How is this different from BuddyPress development?

BuddyPress development builds a public-facing community. Private community development locks the same community down - gated registration, members-only content, role-based access, intranet patterns. The underlying engine is BuddyPress; the difference is the access model and the integrations (SSO, audit, billing) layered on top.

Do members have to log in to see anything?

Yes - that is the point. The whole site is private by default. Guest visitors hit a login wall. You can selectively expose marketing pages (pricing, about, signup) but everything community-flavoured stays locked.

How do you handle paid memberships?

Whatever billing engine fits - Paid Memberships Pro, MemberPress, WooCommerce Memberships, Easy Digital Downloads Recurring. We wire the billing to BuddyPress access. Membership lapses revoke access automatically; renewals restore it.

Can it integrate with our SSO / identity provider?

Yes - SAML for enterprise IdPs, OAuth for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, SCIM for automated provisioning. New employees auto-join the right groups based on their AD attributes; departures auto-deactivate.

What about audit logs for compliance?

Member activity, content access, admin actions are logged. Configurable retention. Export to your SIEM. Used by clients in finance, healthcare, and education where the audit trail is non-negotiable.

How much does a private community platform cost?

Every project gets a fixed price within 48 hours of a free call. A locked-down community for one organisation is a contained build; SSO with your identity provider, audit logging and paid tiers add to it.

How do we keep private community content out of Google?

Every members-only page requires a login, sends no-index signals and is excluded from the sitemap, and files are served only to signed-in members. We test it from the outside before launch, so nothing private is reachable by search engines or shared links.

Can this replace a private Facebook or Slack group?

Yes, and you own it. Unlike a Facebook group, the members, posts and data are yours, nothing is ranked by an algorithm, and conversations are searchable months later. Unlike Slack, answers are kept as Q&A instead of scrolling away.

Service Private community

Members-only communities, private from the first page.

Private BuddyPress, single sign-on, a record of who did what, and paid membership built in. The same private communities we build for mid-sized and enterprise clients.

Tell us about your project See BP Lock

BP Lock and Private Community Pro in use today

Why private over public

Some communities should never be on the open web.

Customer communities full of unreleased product feedback. Internal employee networks with org-chart data. Paid expert groups behind a subscription. Healthcare cohorts under HIPAA. None of these belong on a public BuddyPress site indexed by Google.

Private community development is the same BuddyPress engine, but every door is locked by default. Members sign in, see what their tier permits, and the activity stream stays inside the building. We ship the plugins that make this possible (BP Lock, Private Community Pro) and the integration layer that makes it enterprise-ready.

Members-only activity

Private streams, accountable members.

What a private activity feed can look like. Verified members, audited actions, role-aware visibility. The stream is real-time without being chaotic. Scroll up and back down to replay.

Vivian Leeposted inMembers-only Updates

"Q3 numbers are in. Internal dashboard linked. Comments stay inside this group only."

just now ♥ 0 ↩ 0
Nadia Brownjoined via SSOMember tier · Gold

2 minutes ago 487 members
Kenji Tanakashared a confidential brief inLeadership Circle

"Strategy doc · 14 pages · members in the Gold tier only · audit-logged."

8 minutes ago ♥ 0
Robin Carterreplied inMembers-only Updates

"The Q3 acquisition cost number is much better than I expected. Want to compare notes in the AMA next week?"

14 minutes ago ♥ 0

Whole-site lockdown · including REST, RSS, and embedded media
SSO + paid tiers · OneLogin, Okta, Google Workspace, Memberpress, EDD
Audit-logged · who saw what, when, exportable for compliance

Whole-site lockdown, not page-by-page

BuddyPress Lock and Private Community Pro (our plugins) gate the entire site at one switch - profiles, groups, activity, REST endpoints, even feed URLs. No more "I forgot to lock that page" moments. Search-engine bots get a login wall, not your member data.

The site is private by default, never by accident.

Role and tier-based access

Content visible to one member tier, hidden from another. Groups members must be invited to. Activity types only certain roles can post. Restrict by BuddyPress role, WordPress role, paid membership tier, or any combination. Permissions stay manageable as the org grows.

The right people see the right content, automatically.

Intranet patterns that scale

Org charts, department directories, announcement walls, document libraries with permissions, internal-only events, employee onboarding flows. The patterns mid-market companies need to run an internal community without buying Yammer or Workplace.

Replaces Slack-as-everything with something owned.

Paid private communities

Membership tiers gate community access. PMPro, MemberPress, WooCommerce Memberships, or Easy Digital Downloads all integrate. Stripe + PayPal billing. Annual + monthly tiers. Free trial periods. Failed-payment grace periods. Cancellation flows that retain.

Recurring revenue from your private community.

SSO + identity-provider integration

SAML SSO for enterprise. OAuth for Google Workspace / Microsoft 365. SCIM for automated provisioning. Auto-join groups based on AD attributes. Auto-deactivate when an employee leaves the IdP. The integrations procurement asks for.

Audit trails and compliance

Who accessed what, when. Member activity logs. Content-access logs. Admin-action audit trails. Export to SIEM. Configurable retention. The data your security team needs when the auditor asks.

Compliance-ready without bolting on a third-party logging tool.

