This LearnDash review is meant to simplify the game for all types of course creators. Ensuring you choose the correct LMS to support your course business is critical for success. Read on to discover LearnDash LMS pricing, features, integrations and more to help you decide if the LearnDash learning management system is for you.
Choosing a learning management system (LMS) to host your online courses is no easy feat. There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of options to choose from – and they are definitely not all made equal.
As a seasoned e-Learning Specialist, I spend a solid amount of time developing training courses and doing consultations on learning management systems for my clients. And I have to say, even I can get overwhelmed by the options.
Sometimes, my clients make it easy for me. Sometimes, they specify that they want their online learning courses to be hosted on their WordPress.org websites. This dramatically narrows down the search, as it leaves me with only WordPress LMS plugins.
Well, one recommendation that’s never failed is LearnDash! This LMS plugin for WordPress effectively transforms your WordPress website into a fully-functional Learning Management System. It is a premium option that’s used by over 30% of Fortune 500 companies, as well as corporate trainers and educational institutions worldwide.
What’s more, in the past year, they’ve fully revamped the platform with game-changing add-ons, new features, and functions! For all of these reasons and more, LearnDash is the top WordPress choice in our round-up of the best online course platforms.
In this LearnDash review, we’re going to do a 360° deep-dive into the platform to see if it’s right for you.
Is LearnDash Right for You?
If you have a WordPress website and and would like for your course platform to be fully contained right within that website, then LearnDash is definitely an option you should consider.
Even if you don’t have a WordPress website or just don’t want to have to deal with installing and maintaining a relatively complex plug-in, LearnDash is still and option – the company has introduced a cloud version that provides for a fully-hosted course website using LearnDash and WordPress.
LearnDash Cloud vs Plug-in – Which is Better?
If you can navigate the back end of your existing website(s), then you’ll have no issues navigating the LearnDash plugin back-end. As mentioned, LearnDash simply transforms your WP dashboard into an online learning platform.
That being said, you don’t need to be a tech whiz, but you do need a moderate level of tech savviness.
If you’re thinking of starting from scratch – that is, getting a WP site and then getting LearnDash – or you just aren’t all that tech savvy, then you may have a bit of an uphill climb. It’s doable, but you would likely be better off focusing on your content, unless upping your tech skills is a personal goal.
The cloud option enables you to leapfrog the tech hurldes and jump in to taking advantage of the powerful set of features and functionalities that LearnDash offers.
When I first started using WordPress, I found the platform to be impressively intuitive. Moreover, LearnDash uses a drag and drop interface to help you create online courses and organize the course content – it hardly gets easier than that.
LearnDash Review: Consideration – Business Needs
Any LearnDash review would not be complete without looking at key considerations. The most important consideration is your business needs. You need to project into the future.
If you’d simply like to bang out course content with minimal involvement in the look, feel, and functionality of them, then you may be better off with standalone platforms like Teachable or Thinkific. Sure, there’s more limited flexibility and customizability there, but they do most of the heavy lifting for you, enabling you to focus on solely the course creation aspects of your e-learning efforts.
On the other hand, if you’re serious about scaling your business and monetizing your courses, offering course access via a membership plugin or have course prerequisites, then you’re going to need be as “agile” as possible to meet market demands. You’ll need customizable branding, programming abilities, and a vast range of features for ultimate flexibility.
The best part is that LearnDash grants you this scalability, customizability, and richness of features at a competitive rate. It is a complete component to creating a self hosted course website. But is LearnDash right for you?
To answer that, we need to ask who is using LearnDash and how does it fit into the realm of learning management systems available.
Who’s using LearnDash to Sell Courses?
As mentioned previously, LearnDash is used by 30% of the Fortune 500. Whether they are leveraging it to sell online courses, employee training, or for its other advanced features when married with WordPress, it has proven to be a valuable tool.
Additionally, professional training organizations can easily leverage it as part of their WordPress infrastructure or a standalone instance.
Lastly, because LearnDash doesn’t break the bank, major universities and educational institutions use LearnDash for course progression and course completion within their student population and for remote learning capabilities.
How to get started with LearnDash?
LearnDash, unlike many other WordPress plugins needs to be purchased on the LearnDash website. Once you have created and account and successfully purchased the popular WordPress LMS plugin, you will be provided with access to download a LearnDash zip file. You will upload within the plugin section of the WordPress admin interface.
Once uploaded, you will Activate the core LearnDash plugin and it will present on the left column menu as a new series of links to click. These links give you complete access to the LearnDash interface and toolset including the drag and drop course builder, which is what truly has LearnDash in the best LMS plugin conversation.
