BuddyBoss does more. Ours is free and lighter.
BuddyBoss is the established choice for a WordPress community, and MemBuild Community is the free, light one. Here’s the honest side by side, including where BuddyBoss is still the right call.
Danica LouweUpdated 6 min readPick BuddyBoss if you need forums and sub-groups, a native mobile app, or quizzes and certificates today. Pick MemBuild Community if you want a feed, courses, levels and chats on your own site, free, with no licence to renew.
Who each one is for
The established choice. Groups, forums, a theme, an app.
For a large community that needs forums and groups today, LearnDash templates out of the box, and a branded mobile app, with a yearly licence to match.
Free. Light. Members stay yours.
For a membership that wants a feed, stories, courses, levels and chats members actually open, on a site you already run, with no licence to renew.
What you get, and what you pay for it.
MemBuild Community leads on cost and licence. BuddyBoss leads on forums and groups, courses with quizzes, and a native app.
Pick BuddyBoss if you need these today.
It is the established choice for a reason. If your community is built on any of these, stay, and do not let a free plugin talk you out of it.
Forums and sub-groups
Threaded forums, groups with their own feeds and subscriptions, group-level moderation. MemBuild Community has one feed with topics and access groups, and no forums.
A native mobile app
If your members want an app in the App Store with push notifications and offline courses, BuddyBoss sells one. Ours is an installable web app, which is good, and not the same thing.
Quizzes, certificates and LearnDash templates
BuddyBoss ships an LMS with quizzes and certificates, and its theme has LearnDash, LifterLMS and Tutor templates. We have courses with drip and progress, and no quizzes.
Years of integrations
Nineteen access-control adapters, Zoom, OneSignal, Pusher, by our read of its code in Oct 2026. We integrate through WordPress roles, hooks and FluentCart, which covers most memberships and not every edge.
Pick MemBuild Community if these matter more.
We built it for the memberships we run: owners who want the parts of Skool members like, on WordPress, without a yearly bill or a plugin that gets heavier every release.
The bill is zero and stays zero
Levels, leaderboard, chats, stories, reels: free. On BuddyBoss the gamification alone is the $349-then-$699 tier, per site, every year.
No licence to renew
Nothing to keep active, nothing per site. If we disappeared tomorrow, your community would not notice.
Light enough that members open it
A small app that loads only what each screen needs, instead of a theme carrying about 1.6 MB of CSS on a community page (our read of Theme 2.22.1, Oct 2026).
Your data, in plain sight
Members, posts, comments, progress, points and files export to CSV from wp-admin. Private messages are encrypted at rest and never shown to admins. Everything the plugin sends us is listed in Settings.
Same site, same members. Your posts and chats can come too.
On a BuddyBoss site, your members are already WordPress users. Import brings most of the community with them. What moves and what does not:
- 1
Install alongside, don’t switch yet
MemBuild Community lives at /community and ignores your theme. Run both for a week with a few members; nothing on BuddyBoss changes.
- 2
Check, then import
Import finds BuddyBoss even if it is switched off. Check first; nothing changes. Then it runs in the background, with Pause and undo.
- 3
Map access
Create a member group per membership level and point it at the WordPress role your membership plugin already gives buyers. Courses unlock by group or level. Private groups become members-only topics, with a membership for the same people.
- 4
Rebuild courses and close the forum
Courses and forum threads do not move. Rebuild courses as modules and lessons, keep the old forum read-only while members settle, then close it. Pin a welcome post and announce the levels.
- 5
Deactivate BuddyBoss when members have moved
Turn it off once members are on the new feed. Keep the licence until it expires, so you can turn it back on if you need something.
How we see it, from building on it.
Our view on who the BuddyBoss theme suits: a good investment if you’ll use the community features, too much if you picked it for the looks. Recorded in 2022, so features have moved on.
A real BuddyBoss site next to the default demo: what you get out of the box, and what took custom work with Elementor, LearnDash and code. Recorded in September 2025, so use the table above for current prices.
Questions owners ask
Is MemBuild Community really free, or free until it matters?
Free, GPL, no member cap, no fee on payments. Everything on this page is in the free plugin. Premium add-ons will be paid extras later, not pieces taken out.
I already run BuddyBoss. Can I switch without losing members?
Members, yes: both plugins use WordPress users, so on the same site your members are already there. Import brings their profiles, posts, comments, reactions, chats and groups (as topics), even with BuddyBoss switched off. Forums and courses do not move. You can check first, run it again for anything new, and undo it.
Does it work with LearnDash, MemberPress or WooCommerce?
Alongside them, yes. Members are WordPress users, and courses can be opened to a member group that follows a WordPress role, so a membership or shop plugin that gives buyers a role opens the right courses. There is no LearnDash template layer like the BuddyBoss theme has; LearnDash keeps its own pages. Or sell directly with FluentCart: pick the product in Settings and buyers get a checkout in your community’s look.
What does MemBuild Community send to you?
Once a week, a random ID and version numbers, so we can count installs; our server also notes the two-letter country. “Share usage”, ticked by default on a card the overview shows once, adds what the community is about, which features are on, rough counts in ranges, and errors in the plugin’s own code. Never names, emails, your site’s address, posts or messages. Settings → News from MemBuild shows exactly what is sent and has a delete button; a filter turns it all off.
Who is behind it, and will it still exist next year?
MemBuild, the team that has built and run WordPress memberships on BuddyBoss and LearnDash since 2011. We still build on BuddyBoss where it fits. The plugin exists for the memberships that wanted something lighter and free. It is GPL, so even if we vanished the code is yours.
