When it comes to gating access to content, there’s no shortage of plugins out there designed to help make it happen.
Here at Zeen101, we are laser-focused on serving news and magazine publishers. Our Leaky Paywall product is more than your typical WordPress plugin. It’s an enterprise purpose-built solution designed to accelerate your paid subscriptions.
Let’s dive into specifics that separate Leaky Paywall from Memberful and other plugins.
If you haven’t noticed by now, we are laser-focused on serving news and magazine publishers. This means that we not only provide a robust content restriction platform but also provide in-depth strategy and analysis to help our customers meet their subscription goals. We show you how to make the best of your paywall solution.
No transaction fees ever! Unlike Memberful, Leaky Paywall does not charge a transactional fee.
With Leaky Paywall, you can meter access by the number of views instead of only having an option to lock down content or making it free. A metered paywall is great for Google indexing too!
Unlike Memberful, we are a WordPress-first solution. This means that your customer data resides in your WordPress dashboard and not on a 3rd-party dashboard. You’re in control.
Allow access to mass users based on IP address. A great option for large corporate groups or schools where creating individual accounts for access would be a pain.
Our paywall can be cookie-based or IP-based. If you want to lock down content and prevent incognito browsing/browser switching, our IP-based paywall has got you covered. It also helps increase revenue!
We provide mobile apps for iOS and Android that integrates with your Leaky Paywall installation. Restrict content in your mobile apps and manage everything from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.
We integrate with more than a dozen different CRM/fulfillment platforms keeping your subscriptions in sync across multiple systems.
Offer traditional flipbooks/pdfs to your customers and prevent link sharing by requiring readers to log in to view content.
Offer your customers an Ad-free experience subscription level using our AdDropper add-on (integrates with your existing ad platform too).
| Feature | Leaky Paywall | Memberful |
|---|---|---|
| Publisher focused | ✓ | ✕ |
| Metered paywall | ✓ | ✕ |
| No transaction fees | ✓ | Monthly fee + 4.9-10% |
| IP-based paywall | ✓ | ✕ |
| Give mass access based on IP | ✓ | ✕ |
| Pre-built Fade out text function | ✓ | ✕ |
| Integrated mobile apps | ✓ | ✕ |
| CRM/fulfillment integrations | ✓ | ✕ |
| Ad management | ✓ | ✕ |
If you’re looking for a simple content restriction option and you don’t mind paying the additional transaction fees, Memberful is a great fit. If you’re looking for more functionality designed specifically for news and magazine publishers, Leaky Paywall is the way to go.
Perhaps this may sound bias coming from a blog post on Leaky Paywall’s website—you’re not wrong, however, after using virtually everything plugin out there for my own news publisher clients, I joined the Zeen101/Leaky Paywall team because I fell in love with their product.
Tyler Channell
Morgantown, WV
Tyler is head of support at Leaky Paywall and runs a start-up called PaywallProject focused on providing affordable turnkey subscriptions sites for local news publishers.
