Are you trying to decide which SaaS product is best for managing your website’s membership services? If you’re looking for the pros and cons of Outseta vs. Memberstack, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve tested both, and we’re here to save you the trouble.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- Core features face-off: Outseta vs. Memberstack
- What is Memberstack? History and notable use cases
- What is Outseta? History and use
- Memberstack benefits
- Setting up Memberstack with Webflow
- Outseta pros and cons
- Comparing Outseta vs. Memberstack integrations with Webflow
- Why Slam prefers Memberstack over Outseta
In our opinion, evaluating Outseta vs. Memberstack isn’t the right question to ask straight off the bat. Instead, try asking yourself, which matters more: full design control or built-in business tools? While Outseta and Memberstack are both great SaaS products, only one will meet your needs.
Here at Slam Media Lab, we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out what we need in a SaaS tool. After all, we didn’t become an award-winning B2B website design agency by wasting time and money on a cumbersome and costly tech stack!
As a Webflow design and development agency, custom design control is our top priority, and we make it a priority when evaluating which software to use.
Your startup is as unique as the team behind it, so it’s on you to figure out what you need to crush your goals. You can always trust us to keep you in the loop about great SaaS products that will meet those needs.
Now, let’s take a closer look at two great options for managing membership services.
Outseta vs. Memberstack: Core Features Face-Off
Outseta and Memberstack both make it possible to turn your Webflow website into a membership service with gated content, integrated billing, and subscription tiers. However, each software has different use cases, and choosing the best one for your startup is a matter of determining which features are right for you.
Do you need full design control to keep everything on brand, or are you looking to consolidate your tech stack with built-in business tools?
With Memberstack, you get highly customizable features like:
- A long list of social authentication options
- Full customization control with custom attributes
- Gated content and subscription tiers
- On-point Webflow integration capabilities
- …and more!
Outseta, on the other hand, is an all-in-one platform combining several business tools into a single platform. Here are some of the core features associated with Outseta:
- Membership management
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Email marketing
- In-app messaging
- …and more!
Now, let’s break down the details of Outseta vs. Memberstack so you can decide which product is right for you.
Outseta vs. Memberstack: What is Memberstack?
Memberstack is a SaaS platform that provides customizable tools for adding user authentication and membership functionality to websites. As a user-friendly software, it allows website owners and developers to do things like:
- Create and manage memberships
- Restrict access to certain content
- Set up subscription-based models
Memberstack integrates beautifully with Webflow and other website builders and platforms, making it an accessible option for users with different levels of technical expertise.
History
Memberstack is a project born from a preschool–literally! Tyler Bell and Duncan Hamra met in pre-school in 2001 and started building software together in 2014. After years spent rebuilding and re-doing everything from front-end design to Stripe integrations, they decided enough was enough.
In 2018, they set out to build a single, flexible system that could adapt to any project they might start in the future. With Tyler's engineering background and Duncan's passion for design, they created a beautiful, developer-friendly, and flexible platform that quickly took off.
Fast-forward to 2024, and over 2,400 apps and businesses have launched from a project that was supposed to be nothing more than a solution to a dev team's internal problem.
Memberstack's customers have collectively earned $80 million in revenue, while touching the lives of over 2.5 million people from every corner of the globe.
We call that a win!
Notable Use Cases
Here at Slam, we offer tons of great products for startups, founders, nonprofits, and anyone looking to build a successful project on the Internet. We use Memberstack to handle our course subscriptions, e-commerce, and access to gated content because it integrates nicely with our Webflow website.
In addition to using Memberstack for our site, we’ve also implemented the integration on behalf of clients looking to streamline their membership-based services.
For example, our client QUIET Films wanted to give visitors the option to rent or host screenings of their documentary The Death of My Two Fathers directly from their Slam-built website. When they approached us about building out a user-friendly solution, we knew that Memberstack was the ideal tool for building features like:
- Site-native payment
- Membership options
- Community screening management
- Time and use-limited rental
With Memberstack + Webflow, we delivered a solution that achieved all this functionality, and more. Click here to see how we did it.
In addition to Slam use cases, the Memberstack showcase is full of great projects that rely on Memberstack for their membership solutions. From at-home workouts to a message-based gratitude journal, the software boasts a thriving community of passionate and enthusiastic users.
