After months of testing Saas and WordPress LMS plugins, LearnDash came out on top.

This software is helping us simplify and streamline our ability to deliver online training to students at an affordable cost.

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.

Awesome Support Team

Overall, my experience with LearnDash has been wonderful. It is an easy-to-use tool that is the basis of our eLearning platform

Pros

- Ease of use and set-up - Built-in functionality to present users courses in an organized way - Compatibility with multiple plug-ins and themes - Great value for the price

Cons

- Sometimes the features are a bit restricting

Not quite there yet

We have been multiple Moodle learning systems and wanted to try this since it seemed easier to setup and use. It was easier, but ultimately took more time because of all the limitations in the system which we had to customize. Many features which are free in Moodle require paid plugins for Learndash and that was frustrating. The structure of the courses is not very intuitive and we had to make a lot of accommodations to work within the confines of the system.

Pros

It works with Wordpress so has a familiar layout to those familiar with Wordpress. Visually it looks good to the end user. Open source, so it was fairly easy to modify for our needs.

Cons

Seems limited when compared to Moodle and this is more expensive. The structure of the courses is pretty limited, for example you can't require only certain activities to be completed in order for a course to be marked completed, all sub-sections are required for completion. The navigation through the courses/lessons/topics could be improved. There are a lot of clicks to get to the course content and it can be frustrating trying to setup a course where the user can easily progress through from beginning to end. Often we found the user would complete a topic/lesson/quiz and there wasn't a clear path forward for them. We had to make some core customization to make this more user friendly.

LearnDash is the backbone of our Codeable Academy

LearnDash is the backbone of our Codeable Academy, and we use it to create helpful trainings for our 500+ developer community. In the past we would provide training and resources via a private forum or Google docs. But we didn't know how many users were consuming the information. Now we have full visibility on who has taken a course, how much of it has been completed, and what grades they received on the quizzes. As we continue to add more courses, we see LearnDash playing an integral part in the Codeable Academy, and we're proud to be using it.

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.

Easy to Use but Ugly User Interface

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.