Memberful vs Patreon
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedMemberful compared with Patreon
Same owner, opposite philosophy. Patreon takes 10 percent plus processing, hosts everything on patreon.com, and gives you access to its discovery ecosystem and a large mobile app your members already have. Memberful takes 4.9 percent, hosts nothing, and puts the whole experience on your domain in your Stripe account. If you need discovery and want zero setup, Patreon. If you already have an audience and a community and want to own the relationship, Memberful, at roughly half the fee.
Patreon compared with Memberful
Owned by the same company and built for the opposite creator. Memberful charges $49 a month plus 4.9 percent, hosts nothing, and puts everything on your domain in your own Stripe account. Patreon charges 10 percent, hosts everything, and owns the customer relationship. Above roughly $1,500 a month in earnings, Memberful is cheaper; below it, Patreon's zero fixed cost wins. Patreon built and kept Memberful precisely so it had an answer for creators who outgrow this trade.
Choose Memberful if
Independent publishers, podcasters, and newsletter writers who already have a community running on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and want to charge for access to it under their own brand, into their own Stripe account, without moving anyone to a new platform.
Choose Patreon if
Individual creators, podcasters, musicians, artists, and video makers who want to start earning from an audience today with zero fixed cost and zero setup, who value Patreon's installed app base and discovery more than owning the domain, and whose community needs are chats and comments rather than a structured forum.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Memberful | Patreon |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Community | Community |
| Starting price | $49 per month plus a 4.9 percent transaction fee (free trial) | $0 to start, then 10 percent of earnings plus processing (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | A single published plan at a flat monthly fee plus a percentage of transactions processed through your own Stripe account, with unlimited members, and a custom priced Enterprise tier above it. | No subscription. Patreon charges a percentage of creator earnings, plus payment processing, payout, and currency conversion fees, plus Apple's commission on in app iOS purchases. |
| Free plan | No | Free to create a page, publish, and build an audience. Fees apply only to earnings, so a creator with no paying members pays nothing. |
| Free trial | Free until you go live and start accepting payments; there is no fixed length countdown | Not applicable; the platform is free until you earn |
| Best for | Independent publishers, podcasters, and newsletter writers who already have a community running on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and want to charge for access to it under their own brand, into their own Stripe account, without moving anyone to a new platform. | Individual creators, podcasters, musicians, artists, and video makers who want to start earning from an audience today with zero fixed cost and zero setup, who value Patreon's installed app base and discovery more than owning the domain, and whose community needs are chats and comments rather than a structured forum. |
| Setup time | A few hours. Connecting Stripe, defining plans, embedding the checkout, and authorizing the Discord or Discourse integration are each a small task, and nothing needs to be designed from scratch because the member facing pages are themeable templates. | Twenty minutes to a live page taking money. Patreon is by an enormous margin the fastest product in this category to get from nothing to a first paying member, and that speed is a genuine part of what the 10 percent buys. |
| Learning curve | Low if you already run the community, moderate if you do not, because Memberful assumes you understand your own stack. There is no discussion product to learn, only plans, entitlements, and integrations. | Very low. Tiers, posts, and chats are the only concepts. There is no domain to configure, no entitlement matrix to model, and no payment gateway to connect. |
| Platforms | Web, Members access benefits through your site, Discord, Discourse, WordPress, or their podcast app | Web at patreon.com, iOS app, Android app, Private podcast feeds in any podcast app |
| Compliance | GDPR, PCI DSS handled by Stripe, Global sales tax and VAT collection at checkout | GDPR, PCI DSS handled by Patreon as merchant of record, Sales tax and VAT handled by Patreon |
| Founded | 2013 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | United States, distributed team | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Ownership | Owned by Patreon | Venture-backed, privately held |
Strengths and limitations
Memberful
Strengths
- The Discord integration is the best in this category: roles assigned by plan, invites sent at checkout, and access revoked automatically on lapse, with no bot to maintain.
- Discourse group mapping means an existing, search indexed forum can grow a paid tier without migrating and losing its rankings, which no all in one platform can offer.
- Payments settle into your own Stripe account, so your subscription data and merchant relationship stay yours and leaving does not force every member to re-enter a card.
- Genuinely white label. Custom domain, custom themes, and dynamic paywalls mean the vendor is invisible to members, which is why Patreon bought it as its non Patreon.com answer.
Limitations
- It hosts no community at all. Without Discord, Discourse, or WordPress already in place, there is nothing for the paywall to protect.
- The 4.9 percent fee does not improve with scale on the published plan, so the effective cost stays near 8.5 percent of revenue at any volume unless you negotiate Enterprise.
- No courses, no lessons, no progress tracking, and no certificates, so a course business needs a different product entirely.
- No mobile app of any kind, branded or otherwise; the member experience is the web plus whatever Discord or Discourse provides.
Patreon
Strengths
- Zero fixed cost. No subscription, no trial clock, and no bill until members pay you, which no other product in this category offers.
