This user deleted their account soon after posting this review, so we cannot reply to them. But I can reply here to add context and address the points of the review in case anyone who stumbles upon this in the future has similar questions.
The free version of this is useless unless you spend nearly $600 to access a library of addons
There is no “pro” version of paid memberships pro. The free version available here on .org is the full core plugin. The core PMPro plugin has more functionality than most of its premium competitors. Further, all of our software, including all of our add ons listed as “Standard” or “Plus” on our website are available for free from our GitHub repositories. You can find more information on how to use all of the Paid Memberships Pro add ons for free here.
Their login form redirects users to the Membership Levels page after logging in. Why do that for members who already have memberships?
I’m not sure why OP would think this, but where users are redirected to on login is highly contested by WP plugins and themes. Our actual logic is to respect any previous “redirect_to” value and to redirect members to the account page and non-members to the levels page. You can see the code here.
There are many ways to adjust this through add ons (Member Homepage add on) or custom code (we have several tutorials on our site).
Controlling where users go on login is something we are considering taking more control over and developing a GUI for controlling. Because so many other bits of WP code interact with the filters involved in logins and login redirects, it is a rather opaque part of the site that is frustrating for non-technical users. There is room for improvement here for sure.
Instead of separate emails, your users receive a link to verify their email address in the same email used for welcoming and confirming their membership.
This is true if you are using our Email Confirmation add on. The confirmation email is intended to be a receipt of purchase. Some folks like to put content RE what is accessible in that email. There are other ways to schedule follow up emails or drip content. It should be noted that users don’t like getting tons of redundant emails after checkout, and things are more likely to be marked as spam when emails are sent repeatedly back-to-back. This is something we have to balance when choosing default behavior around emails. This can all be adjusted in various ways.
The header for every membership level is exactly the same: “Membership Level”.
OP here is talking about how we label the section of the checkout page that tells you which level you are purchasing. The heading is “Membership Level” and then the level name and description are shown within that section. I don’t think anyone who is running a membership site and wanting to make it clear which membership level the user is checking out for has issues with this formatting.
Another mindless feature of this plugin is that every page is unnecessarily prefaced with the word Membership
This helps to avoid conflicts with other plugins that might have “account” or “checkout” pages. All of the pages generated by PMPro can be edited like any WP page, including the ability to change the titles and slugs.
They’re obsessed with the word “membership”.
This, among other things in this review, leads me to believe that perhaps OP is not creating a membership site. FWIW we do have a code recipe on our site that we’ve made available for free, which shows you how to change the word “membership” to something else like “subscription” wherever it is found.
They have email short codes for everything except for Shipping Address. So if you have to ship something to a user, you can’t include their shipping address in the confirmation email.
The Shipping Address plugin automatically appends the shipping address info into the confirmation email. I guess OP wants more control over how it is displayed through the same sorts of email tags the core plugin has. This is an interesting feature request and has been passed on to the devs.
Instead of allowing you to configure a confirmation for each specific membership level, you have to configure a template which is used by all of your levels.
For most sites, it’s fine to have one template for the checkout page, confirmation page, and confirmation emails. The purpose of all of those things is facilitate the checkout itself and confirm to users that their purchase worked. Members then gain access to the content on the site that their membership level allows them.
If you want to send users of different levels emails, most folks use an Email Marketing System (like Omnisend, ConvertKit, or MailPoet, etc) to send emails to users of specific levels.
Some do want more control over the content and format of the confirmation email on a per level basis, and this is possible now via custom code. We’d like to improve our email templates in general in the future, and allowing for further per-level customization without code is something we are considering. Most sites don’t need it or get by fine using our tutorials and paid support to set things up how they need.
For example if you want to sell t-shirts, guess how you have to set it up…… as a membership!
Again, I think OP is trying to use PMPro as a general purpose ecommerce plugin. We make many decisions that will make it harder to do things like sell t-shirts on your site, so we can focus on the core use case around selling memberships.
If your site requires stronger shipping and shopping cart functionality, you should consider something like WooCommerce. If the core of your site is focused on your members and shipping is a less important, or optional component, then PMPro will work great for you. It is also possible to run both PMPro and WooCommerce on the same site if you’d like to sell t-shirts and memberships.
FWIW the Addon Packages Add On was a way to sell access to a single post or page for a flat fee. This Add On is no longer needed since PMPro 3.0, where you can create groups of membership levels and users can purchase additional levels via the standard checkout process.
And the support is poor. Not even sure why they have support. They copy and paste links to their documentation, but as you can imagine the documentation is also half-baked.
Using OP’s profile info here as a hint, we did not find any related support requests here on .org, in our email system, or in our paid support system.
I think it would be hard to describe our support and documentation as half-baked after using it. Similarly, I think it’s hard to describe one of the longest run membership plugins, with more functionality than many of its premium competitors, as half-baked. It makes me question these parts of the review and the review in general.
If you’re going to use this, I recommend hiring your own developer and then just fork it, so that way you get it to look and work the way you want it to, and preserve your changes.
I wouldn’t follow this advice. All of our software, including our paid add ons, are available for free on wordpress.org or GitHub. This means, among other things, that you can actively participate in the development of our plugins in a way that isn’t possible with plugins like WooCommerce where the add ons are hidden in private repositories.
We have built the plugin according to best practices in WordPress development, and it’s nearly always easier and better to extend our code using hooks and filters vs forking the entire plugin. Besides just being faster to use a hook vs rewrite some code entirely, when you fork something, you lose the benefit of the continued maintenance and development that we are doing.
If you are building a site that is more focused on products over members, you should consider other options besides PMPro. It sounds like OP doesn’t like that our membership plugin doesn’t work out of the box for their exact non-membership need. I hope they find something that works for them.
If you’re looking for a plugin focused on selling memberships to real human members; a plugin that has been around for over a dozen years and has a strong, profitable company behind it’s maintenance; a plugin that is 100% free to install and use and easy to integrate with; Paid Memberships Pro is the best possible option for WordPress. We’re pleased every day to work on this project that enables so many people and organizations to “get paid” so they can live their lives and pursue their dreams.
Good luck with your sites.
Jason Coleman, Co-founder, Paid Memberships Pro
.
