Building a Membership Site: Webflow vs WordPress

So, you wanna build a membership site, eh?

Maybe it’s an online course, job board, news site, or anything else - if you want to have a site that allows users, you’re probably looking at 2 great options for your CMS - Webflow, and WordPress.

Both are great options, but there are a lot of differences between the 2 that could influence your decision on either way, depending on the use case.

First things first, we recently made a video comparing these 2 platforms in a general way - if you haven’t used both before, I recommend checking that one out first. Now, if you know the core differences between Webflow and WordPress and want to know the difference in building a membership site with one vs the other - keep on watching.

We’re going to break this down into a couple of different categories, and I’ll tell you my winner in each category.

Pricing

To get things started, let’s talk about the cost of running a membership site with either of these 2 tools.

Webflow

Webflow’s pricing is confusing, so I can’t cover it all in this video - but if you want another video where I do a deep dive into Webflow’s pricing, please drop a comment below.

That being said, you can expect to have to pay Webflow at least $30 a month for your site hosting, assuming you need the CMS plan.

Along with that, Webflow has no native user system - so, if you want to build a Membership site, you’ll need a third-party plugin, such as Memberstack.

A tool like Memberstack will handle all of your logins, payments, reset password flows, and more - and, since you’re not using a native tool (like the now-sunsetted Webflow User Accounts), you get one more massive benefit - scalability. Not only are tools like Memberstack built to handle up to millions of members, but since you aren’t tied down to Webflow, if your business needs ever change, you can switch to another front end (such as WordPress, React, or anything your business requires.

That being said, this added flexibility does come with a cost - Memberstack starts at $29/month, which should be enough for any new business.

When you take into account the cost of Webflow, Memberstack, and any other feature-specific apps you may beed - you can expect to have a bill for your Webflow Membership site around $60-80 each month.

WordPress

One big benefit to WordPress is that it’s free - as an open source CMS, you don’t actually need to pay anything to use it. However, don’t let that mislead you - running a WordPress site is anything but free.

Every WordPress site needs hosting, and hosting can get expensive - that being said, you can almost always expect to pay less for hosting a WordPress site than you would for a Webflow site. WordPress hosting can be found for as little as $2 a month, but once you get some traffic and users, you can expect to spend between $10-$30 a month on hosting.

Along with that, WordPress DOES have a native users functionality, which means you can add logins and signups to your site for free - but it doesn’t come without a catch. The WordPress users system works by using your hosted database - which can lead to you encountering a ton of problems in the future with site speed and even security. To make things even trickier, the WordPress users system doesn’t have a lot of the things you’d expect out of a membership site, such as social auth, transactional emails, and even payments. While you CAN do all of these on a WordPress site, you will either have to use a plugin, or code the system yourself.

Luckily, there’s the Memberstack plugin for WordPress - just like with Webflow, you can easily get everything you need up and running, but that will add another $30/m onto your bill.

Again, just like with Webflow, you may also need some feature-specific plugins which can cost extra - so, at the end of the day your cost for running a WordPress membership site are a bit lower than they are with Webflow, ranging from $30-50 a month.

However - there is one big piece of this which we will get more into later, and that’s maintenance. Webflow sites need very little maintenance, whereas WordPress sites have lots of plugins which need to be updated, and can even break your site. Because of this, even on a small membership site, you may have to spend at least a few hours every month to keep things in working order. Because of this, my winner for the price category is Webflow.

Scalability

For any project, you need to consider how scalable it is - if you have advertising going and are expecting to get a million visitors, you need to be ready to handle them. While both WordPress and Webflow are scalable for membership sites, there are some key differences which make the respective tools better in their own situations.

Webflow

Webflow’s infrastructure is rock-solid - even if you have over a million visitors, Webflow should be able to handle it no problem (albeit, with a higher monthly bill).

