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If you're on the hunt for the top LMS plugin for your WordPress site, look no further. With a Learning Management System (LMS) plugin, you can easily create and manage online courses akin to platforms like Udemy and LearnDesk. The ideal WordPress LMS plugin offers a comprehensive range of features, such as the ability to administer and evaluate quizzes, handle payments, and more.
This article compares the finest WordPress LMS plugins to assist you in selecting the perfect solution for your online learning website.
Starting a Learning Website (Training Site, Sell Courses, and More)
There are many website builders and online course platforms available for creating an online training website or marketplace, but we recommend WordPress for its maximum flexibility and freedom.
It's important to distinguish between the two types of WordPress: WordPress.com is a hosting service, while self-hosted WordPress, also known as WordPress.org, offers more features and flexibility. To launch a learning website, you'll need WordPress.org, as it enables you to install any WordPress LMS plugin. For a detailed comparison, refer to our guide on the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
To get started with WordPress.org, you'll need a domain name (priced at $14.99 per year) and WordPress hosting ($7.99 per month). If you want to receive payment for your online courses, you'll also need an SSL certificate to securely accept online payments (priced at $69.99 per year).
However, this can be quite expensive if you're just starting out with creating online courses. For those on a tight budget, we recommend Bluehost, one of the world's largest hosting companies, which offers our readers a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, and a 60% discount on web hosting. With Bluehost, you can start creating and selling online courses for just $2.75 per month.
If you're willing to invest in top-notch performance and budget isn't an issue, we recommend choosing a managed WordPress hosting provider like SiteGround or WP Engine.
After purchasing hosting, you'll need to install WordPress on your website. All three hosting providers offer a guided one-click install for WordPress, allowing you to have your training website up and running within minutes. For further assistance, refer to our guide on how to install WordPress.
Once you've installed WordPress, it's time to find the best LMS plugin for your website. These plugins enable you to create, manage, and monetize your online courses.
To help you choose the ideal plugin for your learning website, we've compared the best WordPress LMS plugins in this article.
1. MemberPress Courses
MemberPress is a highly capable WordPress membership plugin that also includes features for creating and managing online courses. With MemberPress, you can create certification programs, quizzes, and more.
One of the standout features of MemberPress is its Classroom Mode, which simplifies the design process of your online classroom. Classroom Mode offers a ready-to-use design, ensuring that your courses always look professional.
MemberPress also includes an intuitive navigation system that helps your students progress through their training without any confusion. With these features, you can be confident that your students will have a smooth and successful learning experience.
The MemberPress course builder is integrated with the WordPress block editor, allowing you to use familiar WordPress tools to create your course content. With this tool, you can easily add lessons, topics, categories, embed videos, images, and more, using the same tools you already know and use in WordPress. This streamlined process helps you create engaging and effective course content with ease.
For advanced users, the MemberPress course builder offers full support for custom CSS, giving you complete control over the design of your online courses. This feature enables you to create a unique and professional look for your training content.
In addition, MemberPress allows you to track your students' progress and monitor how close they are to completing their training, all from the convenience of the WordPress dashboard.
You can also use MemberPress to create free courses, or monetize your content by selling membership subscriptions. With these features, you have the flexibility to choose the business model that best suits your needs.
With MemberPress subscriptions, you have complete control over who can access each of your courses. You can create a single membership level that gives subscribers access to all your courses, similar to platforms like Skillshare, LinkedIn Learning, or Coursera.
Alternatively, you can create person membership levels for specific courses, allowing you to customize your offering to meet the needs of your students. This flexibility enables you to create a tailored learning experience that meets the unique requirements of each of your courses.
Many MemberPress users have found success by offering special bundles and packages to their customers. By creating a membership package that gives users access to all your beginner-level courses, for example, you can attract more members and even encourage existing members to upgrade to a more expensive package to unlock new perks.
Regardless of how you choose to monetize your courses, MemberPress makes it easy to collect payments through a variety of popular payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net.
In addition, MemberPress offers a powerful content dripping feature that enables you to gradually release restricted content to members over time. For example, you might release one new lesson each week, keeping members engaged with your content and encouraging them to renew their membership. This can help you build a loyal customer base that keeps coming back for more.
MemberPress is compatible with a variety of popular third-party tools that you might already be using to grow your audience, generate leads, and boost your sales. This includes leading email marketing services such as SendinBlue, Constant Contact, Drip, and more than 1000 others.
To enhance your sales and registrations, it's crucial to have a means of tracking what's working and what's not on your training website. Luckily, MemberPress seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics.
