Updated: April 24th, 2017
Many people ask us, “Is Wishlist Member any good? Can I teach an engaging, successful online course using Wishlist Member?”
You should take our opinion with a healthy pinch of salt, since we develop a competing online course platform.
That said, we’ll try to be as fair as we can. We’ve written an in-depth Wishlist Member review here — it includes a complete Wishlist Member feature comparison and decision guide.
Why use Wishlist Member?
Wishlist Member is useful for businesses with strong web development resources who wish to integrate a membership site or course content directly into their existing WordPress website.
This can be helpful if your goal is to host your content on your existing site, or to create a custom design or custom functionality for your course pages.
Because it is a WordPress plugin, Wishlist Member can be customized or extended by developers with WordPress development skills.
Because Wishlist Member allows for “self-hosting” a course on your own WordPress installation, it can have lower hosting fees than dedicated course platforms in some cases.
Possible concerns about using Wishlist Member
Wishlist Member is designed to be added to a self-hosted WordPress installation. Typically, WordPress sites are hosted on commodity web hosting platforms that cannot host video directly.
So, if videos are important to your online courses, you would need to research, purchase and integrate a separate video hosting solution to use in conjunction with Wishlist Member.
Wishlist Member is focused on delivering content, and does not include discussion or online community capabilities. This can make it challenging to run a scheduled course with an active, engaged community.
Wishlist Member does not track how participants are progressing in a course — you can’t see analytics or get insight into how engaged participants are in your course. This can make it difficult to assess how well your courses are serving your participants, and improve them over time.
Wishlist Member does not offer any conferencing or webinar features for running teleclasses or webinar classes within your course. You would need to research, purchase, and manage a separate conferencing tool.
For further details about each of these concerns, please check out our in-depth Wishlist Member review here. The article includes an extensive Wishlist Member feature comparison and decision guide.
Alternatives to Wishlist Member
Here are some alternatives to Wishlist Member you could consider:
- Ruzuku (read the complete Ruzuku review as compared to Wishlist Member)
- Pathwright (read the complete Pathwright review and comparison)
- Kajabi (read the complete Kajabi review and comparison)
- Jigsawbox (read the complete JigsawBox review and comparison)
- Thinkific (read the complete Thinkific review and comparison)
- Teachable (read the complete Teachable review and comparison)
