Are you searching for the best WordPress LMS plugins for your WordPress website?
Learning Management System (LMS) plugins allow you to design and deliver online courses like Udemy or LearnDesk.
The best WordPress LMS plugins includes everything you require to run your courses online, administer and grade exams, accept payments, and much more.
In this article, we’ll look at the top WordPress LMS plugins to help you select the best option for the online course-selling website.
How do I choose the Best WordPress LMS plugins?
It’s easy to see that the need for eLearning platforms is growing each day. It doesn’t matter if it’s technical subjects, academic courses, or even children’s education; people are looking for interactive and best WordPress LMS plugins online.
From individual teachers to the best universities, everyone is taking their courses offline to online digital mode.
With the WordPress LMS plugin, you can offer these education services directly on your website. It allows you to develop online courses, keep track of the student’s progress and then grade the course in a single place.
There are many LMS plugins and membership plugins to allow you to offer eLearning courses through your website.
Here are a few of the features the best WordPress LMS plugins offer:
- Course Creation: A good LMS plugin can allow you to make different kinds of content for your courses, such as videos, pdfs, grades, books, and much more.
- The Course’s Progress: The HTML0 indicator lets your students know their progress in the course in the front end.
- Enrolment: The best LMS and membership plugins allow you to register students, design membership plans, and manage them without difficulty.
- Payment Integration: To make money from your course, you’ll need a plugin for courses that integrates seamlessly with payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, and others payment gateways.
- Content Dripping: It allows users to make your courses available in specific time frames, for example, each week, month, or annually.
Let’s review our top picks of the best WordPress LMS plugins that give all the necessary features.
List of the Best WordPress LMS Plugins
We’ve reviewed the top LMS (learning management system) LMS plugins that work with WordPress. These plugins can help you develop and present courses on your website easily.
So, let’s get started!
#1 – MemberPress
MembershipPress is one of the more powerful WordPress membership plugins. It also has features that let you easily manage and create online courses.
MemberPress has a unique Classroom Mode, which means you don’t need to spend long hours designing your online classroom. Classroom Mode handles the design and ensures that your classes always appear great.
MemberPress provides an intuitive navigation design for your online training. So, your students will know precisely what they need to complete and can complete their training with no confusion.
The MemberPress course builder is built on WordPress block editor. You can also add categories, lessons, topics, embed videos, images, and more by using the WordPress tools you’re already comfortable with.
For advanced users, the course builder offers complete support for custom CSS. This means that you can create online courses in an entirely individual style.
You can track each student’s progress and see their distance from finishing their course directly via your WordPress dashboard.
It is also possible to use MemberPress to develop free courses. You can earn revenue by making money by selling subscriptions to memberships.
They allow you to decide who can gain access to every course. For example, you could create a single membership level that grants users access to your courses. It’s similar to Skillshare, LinkedIn Learning, or Coursera membership.
An alternative is to design distinct membership levels for specific courses. Certain MemberPress users boost their sales by creating unique bundles, packages and bundles.
For example, you could develop a membership program which gives members access to the entire beginner-level course.
This could result in more students and motivate your existing users to sign up for a more costly membership to gain access to new benefits.
Whatever method you choose to earn money for your courses MemberPress can accept payments through PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net and many more.
MemberPress has a feature that allows for the dripping of content to enable you to show restricted content to users after a specific duration.
As an example, you may publish a new lesson every week. This could keep your customers engaged with your offerings and inspire them to renew their membership.
MemberPress is compatible with numerous popular third-party tools you already have to grow your audience, collect leads, and increase sales. This includes the top email marketing tools like SendinBlue, Constant Contact, Drip, and many others.
If you want to increase signups and sales, you’ll need a method to determine what’s working or not working for your training website. The positive side is that MemberPress is compatible together with Google Analytics.
Pricing: MemberPress subscriptions start at $179 for a single website license, which includes one year of support and automated software updates. Additionally, you’ll get the MemberPress Courses add-on without cost, allowing you to create unlimited courses and students.
