Memberful is a membership software for independent creators, entrepreneurs, educators, publishers, and professionals from all walks of life to convert their passion, knowledge, and work into a revenue-generating machine.
On the platform, you can upload, promote, and sell a wide range of digital products or content including online courses, private podcasts, and gated content. You can also create any kind of subscription and payment plan and charge interested customers accordingly.
However, despite its popularity, Memberful is not without shortcomings. It offers limited functionality and customization options, and is more restrictive in terms of user control.
Furthermore, Memberful only accepts payments via Stripe which would prevent you from capturing customers in certain countries that cannot access the payment service. The analytics features of the software are also basic and don’t track or generate insights into advanced activities.
Thankfully, Memberful isn’t the only tool that empowers users to monetize memberships, courses, newsletters, communities, and more. If the platform doesn’t quite meet your needs, here are some wonderful alternatives you can explore.
Best Memberful Alternatives
1. Patreon
With over 200,000 satisfied creators across the globe, Patreon is one of the most popular alternatives to Memberful in the market today. It’s a comprehensive membership platform built for creators to showcase and monetize their work through monthly memberships.
This way, your biggest fans can contribute directly to the work they love so much, and in return, they will get access to your exclusive access to your private community, content, and a glimpse into your creative process.
From hosted creator pages to unlimited membership tiers, diverse communication tools, and workshops where you can learn how to leverage the platform’s features for success, Patreon has everything you need to build a thriving and profitable support network.
Patreon tracks your business operations and provides accurate reports that you can use to forecast growth, optimize your order-to-revenue cycle, and make informed decisions to scale and improve your creative career.
Like Memberful, Patreon automates every aspect of your subscription billing process so you can simply set it and forget it. It also offers flexible payouts so you can withdraw your funds whenever you want or receive auto-payouts monthly via PayPal, Payoneer, and direct deposits.
While Memberful focuses on providing a simple account and checkout management experience, Patreon expands the horizons of what you can do by giving you greater control over all user flows. Despite offering more advanced features than Memberful, Patreon is still very simple to use.
In addition, it provides extensive documentation and learning resources to help you figure out the ropes and tackle any hiccups you might have while using the platform. It also offers excellent creator support for when you need to speak to a real person.
Explore the best alternatives to Patreon here.
2. Podia
Just like Memberful, Podia is a powerful promotional platform that helps creators sell memberships to audiences who love and value their work. However, Podia allows you to sell other digital products like webinars, courses, art, ebooks, and online downloads.
Podia is very easy to use so you can set up your website, storefront, sales pages, checkout options, and more within minutes. Yes, Memberful shines on the integration front while giving you a basic checkout system and account management platform.
On the other hand, Podia is more concerned with providing an all-in-one solution for your sales, content management, email marketing, community engagement, and product promotion needs.
This means you won’t have to integrate it with other third-party apps and software to extend its functionalities because it already has many advanced features built-in.
With this alternative to Memberful, you can incorporate affiliate links into your page to boost sales or take advantage of Podia’s email marketing tools to nurture leads and build stronger connections with your audience.
Thanks to the built-in chat tool, you can speak to your customers in real-time, address any concerns they might have about your product or service, and close more deals.
Find out the best alternatives to Podia in this post.
3. Gumroad
On Gumroad, you can sell anything from memberships to podcasts, online courses, electronic books, and even physical products to people all over the world. The platform is super easy to set up so you can sign up and begin selling within minutes.
Like Memberful, Gumroad works with your existing technology so you can simply embed it on your existing website. For those that don’t have a website, Gumroad also allows you to set up a store on their platform where you can direct buyers or subscribers to complete checkout.
Another interesting feature on Gumroad that makes it a better alternative to Memberful is the ability to choose between recurring, one-time, fixed-length, and pay what you want payment models. This way your customers can select the option that best suits them.
Gumroad accepts payments in different currencies so you can scale your business and maximize sales by marketing to an international audience. You can even create special discount codes in percentages or fixed amounts to reward your subscribers or encourage potential members to buy your product.
Unlike Memberful, Gumroad doesn’t charge monthly subscriptions. You can sign up and begin using it for free and will only be expected to pay a 9% fee whenever you make a sale, and the more sales you make, the lower the fee.
4. Kajabi
Kajabi is a platform like Memberful that helps you turn your ideas into polished digital products and allows you to monetize them through newsletters, courses, podcasts, membership sites, coaching programs, and more.
Whether you’re receiving one-time, recurring, or trial payments, Kajabi allows you to easily receive funds from your customers via PayPal and Stripe.
Kajabi provides you with comprehensive reports, user forecasts, and tracks customer progress so you can see how your audience is engaging with your content and make insight-driven business decisions.
While Memberful only supplies you with the tools to sell your membership with the option of using integrations to enjoy other features like analytics, drip email, email marketing, community management, affiliate tracking, and more, Kajabi delivers all these services to you out of the box.
You can access your website as well as products, community, marketing, and analytic tools all from one dashboard instead of jumping from one tech stack to another. With Kajabi email, you can send customizable emails to grow, reach, and manage your subscriber list and foster strong relationships with them.
