LearnDash recently introduced MemberDash, an innovative solution to WordPress membership and content restriction. MemberDash offers a native integration capability with LearnDash. Using this plugin you can easily sell your courses and manage your memberships. It gives you an easier mechanism through which you can create subscriptions plus control the content they can and cannot access.
You can use MemberDash even as a standalone solution to create a membership site. In this post, we’re doing a MemberDash review, including the LearnDash LMS perspective. We’re going to look at the different advantages of the plugin, and what new features it introduces. Also, we’ll get hands-on experience to have a deeper understanding of the plugin.
What is MemberDash?
MemberDash is a membership and content restriction plugin from LearnDash. If you have an eLearning site, you know how important the eCommerce functionalities are. MemberDash is a plugin that integrates effortless membership management with LearnDash to create a powerful membership site. It allows you to offer perks, discounts, and content beyond LearnDash courses.
Generally, WooCommerce is used to handle all the payments and content restrictions. But the existing free WooCommerce integration isn’t the best tool for selling courses. It is free, yes, but the lack of scalability and disjointed sales flow can cause a lot of headaches. That’s why, to make management easier and expand your subscription functionalities, LearnDash introduced MemberDash.
LearnDash has always been providing the users with an incredible LMS solution. For example, the LearnDash Notes, is such a plugin that helps students take notes from the online courses. Likewise, MemberDash has been introduced so that you can effortlessly manage your members and better control your content access.
Advantages of MemberDash
When you’re publishing courses on your LMS site, one of your main goals is to have as many enrolments as possible. However, to sell your courses and manage your subscriptions, you need proper WooCommerce/eCommerce integrations. WooCommerce combined with LearnDash gives you the ability to do all of those and more.
Some of the benefits of using LearnDash with MemberDash are:
- You can provide a better user experience according to the action or content your customers need to achieve.
- You can sell courses, bundles, and subscriptions.
- You can offer tiered membership levels with different perks, discounts, and content.
Normally you can’t do any of these without the help of a membership plugin. There are certain benefits that MemberDash comes with. Some of the advantages that MemberDash are:
- Simpler management of LearnDash courses and WooCommerce memberships.
- Automatic enrollment of members into LearnDash courses based on their membership plan.
- Compatibility with standard themes and plugins for a seamless experience.
- MemberDash also integrates with multiple payment gateways. You can integrate it with Stripe or PayPal.
- Flexible memberships allow you to choose from different subscription types to allow different levels of member access to premium content.
- Billing management and coupon features allow you to customize your invoices, enable prorating, and user coupons to attract new members.
Also, another great thing about MemberDash is that it doesn’t take any cut from your earnings. You keep 100% of your revenue. However, you have to pay any third-party processing fees through your own payment gateway with either Stripe or PayPal.
Hands-on experience with MemberDash
To understand how the plugin works, it is best to get hands-on experience. After you purchase MemberDash, you’ll receive a zip file. You have to install the plugin by uploading the zip file. After you install MemberDash a new option will be added to your WordPress dashboard. In the ‘Memberships’ section you can manage your memberships.
In the Protection Rule section, you can choose which pages, categories, etc. you want to make unavailable to visitors and non-members. This section consists of pages, posts, categories, custom post types, etc. You can select these categories, and select individual contents that you want to restrict for each user type.
In the ‘All Members’ section you’ll find all the members of your site. You can also add new members or choose a member from the existing WordPress users. All you have to do is put in the username, email address, first name, last name, and password. That’s how you can create a new user.
You can add coupons for your LMS website and you can also select which members will be able to use these coupons. It lets you select a start date and expiry date for the coupons. You can manage all your coupons from this section.
MemberDash also has several add-ons that you can enable for your website. You can access these add-ons from MemberDash > Addons and enable any add-on you wish. For example, if you want to send your members additional email responses, you can use the ‘Additional Automated Messages’ addon. This section also has integration support such as the bbPress integration, BuddyPress integrations, etc.
In settings, you can tweak various MemberDash options. The settings are divided into multiple categories. The first category is the general settings. Here you can enable/disable the content protection feature, hide/show the admin toolbar, enable/disable WordPress Cron for sending emails, etc.
In the payment section of the settings, you can setup your payment details. You can add in your currency, billing address, company VAT/TAX number, etc. You can also setup your payment gateway which are manual, stripe, and PayPal.
You can also edit your content protection message which will be displayed to users when they’re trying to access contents that are restricted to them. The Automated email response can also be customized. In the media protection area, you can mask your download URL and select a protection method.
You can also import/export your MemberDash data. If you’re using MailChimp, the final settings option allows you to connect your MailChimp account with your LearnDash.
Pricing – MemberDash
At this point of our MemberDash review, we’re going to look at the pricing. There are 3 types of licenses for MemberDash right now. For one site, ten sites, and for unlimited sites. Let’s take a look at the pricing of the MemberDash plugin:
- For 1 Site – $199/year
- For 10 Sites – $399/year
- Unlimited sites – $799/year
All the plans include updates and support. Once you purchase MemberDash for your LearnDash site, you can start customizing your LMS site. You will have built-in reporting, simple account management, customizable settings, and much more.
If you want, you can also cancel your MemberDash license. MemberDash is sold on an annual license basis. If you want to cancel your license, you can do it from your LearnDash account dashboard. But remember, you must have an active license in order to receive support and automatic updates.
Conclusion
When speaking about MemberDash we also have to mention LearnDash. Creating and managing an online education website is challenging. To reduce the challenges, LearnDash has always been providing users with powerful LMS features. Plus, you can use MemberDash as a standalone membership management solution.
It gives you a nice interface to manage all your members and also an effective way to restrict content from certain members. So we would say MemberDash is a good solution to all your membership and content restriction challenges for any WordPress site including a LearnDash LMS site.
That brings our MemberDash review to a conclusion. We hope this post was helpful for you guys. Do let us know which plugin you use for your membership management and content restriction. Or do you prefer using WooCommerce membership instead? Let us know in the comment section.
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links and we may receive a small commission if you purchase something by following them. However, we recommend services/products that we believe good to serve your purpose.
