Memberium and AccessAlly: Let’s Compare the Two – Part 1

I often get questions from Infusionsoft users about the membership site platform they should use to build their online course or coaching program.  Given that, I thought it was a good time to revisit the Memberium vs. AccessAlly question.  These are the two major offerings servicing this space and a side-by-side comparison is a valuable for given that those two are usually the ones people are considering.

A Little Background

I think it's only fair to share with you my experience building Infusionsoft membership sites.  I want to be completely open about my potential biases.  I don't want people thinking I've got an agenda serving and that I favor one over the others.

I've been building websites for people as far back as 1998.  In 2017, I taught myself Wordpress when it was becoming popular and in December 2010 I discovered Infusionsoft.  At the time, the only Infusionsoft / Wordpress membership site platform available was InfusionWP.   This was later renamed iMember360.   Dom Casonne, another Infusionsoft Partner had JoomFuse for Joomla users.  Those were really the available options.

I learned to work iMember360 from Micah Mitchell.  I joined as Marketing Automation Mastermind and being a web developer, learning it from him just made sense.

Six years back, a customer asked me to build them a Memberium online course membership site.  That experience introduced me to David Bullock, the tech guy behind what would become Memberium.  It was a great introduction to Memberium and me becoming the second person to become Memberium Implementation Partner Certified.  My team and I have been building Memberium membership sites ever since.

I first heard about AccessAlly three years ago from a prospect who was considering AccessAlly as an alternative to Memberium. This being my space, I thought to investigate AccessAlly right away.  I wanted to be up on Infusionsoft membership site platforms my team and I could be using.  I interviewed Nathalie Lussier, AccessAlly's founder on my Defining Infusionsoft Success program.  My team and I built an AccessAlly version of our own membership site to see how it worked compared to the sites we were building using Memberium

That's my full disclosure concerning these platforms and our alliances with these players.

It's Not Apples and Oranges Comparison

Memberium is a membership site building platform.  It installs as a Wordpress plugin that allows Infusionsoft to control who gets access to the site content.  If someone opts into a webform or makes a purchase, an Infusionsoft campaign can:

• tag the contact assigning membership access,
• assign the user a password and
• send the user their login credentials.

Members are then authorized to access the Wordpress site content they requested or purchased.

AccessAlly takes a similar approach.  It installs as a Wordpress plugin.  It works with the Wordpress login like Memberium does and controlling member access to the content.

That's where they are very similar.

Memberium focus on a membership site building platform it to provide membership site function. That's the specialty and they do not want to stray much outside that space.  Visit their website and you'll see that they integrate well with LearnDash, BadgeOS WP Courseware, Sensei, BBPress, BadgeOS, Simple:Press, WooCommerce to provide learning management, course progress, certifications, and forum features.  We've used these and the integrations are solid.  Memberium serves as the foundation for the site and relies on integration with these other tools to provide features it doesn't provide.

AccessAlly works differently.  Nathalie and her team built AccessAlly to support their online marketing coaching practice.  The available platforms at the time were inadequate.   If you visit her AmbitionAlly.com site, you'll quickly notice that above all else, she's a teacher, marketer and coach.  She publishes a lot of content, much of it free.  She serves business owners wanting online marketing strategies and tactics.  As I cover the AccessAlly features below, you'll notice their new release includes features Memberium delegates to other add-ons.

Click here for part two of this article where I cover Memberium and AccessAlly in more detail.