Of course, there are always other LMS plugins you can try but read this comprehensive LearnDash review first and you’ll have a better idea on how to proceed.
Your WordPress Site
LearnDash is a third party plugin for adding LMS functionality to WordPress sites. It doesn’t complete the build of a website without a WordPress theme. Luckily, most themes will integrate seamlessly with LearnDash and that is truly an advantage to using the content management system over other systems.
This LearnDash review doesn’t get into the specifics of WordPress, but you can learn more about the CMS system here.
LearnDash Pricing Plans
LearnDash pricing shows you the options for the plugin and the cloud versions, as show below.
The pricing above is for the LearnDash plug-in – what you would install on a WordPress site that you host yourself (usually through a web hosting service) – while the pricing below is for LearnDash Cloud – the option where LearDash hosts your course site for you. Notice that the cloud version also comes with ProPanel included. ProPanel provides detailed reports/analytics about user progress, course and assignment completion, quiz completion and results, and real-time data. It’s $49 per year additional with the standard LearnDash plugin.
The rest of the features, such as unlimited courses, unlimited users, drip-feeding, advanced quizzes, and free integrations, etc. are included with both plans. Given all they’re offering, you’re getting a deal no matter which plan you choose!
Currently, you cannot try LearnDash free as they don’t offer free trials but LearnDash does offer a 15-day money back guarantee. So why not try it out, risk-free before committing?
Building Your LearnDash Online Courses
How does LearnDash perform as a course builder? Let’s say you’ve taken the plunge and decided that LearnDash is right for you. You’ve gone into your WordPress backend, installed the plugin, and now your WP dashboard looks like this:
As shown above, the LearnDash LMS menu is simply a new section within your dashboard while keeping everything else intact. All access settings are kept within the entire LearnDash menu, including lesson access settings, payment settings and other critical items to integrate with WordPress and other plugins.
The next step involves using the online course builder to create your LearnDash courses! You might already have pre-existing course content, in which case, you can simply upload your content.
LearnDash supports the following content types:
- Images (jpg, jpeg, png, gif)
- Documents (pdf, psd, and all MS Word, PPT, and XL formats)
- Audio (mp3, m4a, ogg, wav)
- Video (mp4, m4v, mov, wmv)
Note that, with videos, you’re better off using externally hosted videos from a video-hosting service like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia, and then embedding them via an external link.
Self-hosting them is not ideal as video files are large and can greatly slow down your site, especially as your course count increases. This LearnDash review doesn’t get into the specifics on video streaming, but check out our livestreaming/multistreaming post to learn more.
On the other hand, if you don’t have pre-existing content and need to create some from scratch, no worries! LearnDash has an Online Course Builder feature that allows you to do just that! Just go to LearnDash LMS in the left margin, click on Courses, and then hover over the course you’re developing to see the “Builder” link, as shown below.
Likewise, if you’re developing your first course, a course “Builder” tab will appear after navigating to Course > Add New.
The Course Builder Function
The Course Builder function is a drag and drop editor tool that lets you organize and rearrange your course structure and publish courses online faster. For example, you can add new lessons or existing lessons to a module, and then further break down each lesson into a topic. You can title each lesson, topic, and module and move them around to create hierarchies.
And, of course, you can remove lessons and topics or entire modules as needed. If you’d like to make edits to a specific course, then simply click the course title or “Edit” link where you can make direct changes to the content itself.
Another noteworthy feature LearnDash makes easy is the control of when users see specific content and at what specific time. In other words, it allows you to Drip-Feed Content according to a lesson release schedule.
LearnDash enables course creators to drip-feed content based on the number of days that have passed post-enrolment or based on specified dates. Drip-feeding content from LearnDash lessons not only helps you guide your learners but it keeps them hooked while anticipating the next lesson or stage of your online course
A handy tool that pairs nicely with Drip-Feed Content is the Notifications Add-On. It notifies your users when new content is available so they never skip a beat!
As mentioned, drip-feed content enables you to guide your users. But guide them down what? If you have multiple related online courses, then with LearnDash, you can Create Learning Paths (or a path of course prerequisites) that determine what online learning path users take and in what order.
So far in this LearnDash review, we’ve looked at how to create course content, but now it’s time to look at how to hold your users accountable for their learning. You can create quizzes and assignments within the drag and drop interface.
LearnDash Quizzes and Assignments are an inherent part of any e-learning course that’s worth its salt. They’re really easy to create in the LearnDash LMS.
