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LearnDash
Learning management system for WordPress
Last updated: October 2024
Functionality
4.4
/5
270
Total features
39
4 categories
LearnDash features
Common features of Learning Management System software
USMAN ZAFAR M.
Education Management, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 1-2 years
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LearnDash is the best LMS plugin for WordPress. We are using this plugin since 2018 and it's a top tier LMS plugin to build an online courses website. One can easily intergrate learndash LMS plugin and offer online courses or trainings. There's also an opportunity to offer paid courses and collect payments using PayPal, stripe etc. LearnDash plugin has a lot of built-in features 1. Drag and drop course builder 2. Advanced quizzes 3. Dynamic content delivery 4. Flexible prerequisites 5. Automated notifications 6. Badges and certificates 7. Discussion forums 8. Course points 9. Leaderboard 10. Assignments We are using for our college and during corona it's best deal that we are using learndash plugin. There are nearly 20 courses on our site, lot of advanced quizzes (5 types pf quizzes offered by learndash plugin), classwise leaderboards in which we can show leaderboards easily on any page using shortcodes. We are also offering badges and certificates on course completion and the best thing is certificate builder is a builtin functionality in learndash plugin, you can easily collect assignments and mark easily by advanced features. LearnDash LMS is also a best tool to offer trainings for your staff, teachers and team members. One can easily earn by teaching skills and by selling courses on the website. Our college is also offering services for others and we are building course websites for other schools and colleges and the good thing is they are very happy with learndash LMS.
Learndash LMS is the best WordPress plugin and we are not facing any problem yet. Only the thing is the plugin price is a little high. I suggest learndash to announce special packages for the students and teachers as it's not easy for students and teachers to manage such amount. I believe in front of learndash features current price is nothing but I still suggest learndash officials to announce special packages for students and teachers. We are a lot happy with it and not facing any problem yet. It's fast and secure. Thanks learndash team.
Ashley H.
Health, Wellness and Fitness, self-employed
Used daily for 1-2 years
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Really enjoy using Learndash for my business
I really enjoy building my online courses and course portfolio - it is very enjoable and user friendly process to use.
Nothing, it has allowed me to create a great course platform
Aimee S.
Alternative Medicine, 1-10 employees
Used daily for less than 6 months
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I spent about 20 hours installing this plug-in and trying to set it up in WordPress before I stopped and decided to go with Teachable, which is another LMS platform. I was paying $30 a month for LearnDash but it’s not at all worth $30 a month. The support was poor and the user experience felt like the plug-in itself hadn’t been updated in a very long time. If I was using it for free I would’ve thought it would’ve been worth it, but to pay monthly for it is not worth the amount of time and energy that it took me to set up basic functions .
The reason I purchased the software was because it integrated with WordPress. I had already built my courses on WordPress and I wanted to add additional features like tracking my students and providing a central hub where all my students courses would be available and providing them with a progress bar to help them have a more visual way to progress through their courses.
This is really not a software it’s a WordPress plug-in. I use multiple word plus plug-ins that are excellent. This WordPress plug-in is not worth the money. The amount of work that requires you to do just to get your course set up is enormous. I already had my courses fully developed and it was not easy to install the plug-in and have the features that they promised.
Lynn H.
Professional Training & Coaching, 1-10 employees
Used weekly for 1-2 years
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It was relatively easy to use and setup.
This plugin was relatively easy to use and setup and works well with WPML.
It requires an additional plugin to be able to copy or clone courses, lessons, and topics.
Gitte L.
Hospitality, self-employed
Used monthly for 2+ years
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This is perfect for small businesses that offer specialized training for purchase.
I like that I can clone my courses and integrate them with many different apps. The participants of my course have found the interface easy to navigate.
Being a senior, the learning curve took some time to overcome and was frustrating at times but it has a lot of possibilities if you have technical knowledge.
Breda M.
Internet, 1-10 employees
Used monthly for 2+ years
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Corporate elearning, seems good for online courses, easy to integrate video, quizzes etc.
The Learndash is user friendly once you get to grips with the structure of courses, lessons and topics. If you are familiar with wordpress you'll find adding content easy.
There is a learning curve when you start out, I would like if there was a membership built in rather than having to get a separate plugin.
Fatture R.
Food & Beverages, 51-200 employees
Used daily for 1-2 years
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The valuable training option from LearnDash is something that ensure gives credible information.
The solution offers appropriate learning structures, where there is online training.
