2026 WordPress LMS Comparison
LearnDash vs Tutor LMS vs Learnomy
Three plugins get recommended for every WordPress course site: LearnDash, Tutor LMS, and increasingly, Learnomy. Two of them now cost almost the same. Only one is still free to run at full scale.
That fact alone should reorder how you think about this decision.
This isn’t a tour of every checkbox each plugin has. It’s the handful of differences that actually change which one you should install, checked against current pricing pages rather than numbers that were accurate last year.
The One-Line Verdict
LearnDash if you already have years of LearnDash-specific integrations and switching costs more than staying. Tutor LMS if AI-assisted course generation is worth paying LearnDash prices for. Learnomy for almost everyone else, because it does the same core job for free and adds a reason for students to come back after the course ends.
| LearnDash | Tutor LMS | Learnomy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $199/year | Free tier is thin; Pro from $199/year | Free, full LMS, no cap |
| Best for | Established catalogs already using LearnDash add-ons | Teams that want AI course generation and a modern builder | Course businesses that need a community and a revenue model, not just a content library |
What Each One Actually Is
LearnDash
LearnDash has been the default WordPress LMS since 2013, and the ecosystem built around it is the real product now, not just the plugin. Course, lesson, topic, quiz - a hierarchy every WordPress developer who’s touched an LMS already knows. If you need a specific integration, someone has probably already built a LearnDash add-on for it, including its own Achievements add-on for points, badges, and a leaderboard shortcode.
The cost of that maturity is cost. ProPanel reporting is separate. Group management for cohort-based training is separate. Achievements is separate. A realistic professional setup runs $200 to $500 a year past the base license before you’ve touched a mobile app.
Tutor LMS
Tutor LMS built its reputation on being the modern, visual alternative - frontend course builder, drag-and-drop lesson structure, an interface that doesn’t feel like it was designed for WordPress 4.0. In 2026 it added AI Studio, which drafts course outlines and lesson content from a prompt.
Here’s what changed and what most comparisons haven’t caught up to yet: Tutor LMS Pro now costs $199/year for one site, $399 for ten, $799 unlimited - the exact same numbers as LearnDash. The free version still exists, but it’s thin: no certificates, limited monetization. “Tutor is the cheap one” stopped being true this year.
Learnomy
Learnomy is newer, and it’s built around a different question than the other two: what happens to a student after they finish a course?
The core LMS is free with no course cap and no student cap - Stripe and PayPal checkout, membership plans, coupons, revenue sharing for instructors, all included. Course and progress data live in custom database tables rather than post meta, so it holds up under load the way LearnDash does rather than the way lighter plugins slow down past a few thousand students. Certificates carry an Ed25519 cryptographic signature and a QR code, so a scan actually confirms one is real instead of trusting a PDF someone could edit. A native mobile app is in development on top of the current PWA, which already supports offline progress sync.
Paid tiers start at $149/year and scale to $399/year for agency use - the same price as LearnDash and Tutor’s cheapest single-site plan buys Learnomy’s top unlimited-site tier.
Pricing, Without the Marketing Math
Lay the three side by side and the numbers do most of the arguing.
| Plan level | LearnDash | Tutor LMS | Learnomy |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 site | $199/year | $199/year | Free |
| Mid tier | $399/year (10 sites) | $399/year (10 sites) | $249/year (Professional) |
| Unlimited | $799/year | $799/year | $399/year (Agency) |
| Free tier | None | Core only, no certificates, limited monetization | Full LMS: courses, quizzes, certificates, checkout, memberships |
LearnDash and Tutor Pro are, tier for tier, the same plugin priced the same way now. Learnomy’s most expensive tier costs half of what either competitor charges for a single site.
Quizzes and Assessment: Where They Actually Differ
LearnDash still has the deepest quiz engine of the three: eight question types, question pools for randomized assessments, and reporting built for compliance training where an auditor might ask to see it. If certification is the entire business, this is the one real technical reason to pay LearnDash prices over the alternatives.
Tutor LMS’s quiz builder is modern and pleasant to use, but it doesn’t out-feature LearnDash. It’s roughly on par, wrapped in a nicer interface.
Learnomy ships six question types free, eight on the paid tier, with essay grading, practice/graded/survey modes, and partial credit. Timed multi-page quizzes and question pools are a paid-tier feature. For most course creators, the ones not running compliance programs, this covers everything they’ll use.
The Certificate Question
Ask a straightforward question: if a student’s employer wants to verify a certificate is real, what happens?
With LearnDash and Tutor, a certificate is a styled PDF. Attractive, customizable, and no different from a document anyone could recreate in Canva.
Learnomy signs each certificate cryptographically and attaches a QR code that verifies it on scan. Paid tiers add Open Badges 3.0 and Credly export, so a certificate can live in the credential systems employers already check. LinkedIn sharing is one click either way; the difference is what happens after someone clicks verify.
What Happens After the Course Ends
LearnDash answers part of this with its Achievements add-on: points, badges, a leaderboard shortcode, triggers for things like course completion and daily logins. It’s real, and it’s sold separately from the base license. It also stops there. No forum. No shared space for students to show finished work. No events, no path from finished the course to found a job using it. Tutor doesn’t have even that much built in.