The cost of a MemberPress subscription starts at $179 for a single site license, which includes 1 year of support and automatic software updates. Additionally, the MemberPress Courses addon is included at no extra charge, allowing you to create an infinite number of courses and have an unlimited number of students.
Overall, MemberPress earns an A+ grade.
The review highlights that MemberPress is the leading membership site plugin available. The Courses addon offers the ability to design online training courses in a matter of minutes, without requiring any coding skills.
The MemberPress plugin also provides advanced membership rules that enable precise control over course accessibility. This makes it effortless to sell online courses, grant exclusive content access to members, and create captivating drip campaigns.
Moreover, MemberPress permits the tracking of student progress as they complete various lessons and classes. This provides insight into where students may require additional assistance.
For comprehensive guidance on how to get started with MemberPress, refer to the ultimate guide on creating a WordPress membership site. Overall, MemberPress is an exceptional tool for developing and managing online courses.
2. Thrive Apprentice
Thrive Apprentice is a potent WordPress online course builder plugin that also features membership capabilities. With over 55 pre-built course templates and an intuitive drag-and-drop course builder, creating well-organized modules, chapters, and lessons is effortless.
Thrive Apprentice offers versatile lesson creation options, including text, video, audio, or a blend of media formats to maintain student engagement. Furthermore, there's a resource section where you can quickly add supplemental learning information, such as PDFs and links.
The plugin also offers a flexible content dripping feature that enables consistent lesson release intervals for each student. For instance, after purchasing a new course, you can unlock a new lesson every Monday.
Thrive Apprentice is a comprehensive and intuitive LMS plugin with added membership features. It provides over 55 course templates that assist novices in getting started swiftly, and the drag and drop course builder makes it easy to personalize each aspect.
You can even apply diverse drip schedules, with different triggers, to the same course, removing the need to replicate courses every time there's a new batch of students. The Conditional Display feature helps enhance conversions by allowing you to show personalized content to different users, such as displaying a distinct course overview for visitors and students or altering what course content students can see based on their completed lessons.
Upon course completion, you can show a custom course completion page containing a downloadable certificate with a QR code to verify its authenticity. Additionally, the advanced reporting engine provides valuable insights into your students and courses, such as course enrollment, completion, and engagement metrics.
Thrive Apprentice also includes a full-featured member management dashboard to assist in managing a membership site. Here, you can effortlessly grant or revoke users' access to courses or membership products based on their membership type. Thrive Apprentice integrates seamlessly with popular WordPress plugins such as WooCommerce and MemberPress, email marketing services like Constant Contact and Sendinblue, and various other applications.
You can purchase Thrive Apprentice as a standalone plugin for $147 annually or the entire suite of Thrive Plugins, including Thrive Leads, Thrive Quiz Builder, and more, starting at $299 per year.
Overall, Thrive Apprentice is a remarkable plugin with a wealth of advanced features like Decoupled Drip and Conditional Display, course overview pages, detailed reporting, and a member management dashboard. It makes creating and managing a comprehensive online course business a breeze.
3. LearnDash
LearnDash is a well-known and user-friendly WordPress LMS plugin with numerous powerful features. Its simple drag and drop course builder allows you to create lessons, topics, quizzes, and categories with ease. You can deliver all your lessons at once or schedule them using the plugin's drip feed feature.
Using LearnDash, you can assign tasks to your students and then approve or provide feedback on their work. It also includes quiz and test management tools with multiple question types. You have full control over how students take their tests and quizzes, such as setting time limits, limiting attempts, and randomizing the questions, making it more challenging for students to cheat even when unsupervised.
You can easily set rules for students, such as completing a lesson before moving on to the next one. Additionally, LearnDash includes dynamic forums that allow you to create a forum for each course, enabling students to interact with each other. This creates a sense of community around your online training website, which encourages students to sign up for more courses.
LearnDash provides several options for monetizing your online training. If you intend to sell memberships, LearnDash collaborates with MemberPress. You can also sell your courses as one-time purchases, subscriptions, or via an online shopping cart powered by Easy Digital Downloads.
With the free Easy Digital Downloads for LearnDash addon, creating a new digital product, linking it to your LearnDash course, and selling courses with Easy Digital Downloads is easy. Overall, LearnDash is an excellent plugin with advanced features like quiz and test management tools, drip feed scheduling, dynamic forums, and flexible payment options, making it a popular choice for many online educators.
If you own an online store, you'll be pleased to know that LearnDash seamlessly integrates with numerous popular WordPress eCommerce plugins, including WooCommerce. Additionally, LearnDash offers support for various payment gateways, such as PayPal, Stripe, and 2Checkout, when it's time to gather your funds.
