MemberMouse

There are a lot of membership site solutions for WordPress. Some are simple. Some do it all. A few are mature enough to be used for enterprise level applications. MemberMouse is one of those.

That said, I admit I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with MemberMouse.

I used it in my own business for several years. I use to sing it’s praises because of how powerful it is. And, none of that has changed.

But, I ended up leaving MemberMouse after a long period of frustration in the product’s stagnation and lack of development.

That’s the thing about MemberMouse. It truly is powerful. It is also pretty bulletproof from a coding perspective, so it is built to run under high load without breaking a sweat. It will do it’s job reliably. They’ve even built in some powerful functionality most other membership platforms lack, such as 1-click upsells, downsells, save-the-sale options when members go to cancel, gifting functionality, etc.

It has some nice automation features such as push notifications, overdue payment notifications, etc.

It has a nice member management system. It has quite an in-depth built-in reporting system with all the analytics you’d want.

In a lot of ways, it blows the competition away.

Where my negativity comes in was with the slowness of development. They didn’t come out with updates very often and, when they did, it seemed like the updates were often minimal things that didn’t really add any new capability. When you consider that I was paying for MemberMouse as if it was a SaaS application, I didn’t feel it was worth it.

The admin interface was slow and clunky, too. Very far from being WordPress-native. It seems as if they have updated it somewhat since I left to get rid of the slow admin dialog windows and useless animations when you click on things.

MemberMouse is also interesting in that it is a WordPress plugin and you are responsible for the hosting, yet they bill you as if it is a hosted web application. You are paying a monthly fee and they even limit your capabilities and number of members based on what you pay. All in all, this makes MemberMouse one of the most expensive membership site plugins for WordPress.

So, that’s the jist of where I come down on MemberMouse.

Yes, it is probably the most powerful membership site plugin for WordPress. It does a lot, does it well. In fact, it does so much that it is like a large cruise ship. Lots of inertia and it doesn’t make changes very quickly at all (hence the slow development schedule).

These days, I can’t say I suggest MemberMouse to anybody.

It is one of those systems, too, that is hard to get out of. If you stop paying them, your recurring billing of your members simply stops. Again, that’s a heck of a punch in the gut when you are self-hosting a plugin.

Simply put, in most cases, I recommend you not use MemberMouse. And that’s despite it being one of the most powerful solutions for WordPress.