LearnDash Reviews

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

MemberPress

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

MemberPress has a module for online courses, but it did not have the feature set we needed for our product.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Teachable, Podia and Thinkific

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

I wanted to stay on an open platform and own my content. LearnDash allowed me to quickly transfer my existing posts and pages into their platform and continue owning my content and processing payments through Stripe.

Pros

Suitable for small, internal, and experimental projects. Lacks the sophistication to create a large, scalable, and sellable products.

Cons

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.

Pros

It's course builder and the ability to clone courses

Cons

I had to begin learning LearnDash from scratch, while at the same time learning Elimentor and CartFlows. There was a steep learning curve for me. I began when LearnDash 3 was the latest version, and I found it confusing when viewing older tutorials, not realizing I needed to pay attention to when the tutorial was done. I suggest deleting older tutorials. Also, I don't like to call names but I tried to watch several of [SENSITIVE CONTENT]'s webinars and I found them more confusing than helpful. However, I found [SENSITIVE CONTENT]'s tutorials always clear, concise and helpful.[SENSITIVE CONTENT]s instruction about constructing a certificate was the best I found.

Alternatives Considered

Kajabi, Udemy Business and Thinkific

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

I choose LearnDash because we could install it on our website and have total control without sharing our income with a platform.

Pros

Complete package, well designed and easy to use for a complicated need.

Cons

Initial integration was time-consuming, wished it has better features or a tie-in plugin for user management since WordPress user management is poor. Learn press had compatibility issues with WP User Manager (learn dash restoration process was broken with using wp user manager wouldn't create user password on registration) which left me having to do a lot more work to build a user management process

Alternatives Considered

MemberPress

Reasons for Choosing LearnDash

Easier to use and better for online classes

Switched From

MemberPress

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

memberpress was too complicated, too unpolished for our needs

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Moodle

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

Because I thought it would be easier to use LearnDash, since it's not free. The customer support is great though, so that's definitely a plus. But the product itself still has room for improvement, in my opinion.

Pros

Modern design of lessons and modules with bunch of options to create different leqrning experience for different types of lessons.

Cons

Better dashboard overview is not included in basic learndash licence. Reports for quizzes could be better.

Pros

The fact that it's used by large universities in Florida, Michigan and Washington gave me confidence that it is reliable. We like how easy it is to create new lessons and assign quizzes to them. The add-on library is fairly large to help expand its capabilities. It's a popular tool with a lot of resources online to help learn how to make the most of it. There are a lot of built-in options for tweaking how it works.

Cons

It is somewhat complex to use compared to other options. That's partially because it provides so many options. You have to put some time into it to get it setup how you want and understand how it works, so it's not as fast to get going with as some other services would be. It could use more question types for the quizzes. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to view all of a student's essays and quiz answers on one page, however there are custom-made plugins that help with this.

Alternatives Considered

Teachable and Thinkific

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

Price, reputation, positive reviews, able to run on our own platform/servers

Pros

The ease of setup and effective end-user adoption. Apart from that it has almost every aspect of LMS covered using its feature rich add-ons.

Cons

I would say the premium price is the only con here if you compare this with something like Learnpress or Moodle.

Alternatives Considered

Moodle and Udemy Business

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

Good integration with most of the stable WordPress themes.

Pros

It's easy to use, has quizzes which is so important for online courses.

Cons

I'm using BuddyBoss with LearnDash. For some reason. none of my pages are ranking in Google. This hasn't happened with any of my other sites.

Pros

- 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.

Cons

- 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.

Pros

We needed many features that were hard to find in SaaS based LMS solutions and WP plugins. Here's a list of features that pushed us towards LearnDash because it worked with our stack or is helping us upgrade it:

1. Integration with Zapier (allows communication with our Podio CRM hub)
2. Integration with any Shopping cart with One-Click Upsells. We will be migrating to SamCart after 6 years with Nanacast.
3. Ability to "Recycle" LMS content. (i.e. use one lecture in multiple classes)
4. Progress % for classes so students can see their progress.
5. Forum integration for class discussions. We chose BBPress and it works perfectly with it.
6. ActiveCampaign integration for email management.