Kajabi also enables you to create custom, fully-integrated pages for marketing, promoting, and selling your products. Additionally, it supports automation so you automate certain workflows and customer experiences and focus on the more nuanced aspects of your business.
5. Teachable
With over 100,00 creators and more than $1 billion in sales from courses and coaching, Teachable has cemented its place as one of the premier online learning platforms in the market and a veritable alternative to Memberful.
It only takes a few minutes to get started with Teachable and get access to all the tools you need to build and sell online courses and memberships.
You can let your brand’s personality shine through by customizing your content to tell your unique story. The beauty of Teachable is that you don’t require any technical skills to create a thriving business around your knowledge, skills, experience selling coaching or courses.
Just like with Memberful, you can easily connect your existing website to Teachable using a custom domain. It’s easy to keep an eye on your sales numbers and insights about your users thanks to LearnDash’s rich analytics dashboard.
Teachable also helps you to create beautiful sales pages that you can use to attract and capture potential customers. You can even turn your courses and coaching into a collaborative effort by teaming up with other authors and contributors and assigning them roles and permissions on your Teachable dashboard.
In addition, Teachable has an exhaustive list of partners which means you can integrate it with other third-party solutions and all your preferred tools.
6. Ontraport
With Ontraport, you can build a comprehensive membership site from the group up without writing a single line of code.
This all-in-one tool is capable of creating lessons, course overviews, thank you pages, and scaling with you as you grow, making it an excellent alternative to Memberful.
Ontraport keeps track of your prospects, leads, and customers and supplies you with detailed reports that show you exactly what’s working and what’s not so you can make adjustments. You can automate your marketing processes to create a personalized journey for each customer.
You can set up your membership site, build your courses, create customer portals, sync them with your subscriber or member emails, connect to a payment system, and have it all running in no time.
In addition, Ontraport’s customer support is one of the most reliable in the market which means you can always get help for your problems and answers to your questions anytime, any day.
7. LearnDash
This award-winning software is one of the best Memberful alternatives out there that’s specifically tailored for building and hosting online courses. LearnDash provides a structured content delivery system that’s designed to encourage learning and increase completion rates for your users.
You can create content layers, divide students into groups, flesh out micro-courses, automate notifications, and even gamify the learning experience to make it more engaging. Like it is with Memberful, there are various pricing models available on LearnDash including one-time payments, memberships, subscriptions, and bundles.
With over 300 payment gateways on LearnDash, your customers are guaranteed to find a payment method that works. The setup process for LearnDash takes all of five minutes and all you need is a WordPress site to begin using it.
This alternative to Memberful furnishes you with everything you need to make your online courses a smashing success. LearnDash is equipped with drip content, engagement triggers, extensive user management, and a rewards system for your learners.
It also integrates with a diverse range of tools so you can extend the functionality of your LearnDash platform by connecting it all to your favorite software like Zapier, Slack, MailChimp, ConvertKit, and more.
Check out the best alternatives to LearnDash here.
8. Ko-fi
If you’re a creative entrepreneur with precious knowledge or talent that you want to share with the world and build a business around or just earn some extra money from, Ko-fi is a great platform for achieving that.
One reason why Ko-fi is one of the best Memberful alternatives is that the platform doesn’t charge any fees on the money you receive from memberships, donations, or sales—sales except on the free plan—so you can keep it all for yourself.
You can create membership tiers with different prices and benefits that your audience will love and be willing to pay more for.
Ko-fi lets you monitor your biggest fans and send them a direct message to thank them for their support or offer them additional value like merchandise, exclusive content, and more. You can also download your supporter data anytime you want.
With Ko-fi, you don’t have to wait till the end of the month or some arbitrary date to receive your earnings. You get paid instantly and directly via your Stripe or PayPal account whenever someone makes a purchase, donation, or signs up for one of your membership plans.
9. MemberPress
MemberPress is an elite tool that lets you create a fully-functional and integrated membership site on WordPress. The solution helps you produce gated content, sell your online courses and other digital downloads, and accept payments easily and quickly.
Similar to Memberful, this alternative allows you to secure more membership subscriptions and sales by creating and offering customizable coupons to your customers.
With MemberPress’ community feature, you turn your website into a great place for your users to hang out and interact with each other while engaging with your products and services.
MemberPress offers drip content so you can decide to release all your content at once or time it so that they drop at intervals. Like Memberful, MemberPress also supports affiliate marketing via plugins so you reward people who help drive sales for your courses, memberships, and online products.
The payment gateways available on MemberPress are diverse so you never have to worry about losing out on a sale over unsuitable payment methods. In addition, MemberPress is easy to set up and you can take advantage of automated emails and detailed reports to increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
10. Thinkific
Create digital courses and products quickly and easily with Thinkific’s intuitive course builder. The platform offers gorgeous ready-to-use templates and themes that you can use to build the membership site of your dreams.
You also have the option of customizing your site from scratch to suit your specific needs and pregnancy. Thinkific makes managing your course content a walk in the park with its simple drag-and-drop editor and the option of previewing your content and changes before you publish them.