100%

of community surfaces are gated by default

No accidental public pages. No leaked REST endpoints. No indexed member profiles.

The full system

A private community, from invitation to renewal.

Private is more than a login wall. Every step is controlled and recorded, and members still get a community worth coming back to.

Invite and verify

Invitation codes, approval queues or domain rules decide who gets in.
BuddyNext
Sign in once

Single sign-on with Azure AD, Okta or Google Workspace, so access follows your directory.
Private spaces by role

Committees, cohorts and departments see only what they should.
BuddyNext spaces
Answers kept in-house

Members-only Q&A and documents that never reach search engines.
Jetonomy
A record of who did what

Audit logs on joins, posts, downloads and admin actions, ready for a compliance review.
Renew and grow

Paid tiers, renewals and courses for members who stay.
Learnomy

Locked down on day one, and ready to open up as the community matures.

What it costs

Pricing follows how many surfaces have to stay private.

Gating the pages and closing every route to the content are the same sentence and very different projects. Here is what moves the number.

What moves the number

How many ways in Pages are the obvious surface. Feeds, REST endpoints, media URLs, search results and embeds are the ones that leak, and each needs closing deliberately.
How access is granted A single membership tier is simple. Invitations, approvals, organisations, seats and expiry each add rules that must hold under pressure.
What hidden means Not listed, or not readable. They are different requirements and the stricter one costs more, so it is worth being explicit.
Whether it must survive audit A decision trail showing who could see what and when is real work, and non-negotiable in some sectors.
How members arrive Bringing an existing membership across, with its access intact, is its own project.

Small, well-defined work is usually better handled as an hourly block than scoped as a project, and we will say so rather than inflate it into one.

Rough idea to delivery

You send the details What you want built, roughly, plus budget range and timing. The form asks for all of it
Same day, Monday to Friday We read it and reply. Nothing is scheduled before we know what it is about
Then the call Free discovery, booked once there is enough on the table to make it worth your hour
Within 48 hours of the call A written fixed-price quote you approve before anything starts

Tell us about your project

How we work

How a private community engagement runs.

Free: first call with the engineers
10+: monthly developer hours
48h: to a fixed-price quote

Ongoing work uses one blended team rate that covers analysis, front end, back end and QA, with every hour logged.

Tell us about your project

Design the access modelOne to two weeks. Access model (member tiers, role matrix, content gates), billing model if paid, SSO requirements, audit and compliance scope. Output is a fixed-price quote. Build starts with the access model locked.
Lockdown, roles and SSO built and testedSix to twelve weeks depending on scope. Lockdown layer, role-based access, SSO integration, billing wiring, audit logs. Working private community on staging within four weeks. Internal beta cohort joins staging.
Members moved in, then run with youOne to two weeks. Member migration from existing platform if applicable. Beta cohort onboarded. Monitoring + audit log review cadence agreed. Optional retainer for ongoing development. Private community launches with first members live.

Quick enquiry

Needs to be members-only?

Tell us who must be inside and who must never be. If there is a compliance requirement behind it, say so, because it changes the bar.

Prefer the full form? Tell us about your project

How is this different from BuddyPress development?

BuddyPress development builds a public-facing community. Private community development locks the same community down - gated registration, members-only content, role-based access, intranet patterns. The underlying engine is BuddyPress; the difference is the access model and the integrations (SSO, audit, billing) layered on top.
Do members have to log in to see anything?

Yes - that is the point. The whole site is private by default. Guest visitors hit a login wall. You can selectively expose marketing pages (pricing, about, signup) but everything community-flavoured stays locked.
How do you handle paid memberships?

Whatever billing engine fits - Paid Memberships Pro, MemberPress, WooCommerce Memberships, Easy Digital Downloads Recurring. We wire the billing to BuddyPress access. Membership lapses revoke access automatically; renewals restore it.
Can it integrate with our SSO / identity provider?

Yes - SAML for enterprise IdPs, OAuth for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, SCIM for automated provisioning. New employees auto-join the right groups based on their AD attributes; departures auto-deactivate.
What about audit logs for compliance?

Member activity, content access, admin actions are logged. Configurable retention. Export to your SIEM. Used by clients in finance, healthcare, and education where the audit trail is non-negotiable.
How much does a private community platform cost?

Every project gets a fixed price within 48 hours of a free call. A locked-down community for one organisation is a contained build; SSO with your identity provider, audit logging and paid tiers add to it.
How do we keep private community content out of Google?

Every members-only page requires a login, sends no-index signals and is excluded from the sitemap, and files are served only to signed-in members. We test it from the outside before launch, so nothing private is reachable by search engines or shared links.
Can this replace a private Facebook or Slack group?

Yes, and you own it. Unlike a Facebook group, the members, posts and data are yours, nothing is ranked by an algorithm, and conversations are searchable months later. Unlike Slack, answers are kept as Q&A instead of scrolling away.

Where to go next

Related services

Industries we build this for

What clients say

★★★★★

“Wbcom Designs was methodical, reliable, innovative, and knowledgeable. They communicated with us every step of the way and delivered on time and on budget.”

Upwork review, Forum setup, 2023

★★★★★