LearnDash gives reasonable learning streams, and this faces no challenges.
Jay A.
Computer Software, self-employed
Used daily for 2+ years
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I use Learndash for all my LMS websites. Learndash offers a great amount of features that allow me to customize the website to my clients and my needs.
The features and functionality of the Learndash is outstanding.
The learning curve is a little steep but once you start to figure things out it becomes easier.
Ederson V.
Design, 1-10 employees
Used weekly for 1-2 years
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Overall, LearnDash is one of the best online course platforms I've seen. It has all the options that an academy, university, institute, school may need to give their Online courses. I don't think there is another more complete option to give online courses.
If you need to create a website that allow you to teach people, then LearnDash is the best solution. I found LearnDash and liked how it had all the features that I needed in order to make this happen. The support team was always there to help me figure out anything I didn't understand, which is why they are so valuable. It's one of the best and most affordable online learning platforms I have ever come across. I am able to create courses, upload videos, assign quizzes, and keep track of the progress in a single dashboard. Something very important about this platform is that it allows students to learn at their own pace.
What LearnDash needs to improve is its design of the courses, the part that the student sees, in my case I have to use other templates to improve the visualization. Something that I don't know because they haven't implemented is an APP to be able to take the courses from the cell phone.
Surya P.
Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees
Used weekly for 6-12 months
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My favorite feature is that I can self-host LearnDash on my website, which allows me to use my own URL and save money. It also allows me to select whatever theme builder to use with it, giving me complete control over how my landing and other associated pages appear with no scripting.
Lessons and courses can be easily created and managed using LearnDash. The best aspect is that it can be completely integrated with the current WordPress site. They also have nice documentation to help you through it. You may even customize them with your preferred page builder, such as Elementor.
Enrolling several students in a course is difficult, and I have yet to discover a LearnDash plugin that does it properly. Some areas might be difficult to customize the way you desire.
Mike K.
E-Learning, self-employed
Used daily for 1-2 years
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Generally speaking, the documentation is excellent, the customer support has been very positive and helpful, and it's been a good experience.
Honestly, after banging my head against a wall trying desperately to Frankenstein other options together, I finally broke down and bought LearnDash and wish I had done so sooner. It solved a LOT of stressful issues oof how to create courses online, membership management, and the whole process of putting a system in place that works and doing so in a fairly straightforward way.
I absolutely hate WordPress. Every time I fix one issue, the solution causes two more. I spend more time building my site and working on it than I do actually creating content. So my only complaint about this software is that I have to use it on Wordpress.
Rosie H.
Design, 1-10 employees
Used monthly for 2+ years
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The ability to quickly add courses and still have a level of quality that's right on point is what makes LearnDash such a valuable tool. The features I get with video lessons look like custom development, which makes the courses look like a great deal of money was spent to create them which is always a plus.
LearnDash has become quite popular for creating courses. It's flexible and they're also well integrated with other products which is very important. The UI with Elementor is seamless. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to enjoy the best user experience possible. LearnDash provides great content possibilities and documentation but their support is a little less efficient than their software!
The social learning, interactive learning and mobile experience on the website have room for improvement. The last few months has seen an improvement in the mobile experience, but social learning and interactive learning could be better and more user-friendly. Initial integration was time-consuming and there really isn’t any way around that. I also wish they had better user management options since WordPress user management is not great.
D'vorah L.
E-Learning, 1-10 employees
Used daily for 1-2 years
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As an experienced WordPress user (for over 12 years) and a course creator for as many years, I can say that hands-down, LearnDash offers a fantastic, easy-to-use, powerhouse course creation software. Not only is it easy to add and update courses and content, it provides a wonderful user experience for our students! We often receive comments as to how sleek and attractive the online classroom looks and how easy it is to use.
I can't really say there are any cons however I did need to reach out for support to ask a few questions when initially setting up the interface. That said, we were able to get up and running in record time and able to set up many courses quickly and easily. We produce approximately one course each month, so we needed something that would make it possible for us to replicate the process over and over again.
Jeoff F.
Civic & Social Organization, 1-10 employees
Used monthly for 1-2 years
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I had tired other "educational" software, and got frustrated with the different aspects of them, cost, install, course building and so on. Tried out LD and it was a very simple install, and pretty straight forward how to build a course and quiz once you reviewed their videos after the install. We tried it out and we love how this software gives us the ability to have many courses for our SAR Team. With the way things are now, we are able to do much of our training via online and minimal exposure with out hands on, meaning that we have cut our time with face to face instruction down to at the minimal half of the time. You cant go wrong with the software, for the features, the abilities of the software, the response of the Tech Support with issues, and its very user friendly... Thanks and keep up the great work LD!!