#2 – LearnDash
LearnDash is another best WordPress LMS plugins that make creating and selling courses easy. It is an easy drag-and-drop course builder that allows you to create unlimited classes, lesson tutorials, quizzes, and more.
In addition to creating course content, LearnDash allows you to present your students with certificates. This provides them with motivation to finish the course or take a test.
With it drip-feed feature, you can offer your courses in one go or schedule them to run at different times. You also have the option of setting requirements for your student’s classes. This means they can begin a new lesson after completing the previous one.
Furthermore, LearnDash lets your students access new courses based on points earned when they finish their classes. This way, you’ll be able to boost the engagement of the online course you offer.
To assist you in monetizing your course content, LearnDash lets you add different payment options using PayPal, Stripe, and 2Checkout.
There are various options to set up an account for traditional membership access throughout your course. Students can be able to pay one-time or recurring payments in subscription-based models.
Another significant factor of LearnDash is its Multiple Instructors feature. This allows you to let other users make their courses and then be paid. This enables you to earn additional revenue through commissions paid by different instructors.
It’s the ideal course module for trainers, entrepreneurs, and schools that offer online courses for students.
LearnDash Plugin Key Features:
- Front-end student profile.
- Templates for courses that have been designed in advance.
- Course creation using text and multimedia.
- The options for assignments and quizzes are endless.
- Gamification components like certifications and badges.
- Support for Dynamic Course Forum.
- Drip-Feed content features.
- Zapier integration.
- Automatic email notifications.
Pricing: Starting at just $159 per single website license.
#3 – LifterLMS
LifterLMS is a powerful, all-in-one WordPress LMS plugin. It allows you to create an attractive online course with a drag-and-drop creator.
It is possible to make your classes more attractive by making multimedia-based lessons with videos, audio images, audio, and much more.
LifterLMS allows multi-tier courses with training modules, lesson categories, and many more. Once students complete the course, you can also test their knowledge with the help of multimedia quizzes.
LifterLMS allows you to design smaller courses as well as complete degrees. It is possible to make tracks that require students to finish their courses in a specific sequence. In this manner, you can encourage students to enrol in several courses on their LMS website.
To keep students entertained and earn recurring income, LifterLMS has content dripping which lets you distribute lessons throughout.
You may also define requirements for courses to guide the learning experience. For instance, students may be required to finish a particular module or course to access additional content for the WordPress website.
To keep learners interested, LifterLMS comes with powerful tools, such as automated emails, gamification using badges, as well as certificates that students can earn after they have completed an entire course.
After completing an educational program, students may write a review or a testimonial. This is an excellent type of social proof and can increase sales.
If you’re looking for more features, LifterLMS offers a variety of add-ons you can use for managing affiliates. Incorporate with eCommerce plugins or sell group memberships through WordPress and many more.
If you’re hoping to earn money from your online course, LifterLMS will accept regular or one-time payments using credit cards or other popular payment gateways like PayPal along with Stripe.
Prices: The LifterLMS memberships begin at $120 for a single website with no add-ons.
#4 – Teachable
Teachable is a fantastic drag-and-drop course maker. Unlike the other LMS on this listing, Teachable doesn’t have its own WordPress plugin. Instead, you can use Teachable as a sub-domain or with a domain name you have created, or you can create a link for your school’s webpage.
Teachable provides your course and all the tools needed to develop highly dynamic online training courses. Teachable also has built-in email marketing integration and an efficient sales page creator, which you can use to advertise your training company.
To fine-tune your training, Teachable has built-in analytics and advanced data reports. This allows you to monitor the student’s engagement and modify your course to increase sales, signups, and completions of courses.
Teachable is compatible with numerous popular marketing tools from third parties, including Mailchimp, Zapier, and ConvertKit.
To help grow your business in training, Teachable has a student referral option with advanced affiliate marketing tools.
Regarding payment, Teachable will handle all charges for your courses for you. Then, you will receive your money through a payment processor like PayPal, Stripe, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and many more.
The payment terms may differ depending on the pricing plan you have chosen.
Pricing: Starting at $29 per month.
