page based on whether someone has a certain tag, or not.
If you want to set up a member dashboard that shows members what they have access to and how they can purchase more though, you’re out of luck. That’s where AccessAlly’s cross-selling dashboards come in.
AccessAlly’s also made it easier to create gamified credit systems, where members can earn points for completing quizzes, sharing on social media, or being paid members in good standing.
Members can redeem points for bonus content, services, or other goodies. Plus, AccessAlly makes it easy to do all of the automation your heart desires: follow-up with members who haven’t logged in for awhile, drip courses on various schedules, and automatically generate a PDF certificate of completion when they pass a course.
Memberium Alternative That's Open Source & Other Geeky Power-User Considerations
Memberium is a Keap WordPress membership plugin, and they recently released a separate version for ActiveCampaign. These are maintained as separate plugins with different code bases, and neither of them are open source.
This means that when an update needs to be made to the plugin, developers need to update both versions… and if ever the developers get hit by a bus (which is apparently a valid concern), no one will be able to maintain the code because it’s not open source.
AccessAlly took a different approach: it’s open source, anyone can see and read the code, and it’s just one code base for all of the marketing automation platforms it integrates with.
This is helpful for many reasons: it ensures that you’re always using the most up to date code, and it also makes it easier to transition to a different marketing automation platform down the line.
Plus, you’re not dealing with a different feature set — where you can do “some things” with one marketing automation platform, but not another.
With AccessAlly’s deep CRM integration, and built-in payment functionality, members can update their credit card on file, make outstanding payments and even 1-click upsells.
If you want full design flexibility, AccessAlly is for you
Because AccessAlly is a WordPress plugin, you can use any WordPress theme or builder you like.
Or start with AccessAlly’s theme, which comes with all of the progress tracking and navigation menus integrated out of the box.
Power, flexibility, and beauty all in one course platform.
Beautiful Out of the Box
Memberium is strictly a member permission plugin, with no user interface elements to speak of.
AccessAlly comes with a beautiful mobile-friendly interface that you can customize, which is great for:
- Displaying progress tracking, pie charts, and checklists
- On-brand cross-selling dashboards
- Affiliate centers, complete with tracking and downloads
We’ve even heard of folks hiring designers and developers to knock off AccessAlly’s look and feel, because it provides such a great user experience.
AccessAlly is not a theme, it’s a plugin — and it integrates with any WordPress theme seamlessly.
Migrating from another WordPress membership plugin like memberium to AccessAlly is easy
With the AccessAlly migration wizard, you can take an existing WordPress membership site and convert existing members easily.
Similarly, you can also import members directly from your marketing automation platform, and AccessAlly’s migration wizard will ensure all of your members have the right tags and permissions.
Then you can run through the Offerings Wizard to import existing course content, and you’ll be ready to showcase your new members area.
Your workflow on AccessAlly vs. Memberium:
- Set up your WordPress site with your favorite customizable theme
- Install the AccessAlly plugin on your WordPress membership site
- Run through the AccessAlly onboarding wizard to integrate with your CRM and select payment settings
- Create your first offering with the Offerings Wizard and add your content
- Create emails in your CRM or in AccessAlly
- Install the plugin on your WordPress membership site
- Integrate with your marketing automation platform
- Create one WordPress page at a time, manually create your menus and tags inside your CRM
- Install your LMS plugin, order form plugin, member directory plugin, etc.
- Go back to documentation and look up shortcodes
- Add content, write code to style your courses and content
- Then go back through documentation and find more shortcodes…
See How AccessAlly and Memberium Features Compare
We’re a digital marketing software company built by marketers and software engineers. With our particular background and expertise, we’ve designed AccessAlly to give you everything you need in an easy to use, powerful package, making it a great alternative or Memberium replacement.
| Protected course content |  |
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| Built-in Recurring Stripe and PayPal payments | |
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| Course builder for modules, lessons, and topics | |
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| Automatically creates tags, pages, and menus | |
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| Deep 2-Way Integration with Keap, Ontraport, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and Drip | |
Not all |
| Multiple currencies, automated expiring coupons, and order bumps | |
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| Cart abandonment automation | |
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| Progress tracking, and progress-based unlocking content | |
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| Multiple types of quizzes, and auto generated certificates of completion | |
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| Course Licensing with Teams or Umbrella Accounts | |
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| Searchable member directories and editable custom fields through profiles | |
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| Gamification where members can earn points, and activity-based automation, login tracking | |
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| Media player, video bookmarks, tagging automation on quizzes | |
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| Cross-selling dashboards, with 1-click upsells | |
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| Built-in affiliate tracking with multiple tiers, links, and reporting | |
The true cost of AccessAlly vs Memberium
When choosing a course or membership platform, looking at Memberium vs. AccessAlly pricing boxes can be deceiving.
With Memberium, which only handles membership permissions, you’ll need to add on an LMS, a payment processor, and order forms.
Your business needs likely go beyond simply gating content, so with Memberium you’ll end up adding additional tools (each with an added cost!) to make things work the way you need them to.
AccessAlly Pro comes in at a fraction of the price, with no add-ons required.
In Summary
AccessAlly might be right for you if...
- You’re a developer who likes get projects done quickly, and have happy clients who love the results of your work
- You know the value of your time, and you want a tool that will handle set up for you based on your instructions
- You want everything to work seamlessly from one end to the other (payments, courses, and memberships) with as few plugins as possible
- You’re looking to create an amazing customer experience, that’s functional, profitable, and helps you stand out in the marketplace
Memberium might be right for you if...
- You’re a developer who prefers to look up documentation, shortcodes, and spend time documenting everything you create
- You need a bare bones membership site, with no plans for added functionality down the line
- You enjoy duct-taping solutions together, and using a lot of different plugins to achieve your goals
- You plan to hire someone to do your site set up
Take AccessAlly for a test drive
Get your own free demo sandbox account so you can experience the flexibility AccessAlly has to offer.
Find answers
Didn’t find an answer to your question? Just reach out to us, we’re happy to help!
Do you have comparisons to other platforms and plugins?
Yes, we’ve done the research so you don’t have to. Here are some options to consider:
Can I see examples of AccessAlly sites?
You can find videos and case studies with screenshots and descriptions of how people are using AccessAlly on our showcase page here.
Can I talk to someone about my project?
Researching course platforms on your own is great, but if you want to talk to someone, we’re here to help!
We can help you sort out all of the different options. We’ll let you know if AccessAlly is a good fit or not, too.
Planning to develop an enterprise level program?
We’d love to find out more about your project and find out if AccessAlly is a good fit.
Book a discovery call to start the process, or tell us about your project and select “Enterprise” on our contact form.