Instructs are straight forward, took me a bit to figure out exactly how to make things work the way I wanted them too. If I got in to a bind, LD support was there to help make the program do what I wanted. Two thumbs up for the Tech Support
The thing that I don't care for is when building a certificate, you almost have to have two windows open to figure out where the placements go. You setup a fake test/quiz, with one question and use that to get a certificate window, go into your builder, and start laying out your certificate. If you try to click on the certificate in builder you get a forbiden page, Would be nice to just be able to open up the certificate and not have to go though so many steps to build or edit a certificate overlay
Margi C.
Health, Wellness and Fitness, self-employed
Used daily for 1-2 years
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Super awesome and friendly customer service. They talk with me in normal language so I can understand and they really try to get to the heart of the issue.
I'm not the developer of my site but I do make all of the changes, etc. So when my students were purchasing classes but the classes weren't getting onto their dashboard immediately - I contacted LearnDash and they helped immediately. What a relief!
Because the developer I used was the one to implement the software, I wish I could say more here. However, I don't have anything to share here because I use it to load classes etc. but that is all. And customer service helps me when I need it. I also realize I need to learn more to take care of a few issues but I don't feel that is a LearnDash concern.
Ted T.
E-Learning, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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Easy for students to use. Overall experience, quite good. The tech support people are extra helpful, very patient and super supportive. I don't often need their help, but when I do, I've usually got a serious problem and I really really need help! They rescue you without judgement! :-) By far the best people I've dealt with in ANY company. Tech support on weekends would be great.
Easy to use (comparatively speaking) for course developers and students and 100% reliable. Has to be 100% reliable.
A typical software, a bit too complicated - but I guess that is software!
Bello M.
Financial Services, 1-10 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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When it Comes to WordPress lms plugin, Learndash is the best. The interface is very easy to understand both for authors and students, it is having many features compared to other plugins thus saving Space and money you dont need to buy and install extra plugins and it integrates well with third party plugins or Platforms
Eventhough Learndash is an excellent plugin, their customer support is not hundred percent active. At Times i have to open a ticket and wait several days before having a solution
Verified reviewer
E-Learning, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 6-12 months
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The two best WordPress LMS plugins are LearnDash and LifterLMS. It was a hard choice between the two. But we chose Learndash because of their easy-to-use API. The major thing missing from LearnDash is that it still does require a developer (or a experienced Wordpress user) to set up. There's no easy way to plug-and-play. I wouldn't be able to hand this off to a Wordpress novice.
LearnDash has plenty of APIs to do all sorts of fancy things. For other LMSes, I had to write a lot of custom code to do what LearnDash does right out of the box. I also love how flexible LearnDash is. There's a lot of plugins that work alongside LearnDash.
There is a learning curve to setting it up. There's a lot of options. I also wish that Learndash does user management in a much more streamline way. Right now, you have to modify every user individually, or build a script to manage users. I also couldn't figure out how to use their ProPanel software.
Will D.
E-Learning, self-employed
Used daily for 1-2 years
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Overall, LearnDash has made managing a large catalog of content (50 + courses) very easy. I can quickly add courses, and the quality looks great. The features I get with video lessons, feel like custom developement and something I paid ALOT of money for, but they are included for free.
Learndash is incredible easy to get up and running. I loved how easy it is to create courses, add lessons and quickly get a catalog of content up and running. I was transferring courses from pages and posts that I had manually created, and moving to LearnDash allows me to move and work so much faster, plus it's alot easier for students to navigate. All of my content is videobased and their video progression features and integrations with Vimeo are amazing. The ability to remember your location in a video so that when you come back to it, it's there waiting for you-is a feature that feels like it should cost, much, much more.
Initially I had purchased LearnDash and asked for my money back, because I felt like it was too focused on being a solution for higher ed. I didn't need certificates, or quizzes, or homework uploads, just the ability for students to watch video lessons. But.. after digging in the second time, I realized I don't have to use all of those things. While there are alot of features, I don't have to use those.
Nano S.
E-Learning, 11-50 employees
Used weekly for 6-12 months
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So far it has been pretty good. Setting it up was just what i expected - lots of youtube videos and trial and error. But when you get the hang of it building courses and everything is fun and smooth. Support has been great.