First, go to the left margin where it says LearnDash LMS. Just underneath, you’ll see the Quizzes link. The nice thing about LearnDash is that they have an advanced quizzing feature that enables you to create a wide variety of question types, as shown below:
But in addition to testing the learners’ knowledge, this feature can incorporate timers and question banks from which to recycle, as well as display customized messages based on the LearnDash quiz responses. But the most avant-garde capability that I’ve encountered is that you can use any type of media (audio, video, and images) in the questions and answer options.
That being said, if you’re after somewhat of a “blended” learning experience, you can incorporate assignments. Mind you, you’ll need someone who can view the assignments. But administering the grades are easy with LearnDash’s Gradebook feature.
Whether you’re manually submitting grades for assignments or need an automatic tally of LearnDash quiz results, you’ll be able to deliver weighted and offline grading and generate report cards.
To enable this tool, you’ll need the premium Gradebook add-on.
LearnDash LMS Gamification
While quizzes and grades are certainly interactive, they’re not necessarily engaging in a way that will captivate your users. In order to do that, you need to invoke the spirit of competition among your users. And few better engagement triggers exist than Gamification, which borrows inherent elements of game-playing, such as “players,” competition, points, and badges, to engage learners in a way that naturally stimulates motivation. Learners can even “pay” for courses with points they earn.
You can also transform as many courses as you want into full-fledged certifications and issue certificates. The LearnDash Certificate Builder makes it really easy to create customized certificates right in WordPress.
LearnDash Social Learning
LearnDash also incorporates social learning, which involves peer-to-peer interaction, be it online or face-to-face. With LearnDash’s dynamic forums, learners can engage with each other both in public and private arenas to enhance their learning experience.
LearnDash Focus Mode
Last but not least, the LearnDash LMS has introduced a new course-building feature called Focus Mode. By enabling focus mode, you eliminate all extraneous elements on the screen (desktop or mobile) so that your LearnDash users can “focus” on nothing but the course itself. It creates a virtual learning environment that’s akin to the focused environments or interfaces seen on mobile apps.
Not only does this create a more immersive and engaging experience, but it lets your content shine while boosting learner retention rates!
The best part is, you’re not simply beholden to the default LearnDash brand colors. You can incorporate your brand identity by adding your logo and color scheme.
LearnDash focus mode for mobile
Note that focus mode is optional. To enable it, go to the LearnDash settings within the WordPress dashboard as shown below.
Then, under “General”, go to the Design & Content Elements section and enable focus mode.
You’re almost done. Once you enable focus mode, you’ll have the option of specifying the content width within your own courses. Note that the content width specifies how wide the content will appear on the screen. It thus affects the width of the lessons and topics, quizzes, and assignments. The width of the course page does not actually change. I recommend sticking with the default width – 960px.
Now that we’ve covered the logistics behind creating a course with LearnDash, it’s time to explore the other half of its purpose – monetizing your courses.
LearnDash Course Monetization
One of the most important elements of a complete LearnDash review is a deep dive into monetization, considering you are looking to use it to profit from online course creation. Once your courses are complete and ready to go to market, you’ll need to understand what the logistics behind marketing and selling your own courses entail. Overall, you need to ask yourself three e-commerce questions:
How will my storefront look/present my offerings?
Do I want my courses to be fixed-price or subscription-based?
What methods will I use to incentivize my buyers?
Because LearnDash integrates with a vast assortment of third party plugins, the options are virtually limitless.
Let’s look at some of these integrations.
LearnDash E-Commerce Integrations
You can address the above three questions by integrating LearnDash with a third party plugin that can add additional functionality to your WordPress site:
- A storefront (e.g., WooCommerce, Samcart, ThriveCart)
- Payment gateways (Stripe, 2Checkout)
- Email marketing (Mailchimp, ConvertKit)
- Memberships (PaidMemberships Pro, MemberPress)
And much more (see full scope of LearnDash integrations).
LearnDash Review of Storefront and Payment Options
Once you’ve created your course(s), you’re going to need an e-commerce platform or Storefront where current or prospective buyers can browse your course offerings. You can integrate with WooCommerce, Samcart, ThriveCart, Easy Digital Downloads, and iThemes Exchange.
I find WooCommerce to be a premium plugin. Not only does it power over 30% of all e-commerce sites, but it practically is WordPress, and thus inherits all the strength and reliability of WP. Better yet, it has a wide selection of storefront themes that can be programmed and tailored to your custom look and functions. It is likely the most robust plugin for WordPress to sell online courses.
Either way, in any of these shopping cart options, your users will be able to browse, add courses to their shopping carts, pause and think if need be, and then proceed to the next step – payment.
One of the reasons LearnDash is a premium option is that it allows for ultimate flexibility with regards to payment options. There’s nothing worse than missing out on a sale from an eager buyer with an incompatible method of payment.