If you decide to use LearnDash, you might also be interested in exploring their starter WordPress LMS themes, which offer some free LMS themes.
Price-wise, a single-site LearnDash subscription costs $119.40 and comes with one year of support and updates. In our opinion, LearnDash is an A+ user-friendly and flexible LMS plugin for WordPress users, providing you with an array of features to manage your online courses.
LearnDash works flawlessly with many third-party plugins and tools, such as popular eCommerce plugins like Easy Digital Downloads, making it effortless to sell your online training courses.
Whether you're a school, training organization, entrepreneur, or someone looking to create and sell online courses with ease, LearnDash is the perfect LMS tool for you.
For an in-depth LearnDash review and step-by-step instructions on getting started, check out our tutorial on how to create an online course with WordPress using LearnDash.
Bonus tip: To access even more powerful features in LearnDash, give the Uncanny Toolkit Pro for LearnDash a try. This popular LearnDash add-on has over 20 potent modules, including automated branded transcripts, a course timer, and the capability to automatically mark lessons and topics as completed.
4. LifterLMS
LifterLMS is an all-in-one WordPress LMS plugin that provides users with powerful features for creating engaging online training. With its drag-and-drop course builder, you can easily create multimedia lessons with videos, audios, images, and more.
The plugin supports multi-tier courses, training modules, lessons, categories, and multimedia quizzes to test student knowledge. LifterLMS also allows you to create smaller courses or complete degree programs with tracks that require students to complete courses in a particular order.
To keep learners engaged, LifterLMS has features such as content dripping, course prerequisites, automated emails, gamification with badges, and certificates upon course completion. Additionally, students can leave reviews or testimonials, providing social proof that can lead to more sales.
If you require more features, LifterLMS has addons that can manage affiliates, integrate with eCommerce plugins, and sell group memberships on WordPress, among other things. To generate revenue, you can accept one-time or recurring payments via credit card or popular payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe.
While LifterLMS is a powerful and flexible WordPress LMS plugin, it is relatively more expensive than some other options, with pricing starting at $120 for a single site without any addons. Nonetheless, it is an excellent choice for fitness experts, musicians, leadership trainers, education entrepreneurs, and anyone seeking to sell online lessons.
5. Teachable
Teachable is a highly efficient drag-and-drop course builder that provides you with all the necessary tools to create interactive online courses. Unlike other Learning Management Systems (LMS) listed, Teachable is not a WordPress plugin, and you can use it on a sub-domain, a custom domain name, or add a link to your school's page.
The platform hosts your course and offers built-in email marketing integration and a robust sales page builder that helps promote your training business. Teachable also has built-in analytics and advanced data reporting features that allow you to monitor student engagement and make necessary course adjustments to increase sales, sign-ups, and course completions.
Teachable seamlessly integrates with popular third-party marketing tools, including Mailchimp, Zapier, and ConvertKit, and offers advanced affiliate marketing tools to help grow your business. Additionally, the platform has a student referral feature that incentivizes students to refer others to your courses.
Teachable handles all course fees and offers a range of payment gateway options, such as PayPal, Stripe, Google Pay, and Apple Pay. Payment periods may vary, depending on your pricing plan.
Pricing starts at $29 per month, and the platform receives a B+ rating. Teachable allows you to create an unlimited number of courses and enroll as many students as you want. Since Teachable is a standalone platform, you don't have to worry about updates and backups, allowing you to run a successful training business with minimal admin work. However, compared to your typical WordPress LMS plugin, Teachable can be more expensive, and there may be additional fees, such as a 5% fee on each transaction if you purchase a Basic plan.
6. LearnPress
The LearnPress plugin is a free WordPress LMS plugin that offers a similar experience to using Moodle and is even marketed as "Moodle for WordPress." One of the key benefits of LearnPress is the ability to reuse content across courses and export content to other LearnPress-enabled WordPress sites, making it an excellent option for those with multiple sites for online learning.
After creating a course with LearnPress, you can either offer it for free or charge a one-time or recurring fee. Additionally, LearnPress allows you to publish some lessons as a free preview to entice users to purchase the full course. While LearnPress is free, there are paid addons available for advanced features such as content dripping, paid memberships, and integration with bbPress and BuddyPress.
Although LearnPress provides PayPal support by default, additional payment gateways are available as paid addons, including WooCommerce payment gateway and Authorize.net. While support for LearnPress is limited compared to premium LMS plugins, users can still receive some assistance through the official LearnPress forums.
Overall, LearnPress is a feature-rich and flexible LMS plugin for WordPress, but beginners may find the initial setup challenging. While the plugin is free, purchasing some of the premium addons may be necessary to maximize its potential.
