7 Best WordPress Community Plugins For 2024

Are you looking for the best WordPress community plugin for your website?

There are various options available for community building, and one of the most common ones is starting a community on social media, e.g., using the Facebook group feature.

Building your community on social media is easy. You don’t have to worry about coding, web hosting, or the community layout; you only have to design your branding and start building your community.

However, there are drawbacks to this approach. It may look easy to set up, but you have no control over the look and feel of your community; integration with a payment model will be hectic, and you will have to compete with other communities for subscribers and are at the mercy of the host platform.

The host platform can disable, reduce your reach, or block your account anytime, and all your effort will go down the drain. If you want total control over your community and business, then a WordPress community website is a good choice.

WordPress community plugins allow you to offer community features on your WordPress site that will be entirely under your control. You can create user profiles, enable social networking, integrate with a Learning Management System, build an email sales funnel, and more.

To help you choose the best WordPress community plugin for your site, here are some key features you should look out for:

1. Membership plans and paywall: The plugin should allow your community members to create user profiles and activate membership levels based on their subscription plan. It should also let you restrict content or features based on membership plans or user roles.

2. Payment and email integration: It should offer flexible payment options (like allowing one-time, recurring, or payment in installments) and integrate with various payment methods. The WordPress community plugin should also integrate with several email marketing platforms, which will help you build trust through email marketing and collect user feedback.

3. Member Directory: A member should be able to search for other members or groups using keywords like their name, interest, or location. This feature encourages interaction within the community. That is why a member directory page is important.

4. Security and compatibility: The WordPress community plugin should offer protection against spam user registration. To do this, it will need to integrate with security services like Akismet and Google reCAPTCHA or enable two-factor authentication.

7 Best WordPress Community Plugins

Now that you know the key features to look out for, below are the best WordPress community plugins to consider for 2024

1. ProfilePress

ProfilePress is a membership and WordPress community plugin that provides a complete suite to help you enable community features on your site.

It has a social login feature that allows users to register and log in with their social media accounts (including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter / X, Amazon, Microsoft, etc), block spam and bot registrations with Akismet and Google reCAPTCHA, enable Two-Factor authentication and email confirmation after signup, and allow you to moderate user registration by approving or blocking signups.

Features of ProfilePress include:

• Payment integrations with Paypal, RazorPay, Mollie, Stripe, and Paystack
• Member Directory that enables members to search for each other.
• Allows members to edit their profile information, change password, add an avatar, or upload a profile picture
• Enables content restriction based on membership plans, user roles, and logged-in status
• Enables Metered paywall, which allows intending members to view limited content before joining the community
• Reports members’ activities and payment history
• Integrates with other community plugins such as BuddyPress.

2. BuddyPress

BuddyPress is a plugin focused on helping site builders and developers on WordPress convert their pages into social networking sites. Its social networking feature is similar to Facebook’s, allowing users to create and update profiles, start private conversations, and receive email notifications for messages sent on the site.

Features of BuddyPress include:

• Integrates with security systems like Akismet to prevent bot registrations
• Allows both the site builder and members to publish on the platform.
• Enables members to filter, create micro-communities, and join groups.
• Integrates with bbPress, which allows members to participate in forum discussions
• Offer pre-design themes and will help with the designing of custom themes

BuddyPress price: BuddyPress is free.

3. wpForo

wpForo is a forum software that lets you integrate discussion boards on your WordPress site. It enables the launching of multiple forum boards on a single WordPress site. For each forum board, you can choose between four types of forum layouts.

wpForo is also a community plugin that allows users to create profiles and earn ratings based on the number of likes, dislikes, topics, and posts on their account. It is easy to use and has over 100 features and settings for easy customization of your online forum community.

Features of wpForo include:

• Its forum boards are responsive on all screen sizes
• Integrates with Akismet to prevent bot registration
• In-built cache system that ensures that your WordPress site is not overloaded
• In-built SEO features like metadata, permalinks, and sitemap
• Filter functionality for searching members and forum boards
• Restrictions and moderation of topics and posts. Topic owners can enable private mode on topics, making it visible to them and the forum moderators.

4. FuseWP

FuseWP is a marketing automation WordPress plugin that syncs your community members to your CRM and email marketing platforms.

This synchronization is automatic, such that if a member updates their profile or changes their membership plans, these changes will reflect on the CRM and email marketing platform to which you are connected. If they delete their account on the community, they will be unsubscribed from your email list.

This plugin keeps your community-building software in sync with your mailing lists. This is a perfect tool for anyone building a community newsletter and wanting to automate the user management process.

Features of FuseWP include: 

• Compatible with WooCommerce, ProfilePress, Restrict Content Pro, MemberPress, and Learning Management Systems like LifterLMS, LearnDash, etc
• Assign tags to members during subscription to your mailing list
• Map user information to custom fields in your CRM.
• Integrates with several email marketing platforms, including HubSpot, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo, ConvertKit, AWeber, etc
• Allows you to enable double opt-in, which lets members confirm their subscription to your email list before they are subscribed.

5. Youzify

Youzify is a WordPress community plugin based on BuddyPress. This means it requires BuddyPress to be installed, but you can disable any BuddyPress component after installation.

It allows you to extend the capabilities of BuddyPress by adding various features that make a community website more beautiful and engaging. It offers a filter function for members, groups, and activities and integrates with the MyCred plugin, which allows you to reward members with points and badges.

Features of Youzify include:

• Members can like, follow, bookmark, comment, and send private messages to themselves
• Allows signup with social media and Google accounts
• Members can create public, private, and secret groups
• Allows you to send site-wide notifications or pin HF number of posts at the top of the site’s activity wall
• Allows content moderation based on keyword
• 25+ WordPress widgets to add rich content to your community pages.

6. PeepSo

PeepSo is a lightweight WordPress community plugin that lets you add social networking features to your WordPress site.

Users can customize their profiles, like, follow, and comment on posts, and set their profile visibility.

PeepSo also allows users to report content they find offensive and will enable you to filter words based on the user’s profile.

Features of PeepSo include:

• Allows you to make site-wide announcements by pinning posts to the top of the site
• Integrates with MyCred plugin that enables rewarding of members with points and badges
• Allows you to send email confirmation after signup and email notification of community updates
• Allows users to create public, secret, and announcement groups and search for other users
• Allow users to send private messages and upload media in chats

7. bbPress

bbPress is a forum plugin built by the contributors of WordPress. It is an open-sourced, lightweight plugin that offers easy installation, compatibility with several WordPress themes, and an active support team.

It allows community members to subscribe to topics and forums, bookmark favorite topics, and receive email notifications about new activity on the forum.

It also lets members embed external links in replies, create tags to filter topics and search for forums using keywords easily.

All forum features can be managed directly from the WordPress admin dashboard.

Features of bbPress include:

• Offers customizable forum templates
• Allows you to build multiple forums on a single site
• Integrates with Akismet for spam protection
• Offers RSS feeds, which notifies members of new post
• Compatible with other WordPress plugins like BuddyPress
• Integrates with WordPress’ revision system to store records of Forum edits

bbPress price: bbPress is a free, open-source plugin.

Final thoughts: Choosing the best WordPress community plugin

Although pricing is an important factor when choosing a WordPress community plugin, it should not form the basis of your decision. The plugin you choose should have all the essential features to help you run your community efficiently.

Some plugins focus on providing certain community features than others. For instance, bbPress and wpForo focus on implementing forum boards on your site, while BuddyPress focuses on social networking.

Plugins like ProfilePress offer a fair blend of most features, including allowing you to accept payments from your users, adding a paywall and restricting access to your content, creating a member directory, and selling digital products and services.