- The largest installed mobile app base in creator memberships, with millions of people who already have Patreon accounts and saved payment details, which removes real checkout friction.
- Genuine discovery. Patreon's directory, recommendations, and automated growth tools can bring you members you did not already have, which nothing else here does at all.
- Broad publishing for free: native video hosting, livestreaming, private podcast feeds with Spotify integration, email newsletters, and a digital shop.
Limitations
- Ten percent forever, on top of processing, payout, and currency conversion, with an effective rate of 13 to 20 percent depending on average pledge size. At scale this is the most expensive model in the category by a wide margin.
- Apple takes 30 percent of new memberships bought in the iOS app, and creators outside the United States cannot opt out; the workaround raises prices for iOS members by roughly 43 percent.
- No custom domain, no white labelling, and no way to remove Patreon's brand. Your community lives at patreon.com and looks like Patreon.
- The community layer is chats, comments, and DMs. There is no forum, no spaces with independent permissions, no useful search across history, and no way to build a knowledge base.
Pricing compared
Memberful
A single published plan at a flat monthly fee plus a percentage of transactions processed through your own Stripe account, with unlimited members, and a custom priced Enterprise tier above it.
- Standard$49
- EnterpriseCustom
Memberful is excellent value at small scale and poor value at large scale, and you should decide which one you are. A podcaster doing $2,000 a month gets a genuinely well built billing system, automatic Discord entitlements, private podcast feeds, gift and group plans, retention discounts, and their own Stripe account for about $150 all in, which is fair. The same creator at $50,000 a month is handing over roughly $51,000 a year in fees for software that hosts nothing, when Podia or Teachable would do the billing for a flat $84 to $189 a month. The counterargument is real but narrow: nothing else automates Discord and Discourse entitlements this cleanly, nothing else keeps your Stripe relationship intact, and if your community is already thriving somewhere free, Memberful is the only product here that does not ask you to move it. Buy it as plumbing, negotiate Enterprise pricing the moment you pass roughly $20,000 a month, and never buy it expecting a community product.
Patreon
No subscription. Patreon charges a percentage of creator earnings, plus payment processing, payout, and currency conversion fees, plus Apple's commission on in app iOS purchases.
- Standard (all new creators)10 percent
- Legacy Lite5 percent
- Legacy Pro8 percent
- Legacy PremiumApproximately 11 to 12 percent
Patreon is the cheapest option in this category up to roughly $1,000 a month in earnings and the most expensive one above roughly $5,000. Below the threshold, paying nothing until money arrives is genuinely valuable, and no subscription platform can match a zero fixed cost start when you do not know whether anyone will pay. Above it, the arithmetic becomes brutal: a page earning $50,000 a month hands over between $6,750 and $9,450 depending on pledge size, where Podia would charge about $1,900 and throw in a website, courses, and a real community. What you buy with that money is not software, because Patreon's community tooling is worse than everything else here. What you buy is discovery, an installed mobile app base with saved payment details, and the fact that setup takes twenty minutes and requires no decisions. That is worth 10 percent when you are starting and worth very little once you have an audience that would follow you anywhere.
Editorial verdict on each
Memberful
Memberful is the best answer to a specific question and the wrong answer to almost every other one. If your community already lives on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and works, and you want to charge for access without moving anyone or handing 10 percent to Patreon, nothing else does this as cleanly: roles granted at checkout and revoked on lapse, private podcast feeds through your existing host, group plans, gifts, retention discounts, your own domain, and your own Stripe account so the subscriptions remain portable. That last point is worth more than it looks, because every other platform in this category makes leaving expensive by holding your billing relationship hostage. The reservation is the arithmetic. At 4.9 percent plus Stripe with a fee that does not improve as you grow, Memberful costs roughly 8.5 percent of revenue at $50,000 a month, where Podia or Teachable would do the billing for a flat sum and throw in the community, the courses, and the website. Buy it as plumbing for a community you already love, negotiate Enterprise pricing early, and do not buy it hoping for a community product, because it is not one and does not claim to be.
Read the full Memberful profilePatreon
Patreon is the right first move and the wrong long term home. Nothing else lets you go from no infrastructure to a paying audience in twenty minutes at zero fixed cost, with native video, livestreams, private podcast feeds, an email list you can export, automatic Discord role granting, and an app that millions of potential supporters already have installed with a card on file. For a creator who does not yet know whether anyone will pay, that combination is worth 10 percent and there is no honest alternative. The problem is that the 10 percent never stops, processing pushes the effective rate to between 13 and 20 percent, Apple takes 30 percent of iOS signups with no opt out outside the United States, and the community layer is chats and comments rather than anything you could call a platform. At $50,000 a month you are paying Patreon between $6,750 and $9,450 while Podia would charge about $1,900 and include a website, courses, and a better community. Start here, build an email list off platform from day one, and treat the migration to Memberful, Podia, or Circle as a question of when rather than whether.
Read the full Patreon profileMemberful profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Patreon last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.