LifterLMS vs. MemberPress: a comparison

When it comes to researching tools for your membership site, you may quickly become overwhelmed.

It’s challenging to make heads or tails of how these features will support your courses, what implementation will look like, and how each will support your business as you grow.

As mentioned, LifterLMS and MemberPress are both WordPress plugins. So when it comes to set up, design options, and e-commerce features, they’re quite similar. 

MemberPress has more of a focus on membership management while LifterLMS does both member management and offers a learning management system, similar to AccessAlly. 

They both allow you to manage your content with access rules, accept payments, as well as connect with the CRM you’re already using. 

While both MemberPress and LifterLMS will support your online courses, MemberPress is not a full-fledged learning management system at this time. 

LifterLMS however, offers the flexibility to start out slow and add more advanced features over time as your business needs them, similar to AccessAlly. 

That being said, to get these features from LifterLMS, you’ll need to be on their Infinity plan (their most expensive tier) for this to make sense. We’ll get into the pricing in detail later, but this is certainly something to keep in mind. 

LifterLMS does a great job of explaining what kind of support is available, both pre-purchase and after your purchase. 

LifterLMS offers presale phone consultations, Q&A webinars, and chat and email before you purchase. They also offer product demo calls which can be really nice if you have specific setup questions. 

Once you install the plugin and dive into your setup, you can contact their support desk via email if you hit any roadblocks. They also provide robust help documentation within their knowledge base, training courses, and webinars. 

You’ll have access to their getting started guides, video tutorials, and live onboarding calls. They offer a weekly office hour mastermind so you can get answers to your questions. 

MemberPress has a thorough knowledge base with well-documented, up-to-date articles. Once you’ve purchased MemberPress, you can submit support tickets. They offer a Getting Started guide for new users, which is a great way to build the foundational knowledge you’ll need to effectively use the software. 

LifterLMS has more pre-sale resources marketed and available than MemberPress does. 

All in all, both are well-documented. If you want more hands-on support, then LifterLMS may be a better fit for you. If you’re okay figuring things out on your own, and using the support ticket system when you get stuck, then MemberPress will do the trick.

There’s no doubt that features like quizzes, assignments, task lists, progress tracking, and more help students stay engaged and have higher learning retention rates.

If you want an effective, engaging learning environment, choose a software (or the correct plan) that will let you use all these features throughout your courses, programs, and memberships.

LifterLMS has more advanced learning reinforcement features available compared to MemberPress. Be careful though, because if you haven’t chosen the Infinity Plan, you’ll find yourself paying a high monthly fee to get these valuable features.

LifterLMS offers quizzes, quiz timers, prerequisites, student dashboards, discussion areas, achievement badges, and certificates.

If you’re on the Infinity Plan (or paying to get these add-ons), you can use advanced quizzing systems that allow for multiple quiz question types, like fill in the blank, short and long answer, file uploads, and custom code among other features.

MemberPress recently released a courses add-on feature that allows you to utilize some learning reinforcement features in your courses. This add-on is an extension to the core plugin, not an additional integration.

Through MemberPress Courses you’ll get a visual course builder, progress tracking, and a sales feature. The sales feature enables redirects if a user doesn’t have access to a certain piece of content, you can easily redirect to a sales page or order form.

If you want to offer quizzes, tests, certificates, or other learning reinforcements, you’ll need to use an add-on integration for another learning management system, like LearnDash.

If these learning reinforcements are an important part of your content, we’d recommend choosing a different software that comes with these features natively.

The last thing you want is a duct-taped solution that doesn’t look and feel seamless to your users. This can be distracting and have the opposite effect that you’re looking for.

Bulk course enrollment can be a powerful selling tool so you can offer your content to businesses, communities, schools, and other groups easily. With a fully automated bulk course enrollment feature, you can sell a group of licenses to a team leader. Then, each team leader has the power to assign their licenses to team members.

The team leaders have a beautifully designed, intuitive dashboard so they can see their team members’ progress, communicate with them directly, purchase more licenses, and more. All this can happen with no extra time or energy from you or your team.

MemberPress does have an add-on called Corporate Accounts that’s available on the Plus and Pro plans.

The MemberPress Corporate Accounts add-on enables you to specify a membership with a parent and any number of child or sub-accounts. For example, if you have a corporate user and they need a membership that allows them to sign up their employees. Or if your membership is for a parent and their children need to be associated with their account.

With LifterLMS, you can create a duct-taped solution through their voucher system. Through this system, you could provide voucher codes to a business and allow team members to sign up using their code.

What’s lacking here is the team management feature. There’s no dashboard or team connection with the voucher system.

It’s also not scalable in the way that a fully automated team feature will be. These vouchers are created on an as-needed basis. You can’t have one order form that will purchase a certain number of licenses over and over again. They have to register with their voucher. The team leader doesn’t know if their vouchers have been used – only the admin can see it on the back end.

So if bulk course enrollment is an important feature for you, then choosing MemberPress’s Corporate Accounts add-on may be the best option for you.

LifterLMS and MemberPress offer similar e-commerce features. Both can accept credit card payments, either one-time, payment plans, or subscription payments.

LifterLMS works with Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.Net. With LifterLMS, be sure to check your tier limitations. If you’re on the Basic plan, you could find yourself paying up to $100 a month for each integration!

MemberPress works with Stripe, PayPal Payments Standard, Authorize.net, and PayPal Express Checkout.

One thing to note with MemberPress is that the back-end infrastructure for subscription plans isn’t very intuitive or easy to manage. You’ll also have limitations when it comes to customizing your order forms or invoices generated via Stripe.

LifterLMS takes a slight edge here because of the layout of the backend payment management. If you know you want to use WooCommerce, then LifterLMS is the better solution for you as well. If you’re wanting these features from LifterLMS, budget for the Infinity plan to support you.

• • You’re looking for a membership and LMS plugin all-in-one
  • You’re already using a WordPress website and looking for a WordPress plugin
  • You don’t mind using a third-party tool to connect your course with your CRM
  • You have a need for more advanced quiz functionality 

• • You simply want restrict content and not a fully functioning learning management system
  • You won’t need a two-way integration with your CRM to allow for customized experiences
  • You’re comfortable with purchasing, setting up, and maintaining multiple add-ons, integrations, and plugins