Choosing the best plugins or web apps to power your businesses tech system can be a big challenge at times.

There’s a dizzying array of choices for almost anything that you’d want to do through your website in terms of functionality, and when you come across two or more pieces of software that do almost the same thing, deciding between the options based on their feature sets alone can lead you into some frustrating trouble.

Let’s look at one example that will lead to one of the most helpful tactics I’ve found for choosing the right software and steering clear of software that could waste your time and money.

If you have a WordPress site and you’re interested in creating a paid only access member’s area to deliver an online program that you’re selling, the two most popular plugin options to accomplish that are Digital Access Pass (DAP) and WishList Member.

I get a lot of questions from people looking for help in trying to make the decision between these two plugins, and it’s understandable: they accomplish nearly the same end result and their feature sets are somewhat similar.

When I get this question about using DAP or Wishlist Member, my answer always comes down to choosing DAP, and here’s why:

The two plugins have similar feature sets, but as you look more closely between the two, DAP has a handful of additional features that are really nice to have, like being able to have customers go through the purchase process right on your site, flexible content “dripping” (i.e., automated content publishing schedules), and having an integrated affiliate tracking system.

To be clear, Wishlist Member does have the ability to drip content, but I’ve heard a lot of people say that they get frustrated with it because they can’t drip content the exact way they want to. In contrast, setting up the exact kind of drip schedule you want in DAP is quite easy.

Feature differences are one thing, but here’s the more important differentiating factor between the two plugins: Wishlist Member has been known to have a lot of bugs and their customer support has gotten a lot of bad reviews.

The combination of bugs plus bad customer support should be a big red flag for you, particularly when you’re trying to decide on software that will be part of the foundation of the way your business makes money.

Bugs and poor customer support often lead to high frustration, a lot of wasted time, angry customers (your customers that is), increased time spent on answering requests for help from your customers, and lost money.

Over the years I’ve seen many, many people use plugins that are vital to their business that have bugs and bad support, and the result is never pretty.

Software is only as good as it’s customer support is. A certain amount of bugs can be tolerated, worked through, and forgiven if the customer support people take really good care of you throughout the whole process and solve the problem quickly.

With DAP, the feature set is very strong, the software itself is solid, and their customer support is fantastic.

I’ve actually never heard anyone mention anything negative about their support, and my own experience with them has been great.

DAP currently costs about $70 more than Wishlist Member, but in my opinion, it’s well worth that extra bit of money.

For a little bit more money you’ll get a better feature set, better software, and amazing support. That means you get to avoid heaps of frustration and get on with the business of delivering awesome content to your customers instead of getting bogged down with bugs and support tickets.

Outside of the decision between these two specific plugins, when you’re trying to decide on any software for your business, remember to do some research not just on the feature sets but also on what people are saying about each piece of software and its support.

That will go a long way towards you making solid software decisions for your business.

Tweet