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.

Because of issues we've had that were solved by tech support Dan, we haven't yet done an official launch although our plan is to launch on July 3. I would say that my overall experience has been a mixture of frustration and joy. It took me a while to learn how to navigate the builder, needing to navigate out of the course section to design the lessons and out of lessons to design topics, but once I worked that out, it's a breeze. I feel I will know better what real benefits LearnDash has when my students actually start using it.

It's course builder and the ability to clone courses

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.

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.

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.