Joinery is a membership management platform for clubs, associations, nonprofits, community groups, and small businesses. It covers members, event registration, payments, ecommerce, email communication, and content publishing. Rather than being a single-purpose tool, it aims to bring the common systems membership-based organizations need into one platform, with an emphasis on “users own their data”: data can be exported, the platform can be self-hosted, the source code is viewable, and there are no platform transaction fees.
The feature set is fairly comprehensive. On the membership side, it supports custom profiles, permissions, subscription tiers, groups, directory search, and event analytics. For events, it supports capacity management, waitlists, recurring events, custom registration questions, and iCal export. For payments, Stripe and PayPal are built in, allowing organizations to sell memberships, products, and event tickets, with support for subscriptions, shopping carts, discount codes, and order history. For communication, it includes newsletters, mailing lists, and a notification system, and can connect to Mailgun or self-hosted email. The platform also includes a CMS, page builder, media management, SEO metadata, a theme system, and a plugin system.
The hosted version has three tiers: Starter, Organization, and Network. Annual billing works out to 29, 59, and 99 USD/month respectively, covering 250, 2,000, and 10,000 members; monthly billing is 39, 79, and 129 USD/month. All plans include all features, the full API, custom domains, priority support, and 0% platform transaction fees. A 14-day free trial is available with no credit card required. For self-hosting, personal, educational, and nonprofit use is free; commercial self-hosting requires a quote. There is also a one-time installation service for 249 USD.
Joinery is relatively developer-friendly, offering a REST API, API key authentication, rate limiting, CORS, webhooks, 40+ model endpoints, a plugin system, and theme override mechanisms. Its tech stack is PHP 8.x and PostgreSQL, with support for Docker, self-hosting, and automatic upgrades. Security disclosures are fairly detailed, covering PDO prepared statements, XSS protection, CSRF protection, Argon2id, secure cookies, and file upload controls. However, we did not find information on formal compliance certifications such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001. For permissions, it supports roles such as member, moderator, and admin, with plan differences in the number of administrators allowed.
Its strengths are an all-in-one feature set, no platform transaction cut, self-hosting support, portable data, and solid extensibility through APIs and plugins. The downsides are that the project is maintained by an independent developer, enterprise-level SLA and compliance certifications are not clearly established, and commercial self-hosting pricing is not very transparent. Self-hosting and email setup also require technical capability. It is best suited to small and midsize membership organizations that value data control, want to reduce long-term transaction fees, and have some technical resources.
The main documentation does not provide information on mainland China access, ICP filing, RMB payments, or local payment methods. Services such as Stripe, PayPal, and Mailgun may involve payment, deliverability, or network uncertainty in China-related scenarios. If operating for users in mainland China, you should first test site speed, email deliverability, and the payment flow. Depending on the use case, alternatives may include Huodongxing, Youzan, Weimob, or self-hosted combinations such as WordPress/CiviCRM.
⚠ This review is compiled from public sources and does not constitute a purchase recommendation. Verify all facts on the vendor's official site. Verify on theunfold.org official site.
theunfold.org is an Unknown SaaS Tools provider. TG4G tracks its product information, with monthly pricing from $29.00, an overall rating of 7.0/10, and a China-accessibility score of Workable. Click "Visit Official Site" to reach theunfold.org directly.