Thinkific gives you everything you need to build the perfect course such as communities, assignments, coupons, certificates, live lessons, drip lessons, and randomized quizzes. You get to set and control your pricing and payment structure however you like.
Thinkific has a long list of app partners ranging from email automation to lead conversion, coupon creation, customer relationship management, and more that you can integrate your website with.
It also provides robust student data analytics to help you refine your course content and future marketing efforts.
11. Kartra
Another all-in-one alternative to Memberful that’s worth checking out is Kartra. It was built to help creators produce and market digital products, sell memberships, and host online courses.
Customers can purchase your content on Zapier and make one-off payments, utilize payment plans, or sign up for one of your membership tiers depending on the pricing and payment structure you want to adopt.
Kartra’s simple drag and drop interface makes the platform easy to navigate and it provides an assortment of templates and colors to choose from when creating your membership site.
With Kartra, you can structure your content into categories, drip content over time or make it available all at once, build multi-membership portals, upload audio or video files, and track your audience’s progress which makes it ideal for courses and learning centers.
Kartra sends you detailed analytics reports about your pages, emails, and campaigns so you can see what’s working and what’s not. Just like Memberful, Kartra also supports seamless integration with a range of tools including Zapier, SendGrid, Twillo, and Google Calendar.
From the comments section of your Kartra memberships page, you can interact and quickly respond to feedback or questions from your audience, and moderate your community to foster a more engaging experience.
12. Simplero
Simplero is an all-purpose solution that helps you build and launch membership sites, coaching services, and digital products like courses, ebooks, videos, audio files, and virtual events.
It has earned a solid spot as one of the best Memberful alternatives by being chock-full of all the advanced features creative entrepreneurs need to create fast-selling online products.
You get to enjoy access to email marketing tools, landing page builders, media hosting, and ready-to-use templates for customizing your offerings and nurturing relationships with your customers.
With Simplero’s automatons and triggers, you can automate every aspect of your customer’s journey from simple workflows to advanced actions depending on how they interact with your content, emails, and website.
When it comes to membership sites, all you have to do is figure out how you want to tier your content and Simplero will take care of everything else, making sure people only get access to what they paid for, and nothing more.
13. LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is a powerful yet simple platform for creating membership sites that provides you with the tools and resources you need to sell courses, memberships, and bundles.
You can take advantage of the customizable templates and themes to build enjoyable learning experiences for your students.
LearnWorlds takes interactive learning to a new level by allowing you to turn your course videos into engaging experiences with interesting quizzes, tables of content, and auto-generated transcripts.
You can also create optimized marketing funnels to capture leads, upsell and cross-sell offers, and increase your ROI. Like Memberful, you can use LearnWorlds with your existing or custom domain name and weave your brand identity throughout your membership site.
Besides, you can seamlessly connect your favorite marketing tools to LearnWorlds to extend its functionality and prevent you from jumping from app to app.
Furthermore, LearnWorlds offers extensive support through its blog, live masterclasses, course building academy, free resources library, and help center so you can always find help speedily should you encounter any issues with the service.
14. Ruzuku
Ruzuku is another online platform like Memberful that enables you to share your knowledge, build and sell courses, and host videos.
It comes with all the important tools you would expect to find in a membership site such as an easy-to-use drag and drop editor that makes designing and promoting tutorials a breeze.
Whether you’re a beginner or you possess ample technical skills, Ruzuku has extensive onboarding processes and detailed guides to help you get your online knowledge business off the ground. You can accept payments for your courses via PayPay, Stripe, or by integrating Ruzuku into your own payment system.
The option to host teleconferences and live webinars on Ruzuku is one benefit that really sets it apart from Memberful and other alternatives as it creates a more engaging learning experience for students.
Ruzuku also supports other content formats like audio and PDF so you can deliver your content using your preferred medium. It’s easy to monitor the progress of your students and see how they are engaging with your courses with the help of Ruzuku’s course analytics feature.
Additionally, Ruzuku offers flexible payment options for your students and customers including one-off purchases and recurring subscriptions.
15. Mighty Networks
The final Memberful alternative on this list is Mighty Networks, a community-building platform where you can charge for memberships, launch courses, stream events or sessions live, and establish a community around your content.
With Mighty Networks, you can build a customizable website with your own domain and branding elements, from where you can develop interesting courses and sell subscriptions or bundles to generate considerable revenue and profit for your business.
One of the features that sets Mighty Networks far apart from Memberful is the ability to design content drips for your courses and set them by date or based on when your learner completes a section. However, like its rival, Mighty Networks enables you to provide free trials and discount codes to help boost sales.
The platform offers problem-free integration with various email services, CRM software, and other tools by way of Zapier. Also, Mighty Networks delivers broad-guage insights and data about your courses, memberships, messaging, and financials, alongside deep analytics from other communities and creators to help you optimize your business.
Conclusion
These are some of the best Memberful alternatives you can invest in to help monetize your knowledge and work and earn a substantial income.
Although all the above-mentioned platforms are up to the task, Podia takes the lead amongst them as the best of the best.
It’s an intuitive tool that allows you to sell all kinds of digital products, set and accept different payment options, supports integration, and gives you full control over all your activities.