#5 – Thrive Apprentice
The Thrive Apprentice is another best WordPress LMS plugins with membership functionalities.
It comes with more than 55+ pre-made course templates and an easy drag-and-drop tool for creating courses, making it simple to organize chapters, modules, and lessons.
You can also create text-based lessons, videos, audio lessons, or mix-and-match media formats to keep students entertained.
There’s also a resource section that allows you to easily add additional learning resources such as PDFs, hyperlinks, and other resources.
Thrive Apprentice offers flexible content in various ways that let you consistently release lessons for every student. For example, you could get a new lesson to students every Monday on the day that the student purchases the course.
Using different drip schedules with various drip triggers for the same course is possible. This way, you don’t need to repeat your classes each time you receive new students.
With the Conditional Display feature of Thrive Apprentice, you can provide personalized content to various users to boost conversions. For example, you could show a different course overview for both students and visitors or modify what students are exposed to depending on the lessons they’ve taken.
If your students complete the course, you can display a customized course completion page, which includes the certificate as a PDF and the QR code to confirm the authenticity.
In addition, you can access helpful details about your students and your course with Thrive Apprentice’s advanced reporting engine. With just a few clicks, you will be able to obtain detailed reports about the enrolment of students and completion of courses and lesson completion, the students with the highest scores, progress, and drop-offs, as well as engagement.
Thrive Apprentice will also help you manage your membership website by providing a full-featured user management tool. In this section, you can give or remove users’ access to membership or course products according to their membership type.
Thrive Apprentice integrates seamlessly with the most popular WordPress plugins, such as WooCommerce and MemberPress, email marketing tools like Constant Contact and Sendinblue, and many other applications.
Pricing: You can purchase the Thrive Apprentice as a stand-alone plugin costing $147 per year. You can also purchase the whole Thrive plugins, including Thrive Leads, Thrive Quiz Builder, and many other tools, starting at $299 for a year.
#6 – WP Courseware
WP Courseware is another best WordPress LMS plugins with a drag-and-drop course creator. The powerful tool comes with bunches of options that can be used to build large or even small online courses.
If you make a course available for publish, WP Courseware will automatically create a list of the course on your website and encourage students to sign up.
Each course can include several units, modules and tests. For online learning, WP Courseware lets students download their courses in PDF, media files or even text.
If you want to create a guided learning experience, do it with WP Courseware. WP Courseware supports both course prerequisites as well as course tracks.
It also has the power to drip content, which means you can distribute lessons based on the date or number of days since the student was enrolled. This way, you’ll be able to keep students interested and engaged.
WP Courseware has instructor profiles, student grade books, and a host of other features to provide a fun experience to users. It also has a list of questions so you can easily make quizzes for various classes and modules.
If you want to sell your online training courses, WP Courseware has powerful monetization features. It comes with a shopping cart that allows you to connect directly with PayPal or Stripe and start selling your course as a one-time purchase or as a monthly subscription option.
It is possible to design complete courses, and WP courseware can support unlimited students. WP Courseware can help your online learning business even as it grows.
Price: WP Courseware licenses start at $129 for two websites with a Year of updates and support.
Are Premium LMS Plugins Worth the Cost?
While many excellent free options are available in the market, those free plugins lack the features required for your daily need, especially if your website becomes more popular. Most notably, your design choices and user-friendliness are much smoother when you use premium plugins.
It’s regarding navigating online coursework. Many people reading this will have completed a course online; if the interface for students could be better, it could be a better experience.
Expectations for these kinds of websites are increasing, with a shortage of competitors. This is why having all these bells and whistles available is more important than ever, and premium LMS plugins have that in spades.
Conclusion
The best WordPress LMS plugins provide everything you need to run and sell courses online, including course creation, progress tracking, enrolment, payment integration, and content dripping.
MemberPress and LearnDash are two of the top WordPress LMS plugins that offer these features and allow you to create and sell courses quickly with drag-and-drop course builders and customizable content.
Both plugins have various pricing options and integrate with popular payment gateways and email marketing tools. Whether you’re an individual teacher or a large university, these LMS plugins will help you offer online education services directly on your website.