LearnDash’s shopping carts not only give you the extra functionality of generating coupons and affiliate marketing, but you also gain access to hundreds of Payment Gateway options, not to mention add-ons such as Stripe.
Speaking of payment options, it’s also nice to have flexibility with your business model. Do you want to sell standalone courses on a fixed-price model? Great! Just set your price and your customers can pay through various methods, including PayPal, 2Checkout, or Stripe. Once the payment goes through, your customers are auto-enrolled into your course. You can even set a course expiry date that revokes access.
Or, would you like to generate some passive income by selling your courses on a subscription-based model? Most edupreneurs opt for this route. Your customers can subscribe to a single course or gain access to a wide variety of courses via memberships using integrations such as MemberPress and PaidMembershipsPro!
But the options don’t stop there! I highly recommend taking advantage of LearnDash’s course bundles to incentivize your customers! In addition to providing discounts via coupons, you can give your customers access to multiple courses for a “bundled” or discounted total.
Another handy feature is course licenses. If you have courses that are tailored for corporate training, then you can sell course licenses in bulk, enabling the company to not only share the courses with their trainees, but also track trainee progress.
LearnDash Review of Course Reporting and Sales Analytics
As mentioned early on in this review, I highly recommend buying either the Plus or Pro plan because they include ProPanel, an enhanced reporting tool that gives you information about student progress and quiz results. You can also view real-time activity to see what content is generating the most traffic.
But what does this have to do with monetizing your courses?
Well, by analyzing user data, you can diagnose potential downfalls with your courses. You can ask yourself why your users are spending more time on specific content within a course and/or across courses.
You can also analyze the quiz results to assess your content and determine if anything is impeding clarity. ProPanel is a great course reporting tool from a course admin perspective.
But what about your sales analytics?
Before someone makes a purchase, wouldn’t it be nice to have detailed reporting on how prospective buyers are engaging with your website? This information will help you strategize your course offerings, storefront, and buyer incentives to help you bolster sales.
Fortunately, because the LearnDash LMS is a WordPress plugin, you get access to one of the most thorough and comprehensive reporting plugins available – Google Analytics.
Google Analytics helps you answer questions surrounding:
Visitor volume. How many people are visiting my site (daily, monthly, annually)? When are they visiting? This information can help you tailor your marketing and communication strategy.
Pages visited. What pages did they visit? How many pages did they visit? What is my bounce rate? What pages did they bounce from? How much time are they spending on specific pages?
Email tracking. In addition to email tracking integrations such as Mailchimp and ConvertKit, Google Analytics provides information about how your email marketing campaign is going. It helps you answer questions such as: How many emails were opened/unopened? What email links did they click on? Am I being reported for spam?
Given the number of integrations at your disposal, and the fact that LearnDash seamlessly integrates with WordPress, you have a host of options available to analyze your prospective and current buyers, and enhance your storefront and course offerings accordingly.
LearnDash Review of Technical Features
The e-learning industry is one of the most burgeoning industries to date. To that effect, it can be challenging to not only keep pace with technological advancements, but find software that accommodates all these updates.
Fortunately, LearnDash is a highly-robust WordPress LMS plugin that readily conforms to current and changing technological requirements. LearnDash is:
- Tin Can/xAPI-compliant (and SCORM is supported through an add-on)
- Multi-site enabled
- Compatible with all themes
- Compatible with all media types
- Mobile-friendly
Technical Standards
In the e-learning world, a technical standard is a way your e-learning authoring tool formats your course content so that it can be “read” by your chosen LMS system. Some LMSes don’t comply with all (or any) of these standards.
While you can easily create courses from scratch in LearnDash, you might also prefer to use an authoring tool like iSpring, Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, or IsEazy. These powerful platforms enable a wide range of multimedia, including dialogue simulations.
Some LMS systems and other lms plugins don’t support these formats, which limits your range of creativity. However, LearnDash fully supports content from these tools. You can begin authoring any e-learning content without feeling limited to certain tools.
Moreover, LearnDash LMS is multisite enabled, meaning that if you run multiple websites from one WP dashboard, you’ll be able to share your LearnDash material across the network of sites tied to your account.
Believe it or not, these advanced features have many use cases, such as setting up location-specific learning portals, dividing your training environments based on the department employees belong to, and even selling branded training portals to other companies.
LearnDash was clearly designed with ultimate adaptability and versatility in mind. As mentioned, it is compatible with all media types so that your course can be as engaging as possible while avoiding technical limitations.
And since WordPress has one of the largest theme repositories, with over 50,000 themes offered for free or a small fee, you can make your storefront as unique as possible, using code to further customize your brand identity.