Learnomy’s answer is broader: a course site worth returning to, not just a checkout page with lessons attached. Turn the pieces on and a student earns points and badges as they progress, sees themselves on a leaderboard, posts questions in a discussion space between lessons, shares finished work in a media gallery, RSVPs to a live session posted as an event, and, for course businesses built around getting people hired, finds job postings related to what they just learned.
None of that requires a second plugin, a second login, or a weekend spent making two products’ CSS agree with each other. It’s on or off inside the same install, and the gamification layer alone isn’t sold as a separate add-on.
A woodworking instructor I know runs forty students through cohort-based courses. She didn’t set out to build a community. She turned on the forum so students would stop emailing her the same three questions, added a leaderboard because finishing a module should feel like something, and let students post photos of finished pieces. Her forum now gets more daily traffic than her course pages. That wasn’t the plan. It’s what happened once the option existed to try.
Frontend Experience and Course Builder
The course builder is where a creator spends the most hours, so the difference between “fine” and “actually pleasant” compounds over months of use.
LearnDash’s builder lives entirely in wp-admin. Courses, lessons, topics, and quizzes are custom post types, which means the interface is fundamentally the WordPress editor with LearnDash’s metaboxes bolted on. Functional, familiar to anyone who has used WordPress for years, and slower to navigate for a multi-module course than either newer competitor.
Tutor LMS moved course creation to a dedicated frontend builder years ago, and it shows: drag lessons between sections, preview as you build, no round trips through wp-admin. AI Studio extends that further by drafting a course outline from a one-line prompt, which is a genuine time-saver for a first draft even if the output still needs an editor’s pass.
Learnomy’s builder is frontend-first on the growth tier and admin-based on the free tier, which is a fair trade for a $0 price. The structure underneath, courses stored in dedicated database tables rather than post meta, is what lets progress tracking and reporting stay fast as a catalog grows past a few hundred courses, something post-meta-based systems start to feel at scale.
Mobile and Offline Access
A student who commutes, or teaches in a facility with unreliable WiFi, cares about this section more than any other.
LearnDash’s mobile app is a real native app, sold and configured separately, with setup costs that start around $499 plus ongoing fees. It works, and for a training program that needs offline compliance tracking on factory floors or in the field, it is the most mature option of the three.
Tutor LMS has no dedicated mobile app. Students use the responsive web interface, which is well-built but requires a live connection for anything beyond viewing already-loaded pages.
Learnomy runs as a progressive web app today: add it to a phone’s home screen, and lesson progress keeps syncing once the connection drops and comes back. A dedicated native app is in development. For most course businesses this covers the actual need (learn on the train, sync later) without the five-figure setup cost LearnDash’s app carries.
Support, Documentation, and How Long Each One Has Existed
Age cuts both ways. LearnDash launched in 2013, and thirteen years of documentation, forum threads, Stack Exchange answers, and freelancer familiarity means almost any problem has already been solved by someone, somewhere, in public. That is a real asset when something breaks at 11pm.
Tutor LMS is newer but not new. Themeum has run it long enough to build a full documentation site and a support team that responds inside a business day on paid tiers.
Learnomy is the youngest, which is the honest tradeoff for everything above: lower price, broader feature bundling, and a smaller public knowledge base to search when something goes wrong. Direct support exists and responds, but there is no decade of forum threads to fall back on yet.
The Bottom Line
None of these three plugins is objectively “best.” They are three different bets on what a course business needs most: LearnDash bets on depth and a mature ecosystem, Tutor LMS bets on modern tooling and AI-assisted creation, and Learnomy bets on bundling a community around the courses instead of selling that separately. Match the bet to what your course business actually needs in the next twelve months, not what a comparison table makes look impressive today.
Data Ownership and Exporting What You Build
Every course business eventually asks: if I stop paying for this plugin, do I keep my data? The answer differs more than the marketing pages suggest.
All three store course content in the WordPress database, so nothing is locked behind an external SaaS account, a real advantage self-hosted WordPress has over hosted course platforms generally. Where they differ is what happens to a student’s progress, quiz attempts, and certificate history if the plugin is deactivated. LearnDash and Tutor LMS both store the bulk of this in WordPress post meta tables, which stay in the database but become inert, unreadable structured data, without the plugin active to interpret them.
Learnomy’s data lives in dedicated custom tables rather than post meta, which cuts both ways: querying and reporting on that data is faster while the plugin is active, but the tables are also plugin-specific structures rather than generic WordPress data, so a full export matters more if a switch is ever on the table. Built-in GDPR export and erasure tools cover the actual compliance requirement (a student’s right to a copy of their data, or to have it deleted) regardless of which of the three is running.
None of this should be the deciding factor on its own. It matters most for course businesses selling into the EU, or anyone who has already been burned once by a platform that made leaving harder than joining.
Multi-Instructor Marketplaces
A different question from everything above: which of the three works best if the site isn’t one instructor’s courses, but a marketplace of several?
