Ultimate Member vs ARMember: Which Membership Plugin is the Best?

Need to create a website with paywalled content on WordPress? Our blog is the right place to analyze available solutions, feature by feature! How do popular membership WordPress plugins compare: Ultimate Member vs ARMember? In this detailed comparison post, you’ll find all the needed details.

Content Restriction Rules Compared

The Ultimate Member plugin offers many tools to restrict your premium content, normally with shortcodes. Moreover, the plugin enables you to customize each role’s capabilities and permissions when creating multiple user roles within the plugin.

For pages and posts, you can:

• Restrict content to logged-in users.
• Personalize what logged-out users see.
• Use dynamic user tags to personalize and display info like ({first_name}, {last_name}, {username}).
• Use custom user fields to show custom profile data.

The ARMember WordPress membership plugin allows you to easily control monetization with content restriction as well. Its core tools allow you to:

• Set restriction rules for individual pages, categories/tags, URLs, taxonomies, custom post types, or any content area of your choice.
• You can restrict the whole site for non-logged in members.
• Set members to access drip content created only after they subscribe.
• Allow members to keep access to drip content even after their plan expires or is canceled.
• You can even let expired members access drip content assigned before their plan end date.

So, the Ultimate Member plugin primarily works in the classic way with shortcodes when you need to restrict your content.

But ARMember makes it much easier to work in visual builders like the block editor or Elementor:

Comparing Content Restriction Rules for WordPress Levels

Overall, restriction rules by both WordPress membership plugins are rather well-designed and provide you with the needed level of flexibility and content management that needs to be paywalled.

Payment Processing & Paywalls

Want your members to have multiple flexible payment options? Our compared membership plugin solutions will surely provide this flexibility.

We’re comparing payment methods and payment management features you get in Ultimate Member and ARMember.

The Ultimate Member plugin allows you to buy add-ons individually or get all of them in a chosen premium plan, including WooCommerce for more gateways.

The same applies for the ARMember membership plugin.

Ultimate Member only supports Stripe, but Stripe itself gives access to several payment methods. Still, in our opinion, having more payment gateways would be a convenient addition for membership site owners.

Moreover, as an Ultimate Member user, you are bound to become an exclusive user of the Stripe platform. Thus, the tasks related to payments or paywall customization are dependent on the Stripe platform.

Comparing Payment Options

ARMember, on the other hand, gives you 21+ payment gateways out of the box, so you can simply enable and connect those you need. If you need all the payment gateways with ARMember, note that they are included starting from the Professional plan (in lower tires, you get fewer gateways).

Creating Login Forms and Customer Experiences

The Ultimate Member plugin gives you a wide range of tools to implement registration features for customers and customize them to be aligned with your preferences:

• Front-end (without WordPress dashboard).
• Redirect users to their profile or a custom URL after signup.
• Create unique forms for different user roles or set a default role for new users.

As an admin, you can also choose a registration method for customers, whether it’s auto-approval, email activation, or approving submissions manually.

Moreover, this WordPress membership management plugin extensively works with the extra form field types that you can add and collect more info about your members upon registration, including with conditional logic. You will find it handy to use such fields as:

• Tooltips.
• File uploads.
• Date picker/time picker.
• Star ratings.
• Styling elements, such as dividers.

ARMember is also very member-focused, allowing you to create powerful forms and give customers many engagement tools, such as pre-made templates and pages for membership cards, user templates, and registration templates, custom fields for the forms, etc.

You can also build powerful and beautiful sign-up and registration forms for members, collecting the information you need and customizing the fields in many ways:

• Edit field options (labels, placeholders, field types, required status, BuddyPress mapping).
• Drag-and-drop to rearrange field positions.
• Customize fields and the registration forms. Add confirm email/password fields with validation.
• Enable strong passwords.

Moreover, creating member engagement is not that super easy without the right customer satisfaction tools. How do the plugins in our Ultimate Member vs ARMember comparison solve these tasks? Let’s see!

Comparative Analysis of Member Engagement Tools of Ultimate Member and its Alternative

Also, unlike Ultimate Member, ARMember also comes with the course builder add-on that you can get in higher-tier plans. That means, you can build a course for step-by-step coaching or other educational needs with ARMember rather than with Ultimate Member.

Ultimate Member vs ARMember Pricing

You’ve already learned something about the capabilities of these both plugins, but what is the cost of those features?

Premium packages

Here we see that the pricing plans mostly differ by the number of domains you can use.

As you see, ARMember is significantly more affordable at every level, offering many more options for little money. ARMember also provides scalability and flexibility for multi-site usage at a lower cost. Comparatively, with Ultimate Member, you require a higher investment. Furthermore, you also need to check the availability of plans for 10 websites.

ARMember’s plans also vary by the bundled add-ons, the cheapest one comes with 5 payment gateways and essential features via extensions. Still, getting the all-inclusive ARMember’s package of features and gateways for 10 sites within the Enterprise plan is cheaper than that of Ultimate Member that covers only 2 domain installations.

Add-ons & Integrations of Ultimate Member vs ARMember

It’s also worth mentioning that both plugins allow you to buy dedicated add-ons individually or get them within the chosen subscription plan. The types of add-ons these plugins offer provide many similar features. 

Analysis and Free Version Comparison of Ultimate Member vs ARMember

ARMember add-ons library offers a bigger selection of tools for your membership website. With Ultimate Member, you get email marketing and affiliate integrations with a select few tools only.

You may also notice that building a social network with ARMember requires just one add-on that includes all the necessary features, while Ultimate Member may charge for all separate features (followers, friends, etc.).

When it comes to free membership plugins for WordPress that the reviewed solutions offer, the following differences are most obvious and important:

• Ultimate Member doesn’t provide any payment gateways in a free version, whereas ARMember gives you 2 (PayPal and Bank Transfer).
• You can’t sell recurring subscriptions with Ultimate Member without a paid Stripe add-on while ARMember’s free version supports them.
• Member directories and profiles are bundled in free versions of both plugins.

Ultimate Member vs ARMember: Which Membership Plugin is the Best?

Among Ultimate Member alternatives, ARMember is a top membership WP plugin solution with the best price-performance value. But don’t take our word for it, here is more details on how Ultimate Member vs ARMember compare:

1. The Ultimate Member plugin shows a great dependency on Stripe – and not just for payment methods. If you want to set up recurring payments for members, customize invoices, or configure currencies, all is manageable via Stripe as the only available pre-integrated payment method in premium plans. ARMember, on the other hand, takes a more complete approach by offering built-in payment gateway integrations along with all the tools you need to manage deposits, coupons, and recurring payments.
2. ARMember is much more budget-friendly and offers greater flexibility for multi-site use. In contrast, Ultimate Member is pricier and lacks a plan for agencies or studios that normally need one plugin license for multiple client sites. 
3. ARMember offers more built-in functional add-ons and third-party integrations, which means you have more basic and advanced tools to build your site without paying extra and grow your membership subscriptions. 

More related articles:

• How to Create a Membership Site with ARMember? (Step-by-step)
• Paid Memberships Pro vs ARMember Comparison
• MemberPress vs ARMember Comparison
• A Complete Comparison: ARMember Lite vs ARMember Premium