Outseta vs. Memberstack: What is Outseta
Outseta is a software platform designed to provide integrated subscription and membership tools for start-ups and small businesses. It operates as an all-in-one solution, offering the following features:
- Billing
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Chat, email, and newsletter tools
Outseta’s goal is to help founders keep their tech stack lean and consolidated.
History
The Outseta story starts with a common problem: the SaaS trap.
Sure, start-ups and small businesses need good software products to meet their core needs. The problem is that more often than not, these tools are poorly integrated and only partially used. A 2020 study of SaaS trends published by Blissfully found that small companies use 100+ SaaS products, with wasteful SaaS spending nearly doubling year over year.
Outseta was created to solve this common problem and help businesses stay lean. Founders Dimitris Georgakopoulos, Geoff Roberts, and Dave Wong set out to build a product that met the four basic software needs of start-ups and small businesses:
- A CRM for storing prospect and customer data
- A billing system to charge customers
- A means of communicating with prospects and customers
- Tools for reporting on business performance
As one of the most popular Memberstack alternatives, Outseta helps streamline business processes by offering a unified platform that combines essential tools for managing the many aspects of startup life.
Using Outseta
Since its creation in 2016, Outseta has earned itself a large following of enthusiastic start-up founders and small business owners who appreciate the no-code tool’s simplicity and functionality.
According to testimonials, Outseta users especially love these features:
- All-in-one capability for billing, CRM, support, and newsletters/mailing
- Easy-to-use, no-code embeds
- Great software customer service
- Access to team-building tools
Outseta clients have also noted that it’s easy to set up a new business or to migrate existing account management data from a different platform, with a minimal learning curve and easy-to-access support.
Outseta vs. Memberstack: Memberstack Benefits
Memberstack is great as a subscription management tool. But what makes it stand out from the other great subscription tools on the market?
Memberstack’s powerful and highly customizable integration capabilities with Webflow are where it really shines.
If you value creative control, you’ll love this tool’s flexibility and custom attributes.
There are several benefits to making Memberstack a part of your tech stack. These are our top three:
- Social login
- Full design control
- Webflow integration
In this section, we’ll examine the details behind each of these Memberstack benefits.
Social Login
As you probably know, password management is a bit of a nightmare. Think: poorly chosen passwords, forgotten login credentials, and security issues. Not to mention all the conversions you stand to lose if your signup process is too complicated!
Fortunately, Memberstack has solved this problem in a big way. You’d be hard-pressed to find a subscription management tool with more social signup and login choices! Trust us, we did the research.
With Memberstack, you can sign up and log in to your account with any of the following options:
Interested in freeing your members from passwords in general while still keeping things secure? You also have the option to build a fully custom, password-free signup and login form. Forget poor password choices and management – with Memberstack, your users can log in with a confirmation code or magic link.
Full Design Control
Three words: custom data attributes.
The thing about Memberstack, it’s heavily focused on customizability. This is a tool that offers off-the-charts flexibility, letting you create completely custom signup and login forms that match your visual identity while keeping your customer data organized.
Memberstack also plays nice with metadata. Are you handling info types like external IDs that might look different across members? Memberstack makes it as easy as possible to keep things organized by offering three types of member data:
- Custom fields
- JSON
- Metadata
You can access the first two types in several ways, including through forms and data attributes in Webflow, the frontend and backend API, and via the dashboard. If you want to access your metadata, you’ll need to go through the backend as metadata is read-only from the frontend.
Webflow Integration
The Memberstack + Webflow integration is powerful, period.
You honestly can’t do much better when it comes to building a fully customizable no-code subscription site. Memberstack integrates beautifully with Webflow APIs, making it easy to manage collection items and trigger actions when events occur.
For example, if you want to start sending promotional emails to new customer sign-ups or send relevant blogging articles to course subscribers, Webflow APIs are what you need to make it happen.
The integration benefits extend to design customization, too. With Webflow’s new “Variables” feature, you can easily select style attributes and test them for overall design impact right in your stylesheet.
Whether you build from scratch or use a pre-designed template, Webflow and Memberstack together are a powerful integration that’s hard to beat for membership-driven websites.
