What a Learning Portal/LMS should be.

I used LearnDash to set up a Learning Portal at my prior organization. it allowed me to deploy content to a large user base through the portal, while also allowing me to track our content being used in their xAPI compliant LMS systems and completions of content through our Help system.

Pros

Building a learning portal on WordPress is brilliant. The core features of LearnDash in creating courses is great. Good quiz engine and solid features for offering and tracking courses with clear progress indicators.

But the true power of LearnDash is that it works with virtually any theme, and expands its utility with the WordPress ecosystem. Aside from solid partner plugins for coursegrids and gradebooks, there are additional tools that really give LearnDash some amazing content features like H5P and tools to embed and track content from leading eLearning tools like Articulate and Adobe. No end in sight.

Cons

The most challenging parts of LearnDash are managing WordPress and Plugins. The challenge of adding more and more features with plugins is the administrative maintenance it requires. Users just need to be very clear that unlike using a vendor LMS that you just upload content, they must be prepared to get "under the hood" to maintain the system. This is common with professional WordPress Administration, but learning professionals who just used an LMS may not be clear on the fact that this does require some web administration skills.

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.

Very grateful to rep , who has delivered exceptional support, by far the best help desk service!

Overall quality of finished workshops is superb, and students express enthusiasm. Originally my designer warned me, "This system is hard to learn, but you'll be pleased with the results. That's true. I do want to give a shout-out to the support team. Rep has given me exceptional tech support, and I can't imagine a more helpful, knowledgeable, kindly guide to the mysteries and complications of LearnDash.

Pros

The finished product. My workshops have exactly the components I wish: As many lessons per course as I wish, installing video and audio recordings, quizzes, and forums.

Once I learned how to use the software, it leads to a superb product.

Cons

Over-designed! On the whole, from my perspective, LearnDash is difficult to learn; an upgrade has resulted in far too many choices. For example, used to be that I could easily upload a FILL IN THE BLANKS quiz. Learning the new method, with upgrade, was far more difficult. Each question takes about 6 extra steps, compared to one step previously. As an educator, I do find it offensive that it's supposed to be desirable to copy quiz parts and, apparently, crank out as many quizzes as possible. Why not make that a plug-in, rather than standard operating procedure for those of us who create quality workshops and prefer to not over-complicate.

Highly recommended LMS plugin for WordPress

I discovered how easy it was to create online courses. LearnDash has allowed me to expand my client base.

Pros

I'm a WordPress implementer. A couple years ago I was approached by a client who wanted to develop an online course for non-native English speakers to study for their certifications. I'd never developed online courses before so I had to do A LOT of research.

For that project, I decided on LifterLMS and I still do most of my online course development with Lifter. I'll go into why in that review, obviously.

But LearnDash has certainly come very close to feature parity with Lifter. There are only a few differences in terms of functionality. Lifter's add-on system can be confusing to explain to a client whereas LearnDash is easy to sell. There are some specialized features for teams that are only available on Lifter, however.

The smart course creation tool is very very good. If you're worried about how to build a complex course with video and text, don't be. LearnDash makes it easy.

But LearnDash IS multisite compatible and Astra Pro, a popular WP theme, provides built-in support.

Another bonus is that LearnDash has a free version to get your feet wet, available on the repo.

Cons

There's no support for multiple teachers per course. Lifter's frontend student dashboards are nicer.

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.

A premier option for LMS development. Has all of the features you would expect.

Pros

What is not to like about this? Multi-tier courses, classes, teacher interaction, and a handful of gateways to round out this system. There are really too many features to list, and most of them are rounded really nicely. Customer support is quick and easy to work with, the cost isn't prohibitive as this LMS supports creating large projects, and the features feel like fully-realized and integrated aspects of a complete software, not just bolted on options on a lesser-thought-out plugin.

Cons

We ran into a compatibility issue with our event software. It ended up breaking the software, and we had to axe the event system we had put in place because we wanted to use this LMS over others. We also ran into a problem where we couldn't create a class online to register with, and then host the classes offline, manually entering a grade and pass/fail for in-person testing very well. Our specific use-case ended up being the one that this software couldn't handle.

Woocommerce and Product Feature not compatible.

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.

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.

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.

A very good WordPress LMS

Pros

I used LearnDash for WordPress for a few years now. It's well developed, feature rich, and stable plugin that integrates well with any theme. In LD you have a hierarchy of Courses->Lessons->Topics which can be utilized to develop easy to navigate courses. Quizzes are also a good feature. I18n is also great, they provide .pot files to translate to your own language if translation is not readily provided

Cons

Pricing model is quite awkward. I can't really find a good enough use case for a 1-site licenses vs pro 5-site license, unless I'm a developer/service provider

We switched to Learndash, and as a developer, I LOVE IT.

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Good course cr