LearnDash included all these features and they work. This was the *only* solution I found after months of testing WP plugins and Saas platforms that met our requirements. So far, setup has gone smooth and updates have not broken anything.

Cons

My biggest con is that this is a WP plugin and I'm hesitant to run mission critical software on WordPress. But since all the SaaS LMS' solutions were missing critical features, I decided to give this a shot.

In order to gain some peace of mind and find a middle of sorts, I decided to go the extremely safe route with hosting and chose Kinsta since they use the Google Cloud and their pricing structure is reasonable. Plus, having a "staging area" is nice along with their daily backups, crazy speed and Nginx reverse proxy caching.

Pros

LearnDash is powerful for course creation from A to Z. The course creation possibilities are huge. Everything is flexible, but not too flexible. They are veeeery well integrated with plenty of tools out there. This is very important. They play especially well with BuddyBoss. Thus, I can recommend using both together. BuddyBoss improves the ok design of LearnDash to a brilliant maximum!
I like it a lot, and I am happy to be a long-term LearnDash customer.

Cons

Social learning, interactive learning, and mobile experience are not brilliant. I hope to see improvements in these areas. The mobile experience got improved during the last few months, but social learning and interactive learning are still not enough built-in. They offer h5p integration, which is good, but a native solution would be better. Social learning is basically nonexistent. The only way is to encourage comments on the course page, but that's it.

Pros

Easy to setup, able to re-use different lessons for different courses.
Good constant flow of information and ideas trough their blog.
Fast customer support response.

Cons

Not able to create the lessons titles inside the course creation.

In my case, I use (Course-Modules-Lessons), I can create the Modules inside the course creation, but the lessons I have to go to lessons and create them outside. (Not a mayor hassle) but would it be very convinient to be able to create them inside the course, only the titles that is.

Also, not being able to 'Clone' an existing course with it's modules, lessons and quizes, but with a bit or looking I was able to find a couple of plugins that did the trick.

Pros

I started tinkering with LearnDash a few years ago but never launched my initial product. However, I kept my license active and watched as the LD team continued to upgrade and refine the product. I'm very much a DIY developer and I love that this full-featured package allows me to run a very sophisticated LMS system off of WordPress. The Notifications Add-on fills in a missing piece and enables me to create subscription content wit email notification of timed course content.

Cons

When setting up notifications, it's necessary to manually specify a recipient. If you miss this, nobody will get the email. If "user" was the default recipient, you wouldn't have to double-check in most instances. And in the list of notifications, this would be a great setting to be able to change in bulk or at least see in the dashboard without having to open each notification. Also, while I'm able to do this with shortcodes, I'd love to see a header and footer template for email notifications, and maybe even a visual builder.

Pros

The lesson page are amazing especially when LD is coupled with Presto Player and Buddyboss.
The various courses page are also pretty awesome (again when coupled with BuddyBoss).
The quizz, lessons, courses are overall pretty quick to set up.

Cons

Updating or finding quizz / course / lessons is a real pain.. and I feel a lot of time is lost while adjusting structure of course and all. The builder is amazing but then to change lesson and so on it becomes a rabbit hole and once a lot of lesson and so on are created it becomes a real maze....
I wish the interface would be a bit more minimal so we could maybe see more things at the same time...
Also LD is overall pretty buddy (in term of front end) stuff sometime shows, sometimes not, and I had to ask alternate developper to fix all the issue that are within LD. Also updating the plugin is very scary, as so far I updated two times, and had to roll back because the website ended up being totally broken.. :) (visually)

Pros

It is just great value for money - what you get even as standard is really good. Loads of free plugins which are great. And I really like Notes and Private Sessions paid plugins. The support is also very good and genuinely helpful

Cons

The only tricky part was working out the plugins needed for user registration, but there is an excellent guide on line. Like with all Wordpress tech theres always a few different options and it takes a while to figure out what is best for you.

