9 Best Role-based Pricing and Wholesale plugins for WooCommerce [2022 comparison]

What is role-based pricing? 

WP and WooCommerce don’t provide you with the feature to make non-default user roles and set up different prices for users who share the particular role. That’s why if you run a private wholesale store, want to provide discounts or personal pricing for your members, or need to provide special pricing based on any other common grounds, you may benefit from the solutions we review down below.

You will not find how to design role-based pricing by writing code or using the plugin here. In the following topic, we strive to guide you through the options market has to offer for that purpose. We compared the most popular plugins by their features, pricing, interface, and competitive advantages, so you have all the data to make the right choice. 

Note: plugins have similar naming, so be sure to double-check the developer label not to be confused. 

Role & Customer Based Pricing for WooCommerce by Meow Crew

Download: Meow Crew website or WooCoomerce Marketplace, Pricing: $79 billed annually, Instructions: Docs

This is one of the most advanced plugins for Role-based pricing functionality. It may lose the position regarding exclusive wholesale features, like tiered pricing or separate registration form for wholesalers. Still, it beats any other plugin in terms of the number of functions for Role or Customer-based pricing.

You will find everything for designing special pricing from scratch without the need for other plugins. Plugin by Meow Crew give you the option to create new roles, which you can assign to your users; make general pricing rules based on a variety of products or categories + choose user roles or separate accounts suited for rules; prices can be assigned using two methods – providing discounts for regular cost, or setting fixed regular + sale price; in addition to pricing rules you can also make quantity rules – assign minimum, and maximum quantity users are obliged to purchase and required quantity step. Besides general pricing rules, the same conditions may be created for each product separately, where you can choose user roles or user accounts and assign pricing and quantity rules especially for them. It gives you a chance to prevent non-logged users from purchasing and hiding prices for them.

And last but not least – you can manage role-based or customer-based prices using the default WooCommerce Import/Export tool, and it is also integrated with WP All Import. Some other plugins also provide you with similar options, but they don’t have full integration but simply teach you how to import the pricing field using meta-data, which is not the most convenient way and has a lot of drawbacks.

One more great thing about this plugin is that you can use a free version from wordpress.org, which could be enough for most cases.

Role Based Pricing for WooCommerce by Addify

Download: WooCommerce Marketplace, Pricing: $79 billed annually, Instructions: Docs

Plugin developed by the Addify team fits you perfectly in case you don’t need to mass import\export prices and already have a separate plugin for roles management. You can also use it to design pricing rules for a whole category or bunch of products, as well as set up role-based pricing directly on each product page. This role-based pricing plugin also provides you an option to set up minimum and maximum quantities for each rule.

There are a few other minor flaws – the plugin documentation is pretty limited, and since you cannot try a free version or get a free trial on woocommerce.com, you may have to ask for a refund if the plugin doesn’t work for you.

But still, you can be sure to find core features you expect to see in the role-based pricing plugin; you can find details on crucial segments in the table below.

Yith Role Based pricing

Download: Yith website, Pricing: $89 billed annually, Instructions: Docs

This plugin is one of the most famous in the space, probably because of Yith label, who designed a lot of plugins for WooCommerce and has great expertise in this area. Though, the features they provide in the plugin are limited compared to the prior two plugins.

Plugin by Yith, as well as Addify one, doesn’t give you a chance to create new custom user roles, to create roles for role-based pricing, you need to install an additional plugin.

Yith Role Based pricing is all about “role-based” and “pricing”, so you can create pricing rules for roles, but not the customers separately, as well as you can create pricing, but no the quantity rules.

The verdict is the following: this plugin fits you well if you don’t need the import\export feature, have an additional plugin to manage roles, and all you want is simple role-based pricing. And it’s a bit pricey compared to other plugins on the list, which may provide you even more for less money.

ELEX WooCommerce Role Based Pricing

Download: Elex website, Pricing: $79 billed annually, Instructions: Docs

Role-based pricing plugin designed by ELEX has the largest number of installs on wp.org, but since it doesn’t give you some basic features like pricing for variable products or managing prices on the product page, we will consider the premium version of ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale & Role Based Pricing located on their website.

It is an excellent plugin with a built-in feature to create custom user roles and provide you with many settings to control pricing behavior for guest users.

This plugin is also integrated with the default WooCommerce import tool so that you can mass-import role-based prices for each product. Though the import works through custom fields only with designated CSV format, you won’t find an option to drag and drop fields names into product setup, as you can do with WP All Import plugin.

Plus, there is no chance to specify the quantity rules, which is necessary for some wholesale operations.
But overall, this is one of the plugins we can recommend you to go with, especially since you have an option to try the free version.

