Written by Firstly, know what LMS is. LMS stands for the 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.
LMS is a perfect WordPress plugin to create and run online courses. LMS Plugins include various features for managing your online course content, handling subscriptions, accepting payments, running, and grading quizzes, etc. LMS helps vendors to learn more about business culture and understand the business procedure. The LMS plugin will help you easily handle the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, and delivery of your online courses.
Because LMS plugins have deep functionality and I don’t want to make this post a book, here’s how I’m going to set up this comparison. For each plugin I’ll:
- Give you a broad overview of its features
- Show you how you’ll actually build and structure your courses
- Share the different monetization options available, assuming you’d like to make some money from the courses you create
- Discuss the price for you to get up and running
Then, in the end, I’ll share my picks for the best WordPress LMS plugin for your specific needs. With LMS plugins vendors can easily log in to their LMS and update the content of online courses. Learners can easily log in to LMS for practice and manage all aspects of it. Read about some of the best WordPress LMS plugins so that you can use the best plugin according to your need:-
Some Of The Best WordPress LMS Plugins
1. LearnDash
LearnDash is one of the most popular LMS plugins used for online courses as it comes with the best value and multiple features. It is the easiest LMS plugin. LearnDash plugins help to create and sell online courses with simple drag-and-drop features. It allows vendors to create multi-layer courses with different categories. LearnDash plugins are used more frequently as compared to others. Vendors can sell courses, topics, certificates, and many more.
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 purchases.
- 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.
You can deliver all your lessons at once or schedule them for the entire course duration with its Drip-Feed content feature.
Using LearnDash, you can give your users assignments and then approve or comment on them. It also comes with quiz and test management tools with multiple question types. You can easily set prerequisites for students, such as finishing a lesson first before going to the next lesson.
It offers plenty of monetization options including subscriptions, one-time purchases, memberships, and a shopping cart for your online training course. You can accept payments using multiple payment gateways including PayPal, Stripe, and 2Checkout.
The Key Features in This WordPress LMS Plugin
- Offers tools for drip-feeding your content based on a schedule. You can also add lesson timers to ensure that everyone spends a certain amount of time on each lesson.
- There’s no need to integrate with a forum plugin since dynamic forums are already built into LearnDash.
- LearnDash shows a guidebook to your students along with course points whenever a user completes a certain part of the course. This pairs nicely with the certificates and badges.
- Market your courses with several monetization tools like a shopping cart, memberships, subscriptions, course bundles, and course licenses.
- LearnDash has automated email notifications and detailed reporting.
- Allows for user profiles and group management–this is perfect for any group work you would like to assign.
- LearnDash has support for most media types like videos, audio, images, Adobe Captivate files, and Google Docs.
- It’s also multi-site enabled, just in case you’d like to run LearnDash on a network.
- Let users create their own courses on your WordPress site using the premium Front-End Course Creation add-on.
Price: Starting from $159 for a single site license with 1 year of support and updates.
Grade: A+
Get started with LearnDash plugins today. This will increase user engagement in your online courses.
2. LearnPress
LearnPress is the simplest plugin and is completely free to use. Vendors can create their own setup in this Plugin. LearnPress includes a template of landing pages for linking from ads and talking about course descriptions. Course creation is done with the help of lessons, quizzes, and questions. LearnPress is the best option for creating online courses for free.
It has both free and paid add-ons available, which allow you to extend the features. It supports scheduled content (content drip), quizzes, assignments, grading, etc. It also supports integration with bbPress, WooCommerce, and WordPress membership plugins.
The Key Features in This WordPress LMS Plugin
- LearnPress includes a landing page template for linking ads and talking about course descriptions, curriculum, and more.
- You can create a beautiful page that markets to people who might want to become instructors.
- LearnPress supports a large collection of payment gateways including 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and Stripe.
- LearnPress allows for multiple instructors, where two or three teachers manage one course.
- A badge and point system is available to gamify your courses.