How to Set Up Memberstack Memberships with Webflow
If you’re interested in giving the Memberstack + Webflow integration a try, follow these six easy steps to get started:
- From Memberstack, click ‘add website’ and choose Webflow
- Follow the steps to add Memberstack to your site
- After your website is added, open the Memberstack dashboard
- Select ‘create membership’ from the dashboard, name it, and select pricing details
- Customize options like hidden content, form and field data, and member-specific pages
- Add a test member to ensure everything works as it should
The thing about Memberstack, it has some of the most thorough documentation of any SaaS product on the market. If you need more info, head over to the docs page for tutorials, developer docs, and FAQs.
Outseta vs. Memberstack: Outseta Pros & Cons
Outseta was designed as an all-in-one SaaS solution to consolidate your tech stack and make it easier to launch your subscription-based startup. Sounds great, but does it measure up?
In this section, we’ll explore the following three aspects of Outseta:
- Price analysis
- Business tools
- Limitations
Now, let’s look at the pros and cons of using Outseta.
Price Analysis
Outseta is an all-in-one SaaS product with built-in tools for CRM, communication, and support, and it’s been priced accordingly.
When signing up for Outseta, you’ll need to choose one of three pricing tiers:
- Founder for $33/month + 1% transaction fee
- Start-up for $66/month + 1% transaction fee
- Growth for $99/month + 1% transaction fee
You can take advantage of the 7-day free trial to determine whether Outseta is the right tool for your membership-based start-up or small business.
Business Tools
With Outseta, you get more than just a subscription-based service. In addition to giving your users a way to access gated content, you also get services like:
- CRM features
- Support ticketing
- Communication and email marketing components
- Team building features
- Protected content
Bonus: you can integrate all these things into your membership site in minutes.
Forms are simple to create and capable of collecting the user info you need. They can be embedded on a page, or as a pop-up. When it comes to billing, Outseta’s Stripe integration is the very definition of effortless. Just click a link in Outseta, sign in to Stripe, and call it a day.
One nice feature that’s unique to Outseta is the ability to have teams for each membership. This way, the option for more than one person to access billing or support is built into the tool.
Limitations
In terms of account access, Outseta gives you and your users the option to sign in with Google. However, it doesn’t offer the same range of social sign-up options as Memberstack. A potential con to consider, depending on your needs.
Another major limitation is the lack of flexible customization options. This is where Memberstack is the undisputed champ. While Outseta does offer embeds, their customizability is limited. If your use case requires you to design all aspects of the page, maybe consider looking elsewhere.
Comparing Outseta vs. Memberstack Webflow Integrations
While Outseta and Memberstack both integrate with Webflow, nothing beats the customization control offered by Memberstack. While it’s relatively easy to place Outseta embedded forms on a page, we wish they’d give users a bit more control through custom attributes.
Customizability is one of the best things about working with Webflow. In our opinion, it would be a shame to sacrifice that custom control when adding a membership feature to your Webflow website. That’s why, in an Outseta vs. Memberstack face-off, Memberstack is the clear winner in our books.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Webflow stacks up against other web builder platforms, check out our Webflow article series:
- Webflow vs Wordpress 2024
- Webflow vs Wix
- Webflow vs Contentful
- Webflow vs Elementor
- Squarespace vs Webflow
- Editor X or Webflow
Outseta and Memberstack both integrate nicely with platforms other than Webflow. Do your research and find the integration that works best for your use case!
Why Slam Prefers Memberstack over Outseta
Here at Slam, customizability is at the top of our list of must-have features for a SaaS product. As Webflow experts, we like designing all aspects of whatever we’re putting out into the world. Since we specialize in branding identity and strategy, we need the ability to fully customize everything from sign-in pages to error messages and password reset forms.
For example, let’s say a customer attempts to create an account with an email address that was previously registered. Thanks to Memberstack’s custom error and success messages, we can let the client know about the issue without disrupting the flow of our (or our client’s) branding and visual identity.
Customization is what Memberstack does best, while Outseta is more limited in terms of creative control. That’s why we prefer Memberstack over Outseta and other alternatives.
In addition to brand strategy and identity, we also offer these award-winning services to our clients:
After 10+ years in the industry, we know what we like and need to get the job done. We settled on the Memberstack + Webflow integration after a lot of trial and error, and we’re happy with how easy it is to integrate, customize, and launch.
Did you know we offer free consultations? If you’re interested in working with us on a project, please contact us today to set something up!