Depending on the audience your course is catering to, you might also like a mobile-friendly LMS that supports iOS, Android, iPads, and tablets. In this digital age, it’s common for many people to take their courses while on-the-go. Having an LMS system like LearnDash that is mobile-friendly is a valuable feature.
If you know the majority of your users will be taking your courses on mobile devices, then I’d highly recommend creating microlearning courses that will enable them to digest information in bite-sized, 5 to 15-minute chunks.
LearnDash Review: Questions about LearnDash?
How is LearnDash Support?
LearnDash offers extensive self help resources, a Facebook community, and the ability to submit support tickets between 7AM and 4PM Eastern time, Monday through Friday.
Does LearnDash offer video tutorials or professional training to get me up and running?
Yes. One of the things you will be greeted with when you first click into LearnDash in WordPress is the LearnDash Bootcamp - a collection of videos covering everything you need to know to get up and running with LearnDash.
How would you rate the LearnDash course builder? Is it that much better than other online course builder plugins?
The course builder within LearnDash would be very solid even if LearnDash were a completely standalone course platform. The fact that it provides a first-rate builder inside of WordPress is flat out amazing.
Are there other WordPress LMS plugins worth checking out?
Sure. We think LearnDash is the best choice, but you should also have a look at LifterLMS, which is very solid. Most of the other LMS plugins we don't rate very high, but if you want a hosted, WordPress-based platform built for online courses, you should also check out Coursecats and AccessAlly.
Can you build unlimited courses with LearnDash?
Yes, LearnDash lets you build an unlimited number of courses.
Does LearnDash work with a WordPress membership plugin?
In addition to having its own membership capabilities, LearnDash has pre-built integrations with MemberPress, PaidMembershipsPro, and Memberium.
Are there other WordPress plugins you think work really well with LearnDash?
One word: BuddyBoss. Combine LearnDash with BuddyBoss and you will have powerful online course and online community features. Hard to beat.
How does LearnDash pricing compare to other options?
LearnDash pricing falls inline with what most other plugins are offering as it relates to an LMS for WordPress. LearnDash pricing plans include a lot of features for what you pay.
Does LearnDash pricing run monthly or annually?
LearnDash pricing runs annually. The license will automatically renew after one calendar year but they allow you to cancel at any time. An active license key is needed in order to continue to receive new feature updates, security patches, and support.
LearnDash Review: Final Thoughts
As you can see, LearnDash is decked out with a wide degree of features and functionality – the only limitation being that you need a WordPress site to power it. But by transforming your WP dashboard into an LMS, you eliminate the learning curve associated with navigating a new platform.
Moreover, because WordPress is also an authoring tool, you can create courses from scratch using LearnDash’s course builder, or simply upload pre-existing content with full assurance that LearnDash is compatible with all content, media types, and technical standards!
Because it integrates with a vast degree of add-ons and integrations, and because WordPress is highly-programmable, you have ultimate flexibility with the look and feel of your courses, as well as your storefront.
And with ProPanel and Google Analytics reporting, LearnDash not only helps you sell courses – it helps you sell more courses!
I highly recommend LearnDash LMS if you’re looking for a visually-appealing LMS that’s easy to get started with, doesn’t have a deep learning curve, and is optimized for an engaging and distraction-free learning environment.
If you’re thinking about launching online courses, then you have 30 days to try LearnDash out, risk-free!
See also:
LearnDash New Features & Platform Updates
Key updates since initial publication of this LearnDash review:
- Summer 2021 – LearnDash introduces the LearnDash Achievements gamification add-on.
- Spring 2021 – LearnDash introduces the LearnDash Certificate Builder.
- Fall 2020 – LearnDash announces integration with ThriveCart.
- Summer 2020 – LearnDash announced a collaboration with the very powerful Web site authoring tool Elementor. LearnDash design elements that were previously difficult or impossible to customize can now be easily edited to match your brand with Elementor, including color scheme and font choices.
- Summer 2020 – LearnDash introduced the ability to sell access to memberships. While it has always been able to protect content in the platform, the Groups functionality has now evolved to to include membership capabilities. You can create levels, sub-levels, sell access, award group certificates, and more.
ABOUT YOUR HOST
Learning Revolution founder Jeff Cobb is an expert in online education and the business of adult lifelong learning. Over the past 20+ years he has built a thriving career based on that expertise – as an entrepreneur, a consultant, an author, and a speaker. Learning Revolution is a place where Jeff curates tips, insights, and resources to help you build a thriving expertise-based business. Learn more about Jeff Cobb here.
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