Tutor LMS has the most built-out marketplace tooling out of the box: an application flow, a per-instructor earnings dashboard, commission handling. LearnDash can do it through its Groups add-on plus additional configuration, but it isn’t the plugin’s primary use case and it shows in the setup effort required. Learnomy includes revenue sharing and commission tracking on the free tier along with an instructor application flow, and the community layer, forums, leaderboards, a shared space instructors and students both use, adds something neither of the other two offers a marketplace out of the box: a reason for instructors’ audiences to overlap instead of staying siloed to whichever course they bought first.
Moving Between These Three
Nobody picks an LMS forever. Here’s what actually happens when a course business outgrows one of these three, or realizes partway through setup that a different one fits better.
LearnDash to Learnomy. Course structure, lessons, and quiz content transfer through Learnomy’s import tool in a few hours for a typical catalog. What doesn’t transfer automatically: LearnDash-specific certificate templates and any ProPanel historical reporting. Certificates get rebuilt natively during migration, which ends up being a net improvement since the new ones carry cryptographic verification the old ones never had.
Tutor LMS to Learnomy. This is the smoothest of the three migration paths, since both plugins store lesson content in a modern block-based format rather than legacy shortcodes. Course structure and lesson content move cleanly. Anything built around Tutor’s AI Studio drafts needs a human editing pass either way, migration or not, so that isn’t really a migration cost specific to switching.
Learnomy to either of the other two. Less common in practice, since the free tier removes the financial pressure that usually drives a switch, but course and quiz content export in standard formats that both LearnDash’s and Tutor’s import tools can read. What’s lost in that direction is the certificate verification layer and the community features, since neither destination plugin has an equivalent to rebuild into.
Whichever direction, test the migration on a staging copy first. Student progress records and payment history are not the kind of data worth risking on a live site during a first attempt.
Who Should Actually Pick What
Stick with LearnDash if you’ve already sunk years into LearnDash-specific add-ons and integrations. The switching cost isn’t worth it for most established sites. Budget honestly for the $799 unlimited tier once you’re running more than a couple of properties, and treat that as the real price, not the $199 headline.
Pick Tutor LMS if AI Studio’s course-generation tooling is worth paying LearnDash-level pricing for. That’s the actual 2026 pitch, not price, which no longer differentiates it from LearnDash at all.
Start with Learnomy if you’re building anything else, especially a course business where retention matters as much as the first sale. Free means free here, with no course cap forcing an early upgrade decision. Try it at learnomy.app and pay only once growth actually requires the paid tier, not before.
FAQ
Is Learnomy’s free version a trial, or the real thing?
The real thing. No course cap, no student cap, no expiration date on any feature listed as free. Courses, quizzes, certificates, Stripe and PayPal checkout, and membership plans are all included at $0. The paid tier adds growth features, learning paths, cohort management, automatic instructor payouts, once a business actually needs them.
Why did Tutor LMS get as expensive as LearnDash?
Themeum repositioned Tutor around AI Studio and pro theme bundling in 2026, and the pricing moved to match: Individual, Business, and Agency tiers now land at $199, $399, and $799 a year, identical to LearnDash’s structure. Older reviews still quoting $149/year lifetime pricing are describing a plan that no longer exists.
Does LearnDash’s Achievements add-on cover the same ground as Learnomy’s community features?
Only the points-and-badges part. Achievements is gamification alone, sold as a separate add-on, with no forum, media sharing, events, or job board attached. Learnomy bundles all of that into the base plugin.
Can I move from LearnDash to Learnomy without losing my course content?
Course structure, lessons, and quiz content transfer through Learnomy’s import tool. LearnDash-specific certificate templates and ProPanel reports don’t carry over directly; you rebuild certificates natively, which is a net upgrade since verification is built in rather than bolted on.
Does Learnomy actually have community features, or is that marketing language for a course library with extra steps?
Points, badges, and leaderboards; a discussion forum; a shared media gallery; event pages with RSVPs; and a job board all run inside the same plugin as the course builder, not a separate add-on stack with its own settings screen. See the full feature list at learnomy.app.
How does Learnomy’s certificate signing actually work?
Each certificate gets an Ed25519 cryptographic signature at the moment it’s issued, plus a QR code linking to a public verification page. Scan the code and the verification page confirms the certificate ID, recipient, and issue date match what was actually signed, so a certificate can’t be edited in an image tool and passed off as real. Neither LearnDash nor Tutor LMS have an equivalent verification layer; both output a styled, downloadable PDF with no way to confirm authenticity after the fact.
Is there a real cost difference once you factor in add-ons, not just the base license?
Yes, and it’s larger than the headline prices suggest. A realistic LearnDash setup with ProPanel reporting and group management for cohorts runs $200 to $500 a year past the base $199 to $799 license. Tutor LMS’s 2026 pricing already bundles most of what used to be extras into the Pro tiers, so there’s less hidden cost there than with LearnDash, but it starts from the same $199 floor. Learnomy’s paid tiers ($149 to $399/year) include everything on the growth side, learning paths, cohorts, automatic payouts, with nothing sold as a further add-on.