- Content dripping is provided, along with random quizzes, paid memberships, and a WooCommerce add-on.
- Choose one-time or recurring payments.
- Offers a number of free and premium add-ons to take your site to the next level.
- Can be integrated with the popular WooCommerce plugins. This allows you to add advanced payment features and use a coupon system on your website. Use different payment gateways like PayPal, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and Stripe to accept payment from your customers.
Each LearnPress course can be created with quizzes and lessons as the students move through the curriculum. You might have to activate a few add-ons, depending on how advanced you need to make your online course website. For instance, there are add-ons for bbPress, BuddyPress, course reviews, wish lists, importing/exporting, and prerequisites to courses.
LearnPress works with any WordPress theme, but you can also choose from one of their own LMS WordPress themes. This helps you avoid any compatibility issues and offer a better experience for users. LearnPress supports payment gateways including Stripe, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and more. Content dripping is provided with paid memberships and a WooCommerce add-on.
Pricing: Free + Paid Addons and support
Grade: B+
3. LifterLMS
It is another powerful WordPress LMS plugin that helps to create and sell online courses on your site. It is an alternative to LearnDash. Vendors can easily buy add-ons individually in LifterLMS. The vendor pays for a bundle of items like sample courses, sample quizzes, and certificates in LifterLMS plugins.
It has content dripping, course prerequisites, and group membership to offer even greater control over how your courses work. To boost user engagement, it comes with powerful features like automated emails, gamification with badges, and even certificates upon completion of a course. It has built-in content restriction allowing you to restrict any WordPress page on your site to members only.
The Key Features in This WordPress LMS Plugin
- Lifter LMS provides a direct WooCommerce integration for selling your courses individually or as bundles.
- The drag-and-drop course-building tools and integrations are bound to attract beginners and those who want the easiest design experience possible.
- Customer support includes technical support, live office hours, and plenty of free training courses.
- The LifterLMS course builder offers options for all types of multimedia, a beautiful course builder, drip content, and quizzes.
- Moving platforms is a breeze since Lifter LMS provides a course import and export tool.
- Create discussion areas and social profiles for your students to interact with each other and their teachers.
- You get a wide variety of marketing and money-making tools like recurring payments, multiple gateways, unlimited pricing models, and coupons.
- Create multimedia quizzes for your students and set a maximum time limit to test their knowledge.
- Make assignments, set prerequisites, drip content, and offer downloadable material for offline learning.
- Assign multiple instructors to a single course with a multi-instructor platform.
- LifterLMS has a useful collection of add-ons, which you can use to manage affiliates, integrate with eCommerce plugins, connect to your email marketing service, etc.
There are multiple options to accept credit card payments, one-time or recurring payments, sell course bundles, offer coupons, etc. Among payment options, you can integrate it with PayPal, Stripe, or receive payments manually via check.
LifterLMS has drag-and-drop features that remove the need to mess with code, and as a result, you get more visual design. Lifter LMS is popular for its unique integrations with WooCommerce, AffiliateWP, and MailChimp.
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: Allows users to make individual course purchases. You can also set members-only pricing to make paid memberships so valuable.
Pricing: Individual add-ons for $99 each (single site), or Universal Plan for $299 for a single site.
Addons can be purchased individually for $99 each, or save big with a bundle set for $299.
Grade: A
4. Sensei
Sensei is a flexible and easy-to-use WordPress LMS plugin and follows the same best practices as WordPress and WooCommerce. Sensei is not a full-featured membership plugin as compared to other plugins.
To sell your courses and accept payments you will need to use WooCommerce. For each course you want to sell, you will have to create a product and then link it to your course.
There are not many third-party integrations available. You can integrate Sensei with a membership plugin, but there is no add-on for that.
Key Features in This WordPress LMS Plugin
- The extension merges well with WooCommerce and WordPress, and the user experience isn’t much different than making a WordPress page or post.
- The majority of WordPress themes on the market integrate fine with Sensei.