The problem with scaling in Webflow goes down to their product limitations and adding new features. Since Webflow is not open source, you have no control over your Webflow server files. While Webflow may be enough for all the features you need today, if you/your client wants to add a new feature, there’s always a chance it simply won’t be possible with Webflow. This is a very important thing to consider when deciding how to build your site - if you’re building a membership site with Webflow, my advice is to be VERY thorough when scoping out the features you will need, and make a plan for how you will build them before you start development.

Overall, Webflow can be extremely scalable, or not scalable at all - it all depends on what you’re building.

As for member limits - you don’t have to worry about that - with Memberstack, your site will stay just as performant and functional as day one even when you have a million members (seriously - huge companies like Reddit, American Airlines, Amazon, and even Webflow use Memberstack to power their membership experiences.

WordPress

With WordPress, you own everything - and I mean everything.

This is a clear plus over Webflow because it means that virtually anything you want to do can be done - given you or your developer can code it.

However, this full control is also a double-edged sword. There’s more that can break, and you are fully responsible to fix anything that breaks on your site (which will happen more often as you scale).

While WordPress has no user limits in their native users system, lots of people complain that as their site grows, they face performance issues and have to spend a lot of time simply optimizing their database to keep up with the growing demand.

There is some good news though - if you use a plugin like Memberstack, you can completely get around this limitation. When you use a hosted problem, it becomes the plugin developer’s problem if your site can’t scale, and not yours.

Tools needed

WordPress and Webflow alone aren’t enough to run a membership site - with either CMS, you’re going to need some tools to power everything. I’m going to break down the stacks that I use every day to build membership sites with both Webflow and WordPress.

Webflow

Webflow as a tool has more ‘built-in’. Besides the membership side of things, everything you need to build your site is pretty much available right out of the box with Webflow.

As for allowing logins and signups, as I’ve said, I use Memberstack to handle that - it’s the Webflow community’s favorite way to build a membership site. It’s scalable, flexible, and easy to implement even if you don’t know how to code.

If you need some more advanced functionality out of your membership site, you may need a tool to push data between other tools. In this case, there are 2 tools that I would heavily recommend. The first one is Make (formerly integromat). Picture make as a simple, no code way to build automations. If you need to, let’s say, have a user fill out a form and have it add a Webflow CMS item, you can do this easy, cheap, and quickly with Make. If you’re building something a bit more advanced and want to have instant data transfers, I would recommend Wized. Wized is basically a layer on top of your Webflow site that handles sending data between the user, your site, your Membership integration, and any other tools. With Webflow, Memberstack, and Wized - you can build almost anything. I used this stack myself to build a fully functional SaaS product in just 2 weeks.

WordPress

Out of the box, WordPress is a CMS - nothing more, and nothing less. So, obviously you’re going to need a lot more to actually start accepting users.

Builders

Unless you want to hand code your site, you’re going to need a builder. Elementor is the most popular builder for WordPress, but I personally use Bricks Builder. It gives me the same advanced customization I’m used to from Webflow, in WordPress.

Users

While you could use native the native WordPress users system, I personally use the Memberstack plugin - it allows me to launch my site without having to worry about scaling and security.

CMS

Even though WordPress is a CMS, there are some features missing right out of the box that you’re probably going to need - I use ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) to build custom post types and custom fields. I find almost every WordPress site I build needs ACF.

Backups

If you aren’t backing up your WordPress site constantly, you’re living on the edge. Like I said, WP sites can break at any point so it’s important you keep regular backups. For backups and migrations, I use a plugin called WPVivid - the free version works perfect for me, and it does exactly what I need it to do.

Hosting

For hosting, I use WPMUDEV. It was recommended to me when I was getting into WordPress, and I’m a really big fan of their UX and all the features they have. They have hosting options for sites ranging from $4 a month, going well over $1,000. They also have some features for security and backups, but I don’t use them much personally.

Conclusion

I use both Webflow and WordPress every single day, and I love both.

While I can’t say that any of these tools are better than the other, I would say that if you’re going for ultimate flexibility, choose WordPress - but if you’d rather a solution that’s easier to maintain and always stays up, choose Webflow.