- Course creation is intuitive. - User friendly. - Layout of course is practical. - Documentation is handy along with "how to...in LearnDash" youtube videos. - It is a right level of simple. Not to the point where it is too simple where you don't feel like it delivers value to the students and not to advanced where it is too difficult for students to use. - Support is helpful.
- I think you should have the option to mark anything complete. - Add more options to the outline of course. As of now there is only Course, Topics, and Quizzes. It would be handy if you could add homework Assignments and Handouts. Within these Assignments and or Handouts there is checklist that students could follow to check progress of there homework completion. After the checklist is completed only then would the overall progress bar change. - You should be able to save quiz progress. Some quizzes we have are 100 questions and act more as homework (so students do not finish them in one go). - There should be better quiz reporting. Being able to evaluate your own quiz (and even homework) performance effectively is the difference between succeeding and failing. If students could get detailed breakdowns to their performance they could recognize patterns, identify strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately better aim their study efforts. If reporting was to be better it also needs to be intuitive and user friendly. So easy to read graphs and charts, filter options, careful organization of subjects versus performance, and so on. - aesthetics of login pop-up page should have more customization options. - With the pandemic and current era we live in the Zoom feature/ integration should come with product.
Chi Z.
E-Learning, 1-10 employees
Used daily for less than 6 months
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I am an open online Chinese course provider. I used to develop an entire course using our own software, based on Moodle. It worked quite well, but I thought using a plug-in might be the smart move since I want to also optimize the quizzes and courses for SEO purposes. This turned out to be not so easy, in fact, it might make the URL structure much more chaotic than it is if you simply use a "normal" SEO strategy separating the blog content and the free course content. Almost all my customer support requests lead to the conclusion that I will need to hire a programmer to solve the issue. I definitely see more flexibility with moodle, if you have the knowledge to set up a server and run the moodle there. If you are someone who is just starting up alone, or with very little technical understanding, LearnDash would definitely be the right choice. but I think if you grow bigger, you will probably need something that can fulfill more purposes.
What I love is the customer support. I have encountered some issues and have always had a great experience with customer support. Especially one employee [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] went a long way to make sure my problem was solved. Though the problem stayed as a default setup, she truly made it easy to keep using the solution. The customer support overall is amazing. For anyone who has a standard e-learning idea, I think LearnDash is the product to go for BECAUSE of the customer support.
I understand that e-learning products are all quite troublesome due to database issues - it is indeed a sophisticated industry. However, I still have to say LearnDash is not very intuitive to use, especially when you have a concrete idea of how to set up your course. It has an overall extremely complicated URL structure, which makes SEO hard to achieve. And there is no option to make it shorter. Each course creates a line of subcategories, followed by lessons with the same subcategories. And then when you finally reach the quizzes, you simply have a long URL and you have no other way to change that. This is only one of the smaller things that you can't change. Also, it's not possible to insert a page to describe something, followed by a question within a quiz.
Don C.
E-Learning, 1-10 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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I've been very pleased with LearnDash. It's well-designed, well-documented, and well-supported. It scales well and I look forward to continuing to work with it well into the future.
I had been using a hosted LMS, but grew frustrated with the artificial limitations imposed on me by its design. I made the decision to switch to LearnDash for the flexibility, so that I would be able to manage and present my courses in whatever way I deemed appropriate for my customers, and so that I would have full control of my content. (The hosted LMS would not let me keep my own backups!) I also wanted to have full control of the user experience.
There really aren't any cons, as long as you understand this is a large application with many options. The learning curve is substantial, but absolutely worth the time and effort required to master it.
Dean S.
Design, 1-10 employees
Used daily for 6-12 months
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Unfortunately you must make an early decision if you wish to use the features of Learndash or create a profitable product. While LearnDash goes to great lengths to showcase their features. Once you attempt to use these outside of their limited sales pathway many will no longer be available to you. Using the features and scalable processes of woocommerce will remove many features that make Learndash at first glimpse and during superficial reviews attractive. Any experienced UX designers will understand that this is a huge issue. Any user will be disappointed if they can purchase a product not available to them. In many countries selling a customer a product not available to them is illegal and will expose you to legal issues. Very limiting for those wishing to make their product available or sale. Purchase with care. Not as seamless presented throughout the presales marketing.
Suitable for small, internal, and experimental projects. Lacks the sophistication to create a large, scalable, and sellable products.
