WooCommerce is one of the most preferred eCommerce systems in the world. One of the major advantages of WooCommerce is the ability to add subscriptions.
Running a subscription business has its own share of advantages and disadvantages. Here is a detailed guide to running a subscription business on WooCommerce.
In this post, you’ll learn about some of the best WooCommerce subscription plugins that are available in the market. Take a look at the features, USP, pros, cons and pricing before you make your decision to purchase a WooCommerce recurring payments plugin for your business.
WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions by WooCommerce will add a new payment option to your WooCommerce store. It’s built by the WooCommerce team, so you know it’s going to integrate easily with your existing WooCommerce store.
Memberships allow you to create an entire membership system that’s seamlessly tied to your store.
You can restrict your content to members, but you can also “drip” that content over time to schedule when members have access. Sell access to memberships, include memberships with product purchases, manually assign memberships, and completely integrate member perks within your store.
Features:
- Setup expiration dates for certain subscription plans
- Let your subscribers manage their own plans via a member dashboard
- You can create multiple different subscriptions for your products and services
- Plenty of subscription options like downgrades, upsells, and cross-sells
- You can offer trial periods to your customers
Price: $199
WooCommerce Membership Plugin
WooCommerce Memberships has limited functionality compared to the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin but it’s an official WooCommerce add-on that brings your content, shop, and memberships together to create a site-wide platform that allows access to certain portions on a subscription basis. It allows you to drip your content over a period of time so you can schedule when members get access to it.
Using the WooCommerce Membership plugin, you can sell memberships as a stand-alone product, include memberships with a specific product or several product purchases, and add member perks that integrate into your store. You can also manually assign memberships as an invitation-only type of membership program.
Features:
- Free Trials & Sign-Up Fees
- Subscription Management
- Subscriber Account Management
- Variable Subscriptions
- Synchronized Payments
- Upgrades/Downgrades
- Flexible Product Options
- Subscription Coupons
- Customer Emails
Price: Starts at $149
WPSubscription – WooCommerce Subscription & Recurring Payment Plugin
Subscriptions for WooCommerce is a simple yet effective plugin for adding recurring payments to your WooCommerce store. It helps you sell products, memberships, or services on a subscription basis without the usual technical headache.
You can create subscriptions for both simple and variable products. Set flexible billing schedules like daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly based on what works best for your business. The plugin also supports popular payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe (Pro), Razorpay, and Paddle to make collecting recurring payments easy.
Customers can manage their own subscriptions from their account page. They can pause, cancel, or resume subscriptions anytime. Store owners can also set up free trials, paid trials, and custom billing cycles. You’ll get automated emails for renewals, cancellations, and expirations to keep everyone updated.
Features:
- Simple and Variable Subscriptions
- Flexible Billing Schedules (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly)
- Free Trials & Paid Trials
- Supports PayPal, Stripe (Pro), Razorpay, and Paddle
- Customer Self-Service Options
- Automated Emails for Renewals and Cancellations
- Easy Subscription Management from WordPress Dashboard
Price: – Free version available. Pro plans start at $89/year. Free trial included.
Subscriptio – WooCommerce Subscription Plugin
Subscriptio is a comprehensive subscription plugin for Woocommerce users. It allows users to sell subscriptions and activate recurring revenue features for your WooCommerce store .
It’s best to sell e-learning packages, online memberships, magazine memberships, and more.
Subscriptio allows you to set the subscription time length, payment cycle, free trial length, order flow, chronology for each purchase and a lot more.
Using Subscriptio, subscriptions can be paused, resumed or canceled by the owner of the customer; or can be deactivated for the customer.
Features:
- Sell online memberships with recurring costs
- Configure subscription trial period
- Create subscription lists and management tools for customers
- Support Stripe and PayPal
Price: – $69
YITH WooCommerce Subscription
YITH WooCommerce Subscription, this WooCommerce subscriptions plugin allows you to make your products be accessible by your users as subscriptions, for a scheduled time (months or days) in exchange for a monthly or daily fee.
It is best for selling subscriptions for reviews, videos, learning courses, podcasts, hosting and whatever you might wish to offer to your customers in installments.
Features:
- Based upon the payment gateway the admin can schedule dates for the payments
- Customers are free to have varied products in the subscription
- Multiple payment gateways are supported by the plugin. Users are blessed with the automatic renewal feature.
- One best feature is the ‘Pause Notification’ feature. The users can enable it only when they have time.
- A single user can have various subscriptions. Besides that, if the gateway is same he can have multiple subscriptions in a single transaction
Price: $159.99
SUMO Subscriptions – WooCommerce Subscription System
SUMO Subscriptions is another comprehensive option among multiple WooCommerce subscription plugins that helps to create and sell subscriptions.
Using this WooCommerce subscription plugin, you can create simple, variable and grouped product subscriptions on your store. You can let users select the duration for the subscription and the number of renewals for order subscriptions. This plugin also lets customers purchase subscriptions and non-subscription products in a single checkout.
You can set up a fee for signups or trials according to your store strategy. Also you will find several payment gateways incorporated with the plugin to support automatic subscription renewal. This plugin is highly customizable and supports translation.
Features
- This plugin is always compatible with WooCommerce and WordPress updates
- You can create multiple subscriptions in a single checkout
- Fully compatible with payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, etc
- The support is excellent, with fast response time
- Compatible with SUMO Reward Points and WPML
- Allows to sell both subscriptions and non subscriptions products in a single checkout.
Price: $49.
Paid Memberships Pro
Paid Membership Pro Subscriptions is a flexible and easy-to-use plugin for WooCommerce subscriptions. This plugin helps encourage non-subscribers to sign up for your membership by creating messages on your restricted content or products.
Using this WooCommerce subscriptions plugin, you can create any kind of membership subscription you’d like:
- Create different subscription levels and offer rewards to subscribers on each tier
- Restrict certain products within your store and make them only accessible to your subscribers
- Create a members-only store that requires users to login/subscribe to even access your store
Features:
- Fast and easy setup
- Restrict product viewing and purchasing
- Create unique member discounts per subscription or per product
- Create a members-only WooCommerce store
Price: $149
Smart Subscriptions for WooCommerce – StoreApps
Smart Subscriptions by StoreApps is a lightweight, Stripe-native subscription plugin built for WooCommerce stores that want recurring revenue without the bloat. It skips the complexity of heavier plugins and lets you launch subscription products in minutes.
The plugin is built around Stripe’s payment infrastructure, handling automatic recurring billing, failed payment retries, and real-time payment sync out of the box.
Customers can manage their own subscriptions. They can pause, resume, or cancel, directly from their account dashboard. Store owners get a clean admin interface to view, filter, and manage all subscriptions from within WooCommerce.
Features:
- Simple subscription product setup with flexible daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly billing cycles
- Stripe-native recurring billing with automatic payment processing and bank-level security
- Intelligent failed payment retry system to recover lost revenue automatically
- Customer self-service: pause, resume, or cancel subscriptions from account dashboard
- Cancellation reason capture to reduce churn and improve offers
- Full REST API, hooks, and filters for developer customization and third-party integrations
- WooCommerce-style email notifications for all key subscription events
Price: $49/year (single site)
Conclusion
Subscription products are here to stay thus making your store subscription friendly is very essential for the steady growth of your store. Getting a good subscription plugin for your store is going to be the first step in achieving that. I hope this article helps you in choosing the best plugin for your store.