7. WP Courseware
WP Courseware is a WordPress LMS plugin that offers a convenient drag-and-drop course builder. With its plethora of features, you can create both large and small online courses.
Once a course is published, WP Courseware automatically generates a listing to showcase it on your website and encourage student enrollment.
Each course can consist of several modules, units, and quizzes. Additionally, WP Courseware facilitates offline learning by allowing students to download courses in various formats including PDFs, media files, and text.
If you want to create a guided learning experience, WP Courseware supports both course pre-requisites and course tracks. It also features content drip functionality, which enables you to release lessons based on time elapsed since the student enrolled, thereby keeping them engaged and motivated. For more information on adding an LMS to your WordPress website with WP Courseware, refer to our guide.
WP Courseware includes instructor profiles, student grade books, and other tools to create an interactive learning experience. It also features a question bank that makes it easy to create quizzes for different courses and modules.
For those who wish to monetize their online training, WP Courseware provides robust e-commerce capabilities. You can directly connect its shopping cart to PayPal or Stripe, offering both one-time purchase and recurring subscription options.
With WP Courseware, you can create an unlimited number of courses and support an unlimited number of students. This makes it an excellent option to grow your online learning business.
WP Courseware licenses start at $129 for two sites with one year of support and updates.
Overall, WP Courseware is a user-friendly and versatile plugin for building engaging online courses. Additionally, it works seamlessly with any WordPress theme, eliminating any compatibility concerns.
Bonus: Sensei
Sensei is a powerful WordPress LMS plugin developed by the same team behind WooCommerce and Jetpack. It is user-friendly and adheres to the best practices of WordPress and WooCommerce.
With Sensei, you can create courses directly within the WordPress editor, allowing you to use familiar tools. You can add a variety of content to your courses, including images, slideshows, galleries, and videos, to make the learning experience more engaging for students.
Sensei enables you to conduct quizzes and assignments, automatically or manually grade them, and offer badges and certificates to students. Additionally, there is an instant messenger feature to communicate with students and provide them with real-time assistance.
To sell your courses and receive payments, you need to integrate with WooCommerce. You can easily create a WooCommerce product and link it to your Sensei course.
A single license of Sensei LMS starts at $149 for one year of support and updates.
Sensei is an excellent option for those who want to create and sell online courses using familiar WordPress tools, especially those who already run an online store with WooCommerce. However, integrating with WooCommerce can be challenging for those unfamiliar with the plugin, and Sensei has fewer features and add-ons than other LMS plugins on this list.
Which is the Best WordPress LMS Plugin? (Expert Pick)
MemberPress is considered the top WordPress LMS plugin by our experts. It is beginner-friendly, allowing you to create stunning online courses without any coding knowledge.
MemberPress's powerful membership rules enable you to control access to each course and offer subscription plans, course bundles, and more.
In addition, MemberPress offers advanced features such as content dripping, group memberships, protected file management, and reminder emails. The plugin integrates smoothly with more than a thousand email marketing automation services to help you grow your online training business.
If you're searching for a MemberPress alternative, we recommend Thrive Apprentice, which also provides useful integrations and features.
WordPress LMS Plugin FAQs
WPBeginner receives many inquiries regarding LMS plugins from their audience. Below are some of the frequently asked questions and their corresponding answers.
Which LMS plugin should I use for WordPress?
MemberPress is the top recommended LMS plugin for WordPress as it provides all the necessary features to create and market online courses in WordPress. Moreover, it has potent membership features that enable the selling of course subscriptions, bundles, and more.
Which LMS plugin is the easiest to use?
MemberPress and Thrive Apprentice are two of the easiest LMS plugins to use. MemberPress's course builder is built on top of the WordPress block editor, which means that you can create courses using the WordPress tools you are already familiar with. Thrive Apprentice, on the other hand, has a School Setup Wizard that will guide you through building your first online course.
How can I install LMS plugins?
If you need assistance in installing an LMS plugin on your WordPress site, you can refer to this step-by-step tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Is WordPress LMS free?
While some free LMS WordPress plugins are available, they usually provide limited features. If you are serious about starting an online course business, it is recommended that you opt for a premium LMS plugin such as MemberPress or Thrive Apprentice. Premium LMS plugins such as these provide all the advanced features required to create, sell, and manage your online courses.
We hope this article has helped you compare the best WordPress LMS plugins with their advantages and disadvantages. You might also be interested in checking out our guide on must-have WordPress plugins to grow your business and our comparison of the best chatbot software to improve site engagement.
