Are you looking for a learning management system (LMS) plugin for your WordPress site? LMS plugins help you create, manage, and sell online courses with ease. In this article, we’ve compared the best WordPress LMS plugins available on the market.
What is LMS?
LMS stands for learning management system. LMS is a software program that helps you create, manage, and deliver eLearning courses, also known as online courses. A WordPress LMS will help you easily handle the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, and delivery of your online courses right within your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress LMS is a win-win for you and your online learners. You can log in to your LMS to distribute information, update the content of your online course, and manage all aspects of it. And your online learners can log in to the LMS to participate in your online courses.
WordPress LMS vs. Membership Plugin
If you’re looking to offer online courses on your site, then you’ll need to install an LMS plugin.
Now, you might be wondering, why do you need an LMS plugin when you can create and sell online courses using a WordPress membership plugin?
A WordPress LMS platform does more than just a typical membership site. With a WordPress LMS plugin, you can create an immersive learning experience for your students through various gamification methods rather than just persuading them to take up a membership and start learning.
Gamification makes learning fun and easy. Plus, it entices students to take new lessons and, ultimately, increases engagement. It also increases the likelihood of retaining students on the platform longer.
A few basic features of a WordPress LMS plugin are:
- Instant feedback: A good platform provides instant feedback so learners can identify what they know.
- Grading system: One of the best ways to make learning fun is by implementing a grading system that shows your students’ progress.
- Certification: As a reward, you can also offer certification to those who have successfully completed their courses.
- And a lot more…
Now that you know the importance of using a WordPress LMS plugin on your online course website, let’s compare some of the best WordPress LMS plugins.
1. LearnDash
LearnDash is the best WordPress LMS plugin in existence. LearnDash makes it super easy to create and sell courses, deliver quizzes, award certificates, and more.
It enables you to offer a robust learning experience to your members and supports the latest gamification, social learning, and micro-content trends.
Some of the ways you can sell your online courses from LearnDash are:
- Memberships: Sell traditional membership access to your entire online courses.
- One-time price: Allow users to make individual online course purchase.
- Subscription: Maximize revenue through recurring payments and subscriptions for your online course.
- Course licenses: Allow organizers to purchase the license in bulk and grant access to their staff members.
With LearnDash, you can let your students unlock new courses based on the points they earn as they complete courses. This increases user engagement in your online courses. You can also offer front-end user profiles where members can track their learning progress.
The pricing starts at $199 per year for a single site license.
Get started with LearnDash today.
2. Teachable
Teachable is a standalone online course creator tool that allows you to build beautiful online courses with ease. You can either integrate your online courses into your existing site or host them on a teachable subdomain.
Teachable comes with powerful tools such as quiz and discussion forums to help you create an immersive learning experience for your students. The pricing starts at $39 per month, which includes all the basic features such as custom domain support, drip course integration, coupon code support, integrated email and affiliate marketing, etc. In addition, you’ll have to pay a 5% transaction fees for every sale of paid courses.
To waive off the transaction fees, you’ll need to sign up for Professional or Business plan, which costs $99 or $499 per month respectively.
3. LifterLMS
LifterLMS is another powerful LMS plugin for WordPress that makes it easy to create and sell online courses on your site.
You can easily expand its core functionalities by integrating it with powerful extensions, including Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, MailChimp and more.
Similar to LearnDash, LifterLMS also has a keen focus on engagement by providing powerful features like achievement badges, certificates, social learning, 1:1 private coaching, and more.
You can monetize your LMS platforms using different methods:
- Membership: Sell site-wide membership that provides access to every course.
- Bundle: Sell course bundles to boost your revenue.
- Members-only pricing: Allow users to make individual course purchase. You can also set members-only pricing to make paid memberships so valuable.
Addons can be purchased individually for $99 each, or save big with a bundle set for $299.
Get started with LifterLMS today.
4. LearnPress
LearnPress is a free LMS plugin for WordPress that comes with all the important features you’ll ever need. Unlike most other LMS plugins in this list, LearnPress comes with a setup wizard that makes onboarding easy for all levels of users.
With its beautiful interface, you’ll find it easy to create courses, and export or import courses from different websites that also use LearnPress. The core plugin is intended to be lightweight, but you can expand it with powerful extensions. It supports content drip, quizzes, grading, and a lot more.
This plugin allows you to seamlessly integrate with bbPress forums, BuddyPress social networks, and add powerful storefront features using, WooCommerce.
A bunch of free addons are also available with LearnPress:
- Wishlist: Students can add courses to a wishlist.
- Course review: Add social proof by publishing user-generated reviews for your courses on your site.
- Prerequisite courses: Require users to pass certain courses to enroll other courses.
Get started with LearnPress today.
Want the full addons bundle? Click here to get the complete LearnPress addons bundle.
