AccessAlly vs. Paid Memberships Pro: a comparison

AccessAlly is a WordPress LMS and membership plugin that allows you to earn more with fewer tech snafus from your online courses and membership site. We know you’ll love AccessAlly’s power features, along with its built-in learning management system.

If you’re curious to see how AccessAlly really stacks up to Paid Memberships Pro, read on!

Paid Memberships Pro will work with any WordPress theme, however, they do have their own theme, exclusive to Paid Memberships Pro plugin owners.

As a Paid Memberships Pro user, you may not be able to create a totally unique design with this exclusive theme, but you will have a variety of templates, fonts, and colors to choose from so your membership site design can be representative of your brand.

AccessAlly works with any WordPress theme, and comes with a theme you can use as a starting point if you don’t already have a preference.

With AccessAlly’s Offerings Wizard, you can easily design any course structure using a combination of modules and lessons with the drag and drop course builder. Plus you have full design flexibility as every lesson or module added is created as a WordPress page for you to add content in any format or layout you prefer.

Paid Memberships Pro users have access to an extensive library of add-ons and integrations, so it’s easily extensible for membership site owners who don’t need an LMS or sell online courses.

However, there are some things many membership site owners expect to be standard features of their membership plugin. Unfortunately, Paid Memberships Pro fails to deliver.

Some of these features are the ability to release dripped content, being able to manually add members, create custom menus for each membership level, and the option to offer multiple payment plans.

While all of these are possible with Paid Memberships Pro’s paid plans, you have to install an add-on to unlock this functionality. You could find yourself seeking out and investing in plugins or add-ons for:

• • Advanced e-commerce functionality such as upgrades and downgrades, trial offers, and pro-rated subscriptions

  • Integration with your CRM for marketing automation

  • Bulk course enrollment

  • Affiliate marketing

  • Gamification

Paid Memberships Pro’s development philosophy helps keep the plugin itself small, so it won’t bloat your site, but if you’re using a quality hosting provider this shouldn’t be an issue regardless of the LMS and membership plugin you choose.

If you find yourself installing add-on after add-on though, it may be more beneficial for you to find a plugin that takes a more all-in-one approach to development so it’s easier to manage.

With AccessAlly, you sign up for one tool that seamlessly handles everything from payments, course creation, LMS functionality, deep integrations, and member management. No third-party add-ons or plugins required.

Paid Memberships Pro and AccessAlly both integrate with Stripe and PayPal for payment processing. You’ll be able to collect one-time payments, set up recurring subscriptions, and offer payment plans for your offers.

AccessAlly’s order forms are more customizable though, and it offers more advanced e-commerce features and functionality than Paid Memberships Pro.

With AccessAlly you can offer 1-click upsells for other courses and memberships you sell. You even have the opportunity to add order bumps for add-on products. And, you can allow your customers to upgrade and downgrade their subscriptions, pause or cancel them to reduce the number of customer service inquiries you receive for account management.

You’ll be able to improve your sales conversion rates with cart abandonment campaigns for those who initiate the checkout process but abandon their carts before completing their purchase.

The best part? Because AccessAlly has built-in payments and integrates directly with your CRM, you can easily manage and segment your sales and marketing funnels so your customers and prospects get the right communication.

For Paid Memberships Pro users to have access to or benefit from these features, you’ll need to purchase an additional plugin or add-on to integrate with Paid Memberships Pro, adding complexity and expenses to your tech stack.

In some instances, you can use custom code to get the functionality you need, but if you’re not a developer this could be a major roadblock for you.

With AccessAlly, you have two types of progress tracking and reporting features available to you as the site owner.

You can setup front-end tracking for your users to keep track of their prorgress, and back-end tracking for the course admin.

Front-end tracking is based on objective completion and can be displayed as a percentage with a pie chart, a progress bar, or a simple text display.

In the backend of the website, AccessAlly Pro shows unique progress tracking stats so that the course admin can see, at a glance, how users are interacting with their course content.

These reporting features make it possible for you to gauge student success and see where the dropoff begins to happen in your courses to improve the overall user experience. You can use this data to inform your decision-making process for adding various learning reinforcements and checkpoints to prevent students from falling off the wagon by motivating them to keep going.

AccessAlly also has additional business reporting options through its built-in metrics feature for tracking sales, projected revenue, churn, refunds, and so much more.

Paid Memberships Pro offers some business metrics tracking and data points for you to gauge the health of your membership site’s performance in terms of sales and active users but to get the full picture you may need to incorporate another tool for advanced tracking and analytics.

• • You have a simple recurring membership you want to run, and don’t plan to offer any online courses
  • You don’t need deep integration with your CRM or prefer not to follow up differently with people based on their actions on your membership site
  • You’re comfortable with the “more plugins and add-ons” philosophy and maintaining them all
  • You’re comfortable working with custom code to hack your setup for more advanced functionality

• • 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
  • You like to geeky or you have advanced marketing needs and need lots of flexibility in your course platform