- The user registration is done through WordPress, so once again, those familiar with WordPress should find Sensei easy to learn.
- The WooCommerce integration allows you to instantly charge for a course, whether it be as a subscription or on an individual basis.
- The simple course analytics provide information on grading, course completion, and students registered.
- The quizzes aren’t anything special when it comes to design, but several templates are offered for things like true/false, single line, file upload, and multi-line tests.
- Sensei displays random quizzes based on a bank of questions you set prior to launch.
- Quiz grading can be set to automatic or manual.
The seamless WooCommerce integration is the bread and butter of Sensei, especially since it’s made to work with all WooCommerce themes. Overall, Sensei is built around the intuitiveness of WordPress, so the beginner user shouldn’t have any problems making a course like they would a regular WordPress post.
The Sensei LMS plugin integrates seamlessly with WordPress, helping its features to blend in with the rest of the core WordPress functionality. This makes it easy to pick up and get started with this plugin. As you might expect, Sensei also integrates with the WooCommerce plugin, giving you a powerful set of tools for selling access to your online courses.
Pricing: Starting from $129 for a single site license with 1 year of support and updates.
The pricing starts at $129 and goes up to $279 depending on how many sites you want to implement it on. This price is only good for one year, so it’s required to upgrade annually.
Grade: B
Course creation with Sensei is easy. To sell courses and accept payments vendors need to use WooCommerce in Sensei plugins. Creation and publishing of online courses are done in Sensei plugins, but in order to sell access, you will need to use it in conjunction with membership or eCommerce plugins.
Also Read: Essential WordPress Plugins To Use On Your Website
5. WP Courseware
WP Courseware has an impressive set of features as it is one of the best WordPress LMS plugins. It starts with the drag-and-drop editor. Vendors can protect their course from being stolen.
WP Courseware comes with a number of unique features to create large or small online courses. WP Courseware has a large number of element collections you can choose from. WooCommerce provides a large collection of integration like OptimizePress, BuddyPress, and Visual Composer.
Key Features in This WordPress LMS Plugin
The most affordable pricing package allows for two sites at $99 per year. So, if you plan on making two online course websites, WP Courseware becomes more affordable than options like LifterLMS and LearnDash.
- The member portal provides a wonderful advantage since you get to speak with active users who also make online courses for money.
- The visual designer works with drag-and-drop elements, and it offers essential tools like course protection, drip content, and email notifications.
- The grade books can be viewed and exported for managing how well your students are doing.
- Sell through WP Courseware by integrating with your favorite eCommerce plugin. You’re not only limited to WooCommerce or a single payment gateway.
- You can run a multi-instructor system where you assign roles for the teachers for creating and managing the courses they teach.
- The quizzes offer multiple question types and question tags. In addition, question banks are optional if you’d like to generate random quizzes throughout a course.
WP Courseware offers instructor profiles, student grade books, custom emails, and many other features that help create an engaging experience for users. It also comes with a question bank so that you can quickly create quizzes for different courses and modules.
The plugin also includes powerful monetization features to sell online classes on your website. It has a built-in shopping cart option where you can directly connect to PayPal or Stripe and start selling your courses.
Let’s take a look at some of the other features:
- Grade Books: View the progress of every student.
- Certificates: Award downloadable certificates to students for completing a course.
- Built-in Shopping Cart: Use PayPal or Stripe to sell your courses, either for a one-time fee or as a recurring subscription.
- Free Courses: Offer free courses to prospective customers and build your email list
You can also create free courses and provide users with a way to try out your classes. This could encourage them to buy a full course. You can sell paid courses as a one-time purchase or recurring subscriptions.
Pricing: Starting from $129 for 2 sites with 1 year of support and updates.
Grade: B
By choosing the right WordPress plugins from above you can enhance the core functionalities of your online course sites. According to our study, we believe that LearnDash is the best WordPress LMS plugin for most users because it offers the most comprehensive LMS features. That’s all we have for you! Hope you like this article and find the best WordPress LMS plugins for your needs.
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