Pros

It has many of the features that we were looking for right out of the box without added plugins. The Course Grid View feature with video previews and custom layouts is also exceptional. The codebase is robust and it's got a lot of fantastic documentation.

The support is just next level as well. That's played a huge role in our development, as we needed quite a bit of advice on advanced customization for our build. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] on the support team went above and beyond, with same-day replies packed with detailed, and useful information.

Cons

There are a couple of features that are currently available only as WSDM Labs plugin add-ons that I would like added to the core functionality, such as instructor roles and customized testimonials/reviews. But in general, it's extremely good.

Pros

Gamification to quizzes and progress tracking - This addresses the main motivation and needs for us to consider an LMS

Cons

The limited licences pricing structure - Learndash LMS licences structure does not include an option for unlimited website licenses. This would have been a wonderful value for us.

Pros

What I like most about LearnDash is the ease of use to implement and setup courses. The training videos that are included inside the plugin made learning to use it and build the courses simple. The plugin itself works perfectly, and we didn't have any issues building our courses. Our users (500+ developers) have had no issues when taking the courses and everything works like a charm.

Cons

No complaints at all so far! When using an LMS plugin, you just want it to work without hassles or needing to contact support. And LearnDash provided a great experience start-to-finish.

Pros

LearnDash is my go-to choice of LMS for my WordPress customers. One customer in particular had a complex set of requirements, of which LearnDash was able to deliver. With some customisation and add-ons, we have a fantastic LMS solution. Even out of the box, for simpler solutions this product rocks.

The LearnDash support team are amazing, especially Shalom, who has been incredible support. Support teams make or break a product after sales.

Cons

Once you understand the Groups/Users assignment hierarchy ( especially for UI shortcodes ) you are rolling. That element took some head-scratching, but, with great support ( see above ) it's all clear.

Pros

Support is always key for me - even if I never need it and even presale the support team was responsive and helpful. After that comes an intuitive interface and they score high here as well. I also used an extensive online library of video lessons any time I wanted to fill in my personal knowledge base. Also, with the inclusion of a partner like Elementor I was able to deliver a workspace to the client that is reflective of their core website.

Cons

We ended up creating this as a subdomain to the parent site and that worked well for us. The addition of Elementor to their pool of available tools is fairly recent and the documentation is slim from both parties. I hope that this improves and that there is a greater ability to customize even more in the future. Also, I wish the documentation was better for user login, especially when you have incorporated WooCommerce.

Pros

I'm using Learndash with WooCommerce and Cartflows. Perfect integration. Seamless integration also with Elementor, I customized my entire site easily. LearnDash plays very well with other major plugins. That's perfect.
The support is very good and quick to answer to any questions. Nevertheless, I didn't have much problems with LearnDash. And when I had, it was because of other plugins. But the support even helped me to find a solution.
In term of learning, it's very easy to construct courses and to sell them. I love the focus mode and the ProPanel. I can't wait to see what will be next !

Cons

There are not a lot of things I don't like about LearnDash. Maybe I would like to have more native functions of customization. But that's not much. The entire experience as a creator and as a user is very good.

Pros

LearnDash makes it possible for our members to learn English more easily thanks to quizzes and interactive lessons and learning paths (progress tracking, personalized corrections, asynchronous learning and so on).

Cons

It takes a bit of time to understand how LearnDash works but the learning curve is not too steep as the customer support department is really, really good!
Beware that LearnDash can be super ressource-intensive if you have many members and/on many concurrent users on your membership site.

Pros

The reason for our choice of Learndash software was to build our own LMS platform, without any coding and now we run on it all our courses, short and long. Easily and without great problems.

Cons

- Reporting could be improved a lot. In France, we need a lot of it for legal reasons. At the end of a course, we need to export a complete and individual report for each student.
Pdf export of such a document would be a great improvement for all French training organizations .
- Impossible to send easily an email to all or a group of students ... Or didn't I find the way to do it ?