5. WP Courseware
WP Courseware is an easy to use solution for creating and selling online courses on your WordPress site. It comes with a drag and drop builder that makes course creation hassle-free. Once your course units are created, you just need to drag and drop them per your needs, and your course is built.
With its powerful quiz feature, you can create advanced quiz types, set timers, and set retake limits.
WP Courseware is also bundled with advanced automation tools that send personalized emails triggered by student activities. To help improve your students’ proficiency, you can set up custom feedback messages that can be configured to be sent based on students’ scores.
Like any other WordPress LMS, WP Courseware is also shipped with course content drip system that enables you to schedule the release of your content at specific intervals from enrollment.
Get started with WP Courseware today.
6. Sensei
Sensei is a powerful premium plugin that transforms your WordPress website into an advanced learning platform. Sensei is built by the same team behind WooCommerce, the leading WordPress-based eCommerce plugin.
Sensei is not a full-featured membership plugin. It handles the creation and publishing of online courses, but in order to sell access, you will need to use it in conjunction with membership or eCommerce plugins.
Creating courses with Sensei is easy and straightforward. Sensei provides simple reporting facilities that give you an overview of your content, grades, and students registered with the site.
Sensei is not as feature-rich compared to other LMS plugins for WordPress. Plus, only limited extensions are available to enhance core functionalities.
Get started with Sensei today.
7. Namaste! LMS
Namaste! LMS is a free learning management plugin for WordPress. It allows you to create different rules for accessing courses after completing the prerequisite courses.
A few benefits of using Namaste! LMS are:
- Certificates: Students can earn certificates after completing a course
- Grade system: Analyze students’ performance using the grade system.
- Badges: Award badges that can be showcased on any website.
- Progress bar: The premium version of the plugin lets you enable a progress bar that shows students how they do in each course.
Compared to other WordPress LMS solutions for WordPress, the addons and features for Namaste! are limited.
Get started with Namaste! LMS today.
8. MasterStudy LMS
MasterStudy LMS is one of the newer LMS plugins on this list, created by StylemixThemes. With MasterStudy LMS you can easily create, customize, and manage amazing online lessons.
Some of the key features MasterStudy LMS offers are:
- Variety of Lesson Types: 3 types of lessons (text, video, slideshow).
- Countdown: Real-time countdown timer in quiz.
- Quiz Results: Quiz results that display correct/incorrect answers.
- Messaging: Messaging and announcement system.
- Certificates: Certificate generation.
- Course Wish List: Users can add courses they want to take to their wish list.
Although MasterStudy LMS is packed with features, they’re lacking in gamification features that make learning more fun for your students.
The MasterStudy LMS plugin is free and can be used with any WordPress theme. MasterStudy LMS also offers MasterStudy Pro, which is a MasterStudy premium WordPress theme that takes the plugin to the next level. It offers additional premium plugins, 24/7 support, extra features, and ready-to-use demos for $69.
Get started with MasterStudy LMS today.
9. Good LMS
Good LMS is a premium LMS plugin on the CodeCanyon marketplace. Creating online courses is easy with Good LMS because it’s much like creating a WordPress blog post, allowing you to build quizzes, courses, and certificates right from the WordPress dashboard.
Some features include process lines, coupon codes, real-time countdowns, student backend where learners can see their scores and progress, course badges, retakable quizzes, and more.
Good LMS costs $32 for a regular license which gives you future updates and 6 months of support from GoodLayers. If you want to extend your support for 1 year, you’ll need to pay an extra $10.13.
Get started with Good LMS today.
Which is the Best WordPress LMS Plugin?
After comparing all the different WordPress LMS plugins, we believe that LearnDash is the best WordPress LMS plugin for most users because it offers the most comprehensive LMS features. It comes with tons of useful extensions that enhance the core functionalities of your WordPress site.
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress LMS plugins for your needs.
Want to create a membership site? Take a look at the best WordPress membership plugins.
Great one, isitwp. Can you do one with newer plugins such as Accessally, WPEP and Tutor LMS?
Thanks!
LearnDash is slowing my site down. Any research into which is lightweight and won’t affect page speed across the site?
LearnDash is not likely slowing it down that much unless there is a conflict or you are using SCORM or xAPI files to query data. I suggest having someone at Codable look at it. Also, make sure you have the most recent version of major updates.
I am using Learnpress, which is free and that is great, but the lack of support and community help is really an issue… I am trying to customize a template since we don’t have budget for this since the idea is to offer open courses at no cost.
Not one of the wordpress LMS packages indicates if there is archiving of historical data, as in a customer can repurchase the same course in the future with the old course/exam/results/certificate now a past record. Repeat customers in the massage therapy continuing education industry take their CE courses to renew their massage license. In subsequent renewal periods, they tend to purchase the same exact course.
Yet, I cannot get an answer as to which one of the highly touted learning management systems allows for archiving or what that plug-in would be called should it exist.
Can anyone help me out. Much appreciated.