Two different starting points
MemberPress began as a membership plugin, and the vendor’s site still leads with it: rules that decide who can see which pages, posts and downloads, one-time and recurring memberships, checkout pages, coupons and order bumps. Courses, with lessons, quizzes and drip, sit on top of that. It also lists forums, member directories, coaching programmes, corporate accounts and automated member emails.
Learnomy began as a course platform. A course, a lesson, a quiz and a certificate are its basic objects, and memberships were added as a way to sell access to courses. That one fact explains most of the differences below.
Ask what you are really selling. If it is a site full of protected articles, files and directories with a few courses added, MemberPress is the more natural base. If it is courses with grading, cohorts and certificates, with a membership option beside them, Learnomy fits better.
What the page and the table cannot show: protecting content
This is the clearest place where MemberPress is ahead, and we would rather say so plainly. Its rule engine can protect any post, page, category or custom post type by membership level, and you can stack rules across the whole site.
Learnomy protects its own objects. Courses and lessons are gated by enrolment, pricing model or membership, and the course outline shows each row as open or locked according to real access. A blog post, a download page or a directory is not something Learnomy locks for you.
If your plan needs both, there are two sensible shapes. Use MemberPress for the content library and Learnomy for the courses, and give members a link between them. Or keep it simple and put everything people pay for inside courses, using download and rich text lessons for the material.
Building a course and a membership around it
Suppose you teach bookkeeping. You have a ten module course, a monthly membership that includes it and a yearly plan at a lower monthly cost.
In Learnomy Free, build the course, set it as available one-time or through a membership, and create two membership plans with Stripe or PayPal. Add a coupon for the launch. Members can subscribe, cancel at the end of a period and see their invoice history from their account. The quiz at the end has six question types, and the certificate is issued by itself.
In MemberPress you create the memberships and rules first, then build the course in its course builder, and attach the course to the membership. Its quiz tools pull random questions from a pool, which is a good fit for exams that should differ per student. The vendor’s pages do not describe certificates, so confirm that point before you rely on it.
Subscriptions, billing and data
Subscription billing has awkward corners: upgrades, downgrades, proration, trials, failed cards and refunds. MemberPress has years of production use here, and its owners tend to trust it.
Learnomy handles trials, cancel-at-period-end, a failed-payment grace period, partial refunds and delayed bank payments on Stripe. It does not claim the same depth for complex proration across many plan changes. If your pricing has lots of mid-cycle switching, test the cases on a staging site with the gateway’s test mode before trusting either one.
Money goes from the customer to your own processor account in both. Learnomy takes no share of your sales.
Student and member data
Both keep records in your WordPress database. The difference is the shape. Learnomy holds enrolments, attempts, progress, orders and certificates in its own tables, so a report about learners is a plain query. It supports export and erase requests for a person, with orders and audit rows retained but unlinked.
If you already use MemberPress for the list of paying members, remember that moving a list is easy while moving live subscriptions is not.
Moving from MemberPress
There is no importer, and the work depends on what you used it for. Our importer reads LearnDash, Tutor LMS and LifterLMS only.
The course content is the simple part: rebuild lessons and quizzes by hand, or script them through the REST API or WP-CLI. The membership side needs care, because active recurring subscriptions live inside the payment processor. You cannot copy a running subscription between plugins by exporting a file. Plan a clean cut: let existing members finish their current period, offer renewal through the new checkout, and grant access by email or CSV in the meantime.
- List every membership, price and rule.
- Decide which content moves into courses and which stays protected where it is.
- Rebuild courses on staging and test them as a student.
- Bulk-enrol current members by pasted emails or a CSV.
- Announce the change and give a renewal window.
- Cancel old subscriptions only after the new ones are confirmed.
Reporting, and running both for a while
Membership businesses watch retention and course businesses watch completion. They are different numbers. MemberPress gives you views of members, subscriptions and transactions. Learnomy’s reports focus on learners, such as who enrolled, who finished and what a course has earned.
If you need both numbers, expect to check two places when you run the two plugins together, or accept one set of reports and add the other later through the REST API into a spreadsheet. Neither plugin replaces a proper analytics tool, so decide which questions you ask every week and make sure the plugin you pick can answer them without export gymnastics.
Running both for a while
You do not have to choose on day one. Many owners keep MemberPress for the protected library and add Learnomy only for the courses. The cost is two sets of settings, two update cycles and two places to look when a payment fails, so give each a clear job and write it down. If after a few months one plugin is doing almost nothing, that is the signal to retire it.
Learnomy Pro makes the “keep both” route much less work with its MemberPress bridge. You pick what each MemberPress level unlocks in Learnomy (courses, membership plans, learning paths, Space seats or cohort places), and access then follows the member. A paid signup grants it. A refund takes back only what that payment gave, and access the member has from anywhere else stays. A cancelled subscription keeps access until the paid period runs out, the same as MemberPress does. MemberPress keeps the billing and the protection of your other content, and every grant shows in Learnomy’s Access Log with its order, so when a member says “I paid but can’t see the course” you can check, retry or grant it from one screen. The setup is in the MemberPress bridge guide, and the wider picture is in selling courses through the store you already run.
Who should not switch
Stay with MemberPress if protecting a wide range of content is the core of your site, if you depend on its coaching, directory or corporate account features, or if your integrations are already wired into its funnel.
Choose Learnomy if you are selling structured courses and the membership is a way to buy them.