Unfortunately while it is possible to sell courses through woocommerce, doing so will remove the listed features of the learndash product. Most businesses will end up selling through woocommerce to unlock automations and the power of wordpress (ie adding customers to mailchimp, adding the sale to accounting software, directing a customer post sales path etc). Unfortunately once you make a product available for sale through woocommerce many of the listed product features fail. Most notably the course prerequisite feature. Users can purchase any course available in woocommerce regardless of any restriction or settings made in Learndash.
We are really sorry that our product didn't meet the specific needs of your unique use-case. We hope that you have found a solution that works for you. We wanted to address a couple points from this review since it contains misleading information that might confuse others: - Course prerequisites still work when selling with WooCommerce. Content cannot be viewed until all of the determined conditions are first met. -Using WooCommerce to sell courses doesn't expose a business to legal issues. If it is preferred that a product in Woo not be displayed until a prerequisite is completed first then this is indeed possible using LearnDash features.
Karen H.
E-Learning, 1-10 employees
Used daily for 1-2 years
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Lately I have been thinking that because I don't use the quizzes, etc. I could have skipped the whole LMS thing and just created pages or posts that link to the next. Luckily LearnDash is not too expensive so now that it is looking nice (thanks to custom coding), I will probably just stick with it.
Working with LearnDash is very easy. It works very similar to the other functions in Wordpress. You create a course, add Lessons and then Topics for each lesson. For example, the course could be about How to Be a Real Estate Investor. In that course, you might have multiple lessons like How to Flip Houses, How to But Rental Property, How to Finance Real Estate, etc. The you add the detailed Topics. For example, How to Flip Houses might have things like How to Find Greta Houses to Flip. How to Fund Your Flip House Projects, How to Manage the Rehab. You get the idea... It's literally copy and paste for text and you add graphics the same way you would to any page or post in Wordpress. Also, you can have quizzes, delay the release of certain content, offer certificates and points for completion, sell your courses, interact with users based on actions they take, set timers for each lesson, set prerequisites for courses, and offer grading and badges. You can also offer the courses in bundles and even create a marketplace similar to Udemy where people can buy your courses. It integrates natively with many membership softwares including Memberium and also with many email providers and CRMS including Infusionsoft. It;s responsive and even works with SCORMs.
Here's what I don't like. It's ugly. The user interface is plain and not very intuitive. You have to buy other add on's so users can do things like take notes, and so that you can begin to have an interface that looks better than native Wordpresss. In other words... ugly. With all the work they put into this software, it is so crazy that they did not spend time on the user experience. It's hard to tell if you're in a Lesson or Topic. It's hard to navigate around the course form Lesson to Less or Topic or Topic to Topic and don't even think about jumping around. The only way to solve these issues is to use precious sidebar real estate for this navigation instead of being able to showcase other offerings. That or your sidebar gets really long. The interface showing which items have been completed and which have not is also ugly. And while you can buy add ons, those are "meh" at best. I finally broke down and hired a developer to tweak the code and make me a nice interface with great navigation, awesome graphics and stats for users in each Lessona nd Topic and so on.
Hi Karen, thank you for your review! Regarding the visual components in LearnDash, these are soon to be updated in LearnDash 3.0 - we think you will really like them!
Levi S.
Human Resources, 11-50 employees
Used daily for less than 6 months
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So far, there hasn't been anything missing from LearnDash. We were able to launch our online learning program in just a few days. The learning curve was easy to overcome and we were able to get all of our content online with no problems. Each time we were stuck on something the documentation was able to steer us to the right answer and the one time we needed to reach out to support, their response was quick and helpful.
We purchased LearnDash to integrate with MemberPress. Because of this, we do not use any of the payment, membership, or subscription functions in LearnDash. We use it exclusively to present courses, record quiz scores, and provide certificates. For those tasks, LearnDash is the perfect tool. The tools to build your content are drag and drop simple and the management tools are easy to understand. Integration with WordPress core functions and with the MemberPress system are flawless and we never had to tinker with them. Just installed the LearnDash plugin and got to work. A highlight was the "Focus Mode" feature for the actual learning environment. It provided a clean, good looking interface for our students and took exactly zero time to tweak. We just flipped the switch and had a great looking online classroom tool. If we want to hire designers later to build us pages that are more branded, we can. But Focus Mode allowed us to launch faster, with a better looking product, for no additional cost.
Student reporting is adequate, but a little unimpressive. There are reports that can be downloaded, but there is no real dashboard to track student progress.