Product Prices by User Roles for WooCommerce by Tyche

Download: WooCommerce website, Pricing: $49 billed annually, Instructions: Docs

The product made by the Tyche team is the most basic one for managing role-based pricing. They didn’t follow the path of other plugins in the pricing creation area, they have a completely different approach for this – multipliers for price. While role-based pricing plugins usually provide you an option to assign discounts or set up fixed pricing for some roles, Tyche utilizes price multipliers for each role. So to give discounts to a group of users, you can apply a 0.9 multiplier for roles, and to increase the cost use a 1.2 multiplier, and so on. You can also apply these multipliers for shipping costs.

This plugin also has a feature to hide product prices for selected user roles.

Though they have an option to assign prices on the product level, it’s a pretty basic plugin. But if you find all the features you need in the table below, you can rest assured that the plugin works, and in case of any issues, WooCommerce guarantees you full money back.

Prices By User Role for WooCommerce by Festi-Team

Download: Codecanyon Market, Pricing: $45 billed annually 

The most popular role-based pricing plugin hosted on the Codecanyon market. It works with various product types – from simple and variable products to subscriptions and bundles.

You can find one unique feature here – WooCommerce REST API support that means you can send role-based prices over API to your store. In addition to creating pricing over API, you can also use the default WooCommerce Import tool for the same purpose.

Though, a few things are missing – the plugin doesn’t allow you to make customer-based prices and has only one type of assigning costs (there’s no way to give percentage discounts to your regular prices). And it’s all about creating prices for each product separately, there’s no way to make general pricing rules for the whole category, the same as this plugin doesn’t control the minimum and maximum quantity or quantity steps.

Nonetheless, it’s an excellent option for a reasonable price if you are looking for a way to set up role-based pricing on the product level, and you may ever need to do it through the API.

Wholesale For WooCommerce by WPExperts

Download: WooCommerce Marketplace, Pricing: $99 billed annually, Instructions: Docs

This one is not quite a role-based pricing plugin, it’s a whole package for wholesale-oriented stores, but since the largest piece of functionality is about managing prices for user roles, we decided to add it to the list.

The wholesale for WooCommerce plugin by WPExperts provides a bunch of settings to run a successful wholesale store. It starts with the separate registration for wholesalers, which is optional because you can also create and assign custom user roles to users registered through the default WooCommerce sign-up form, and ends up with the global pricing rules and pricing rules on product level, which can be imported via WooCommerce Import\Export tool.

Fair to say that this plugin has to offer almost everything other plugins in the list provide, except the chance to create pricing based on customer account (not the whole role), the discounted prices for wholesalers (you can only assign fixed costs), and the quantity rules (only the minimum required amount is available to set up).

Roles & Rules B2B for WooCommerce by Consortia AS

Download: WooCommerce marketplace, Pricing: $79 billed annually, Instructions: Docs

Roles & Rules plugin is another great plugin to help you manage pricing for various user roles. You can create and assign roles to your users and provide them the chance to choose a role on the registration form.

You can also format pricing and show personalized pricing as discounts, plus you can set up prices validity dates.

Though the plugin lacks a few core features, like mass import\export prices via CSV, because pricing rules cannot be created on the product level, it’s only can be done through general pricing rules. And since there’s no chance to manage role-based pricing on each product page, this may impose limitations on your website maintenance in the future.

But if you are looking for a plugin to create role-based pricing as sale prices for category or entier store, you can find anything you’d need here.

WooCommerce Wholesale Pro by Barn2

Download: Barn2 website, Pricing: $99 billed annually, Instructions: Docs

The plugin designed by Barn2 is the last piece we’d like to discuss here, but it’s definitely shouldn’t be the latest on your shortlist.

If you use this plugin alongside the Order Form Layout from Barn2, you may get more wholesale-oriented options. But since we review standalone plugins, you may notice that WooCommerce Wholesale Pro by Barn2 provides fewer features than the average plugin in this list.

Among the advantages, we can highlight outstanding instructions and documentation provided by the plugin developer. And it still performs the necessary operations for you. Using this plugin, you can create roles, include custom fields into the registration form, control pricing visibility across the store, and set up one price for each role on product level (fixed price, w/o sale price, and discounted option).

However, the plugin may seem a bit expensive due to the lack of such essential components as role-based prices for several products (like the whole category), customer-based pricing, Import & Export capabilities, and a few more you can find in the table below.

Conclusion

We can’t tell you what role-based plugin is the best option for you, all we can do is provide you with the structured data to make your life easier. 

So be sure to double-check if the plugin fits your needs, or maybe you can get more value from another option. We also added galleries with the plugins’ UI because we believe that clean and understandable UI tells more about developers than marketing materials. And don’t forget to look ahead because the fact that you don’t need CSV import at the moment doesn’t mean that you won’t need it while your business grows. Sometimes architectural limitations in the plugin may cause significant damage to your store or at least slow down your growth. 

And be sure to check the plugins’ pages and documentation before you make your choice.