Top Five WordPress LMS Plugins Reviewed

Online learning is getting popular for many reasons, and one of the most significant causes is people don’t want to stop learning because they’re stuck at home. While the scenario for educators is different, as they want to start a business in the digital world, while sitting idly.

Whatever the reason for you, it’s time to get up and running with your coaching business. But how to get started, you may wonder! That’s where I come to give you five best WordPress LMS plugins to make your dream come true. Even if you don’t have any prior course building experience, these tools can lead the way.

LMS Market in a nutshell

In 2019, the global online learning market was circulated around $101 billion, where the LMS platforms earned $18 billion. During the pandemic with the last two years, you can imagine how much the market could expand!

The future of the LMS market is big and bright. Experts projected the e-learning market could become as large as $370 by 2026. Staying in the house taught us how to turn confinement into productive actions.

Online learning solutions available now

There are multiple solutions available currently to start with an online learning platform. We can categorize them into three major groups.

1. Marketplace: Marketplaces are where you can start a course, but you don’t need to worry about selling or promoting them. You’ve already known about many of them, such as Udemy, Skillshare, Udacity, Coursera, and so on.

While these platforms are very popular and seem highly profitable, the actual scenarios tell different things. It’s really hard to stand out among thousands of courses, and only a few can be benefitted. You don’t own the customers, and you have nothing to do with marketing.

2. Platforms: These are learning platforms where you will find many ready facilities to get started with your course. Such platforms are Teachable, Thinkifi, Kajabi, and others.

The main benefit of platforms is they’re easy to set up, but you’ll get frustrated with the limited options they provide. More alarmingly, they can close your course or change the pricing model, which will affect your audience. 

In other words, you don’t have freedom with both of the above solutions. Now, let’s take a look at the third option. 

3. WordPress Plugins: You can create your school within your WordPress website using a WordPress LMS plugin. You can think about Thrive Apprentice, LearnDash, LifterLMS, MemberPress, and more.

If I have to tell you one single benefit of WordPress LMS plugins, it would be to own your content. You’re the sailor of your boat, so you’ll decide in which direction it will go. You have complete control over courses, pricing, customers, marketing, and everything else.

The only problem you may face is making your platform look professional. Unlike the marketplace and platforms, you have to deal with the design and functionality. We’ll try to solve this problem also.

Best WordPress LMS Plugins

I have garnered five best WordPress plugins among a ton of choices. Read and learn which one can get you maximum benefits.

Thrive Apprentice 

Welcome to the new kid on the block. You might know the Thrive Suits already since it’s a popular power-pack for building online businesses. Thrive Apprentice is the new inclusion to this suite.

If you ever felt anxiety, headache, and frustration with WordPress LMS plugins, Thrive Apprentice has some good news. It’s here to give you a brand-new experience with a lot of good feelings.

Currently, there are six templates available for course building, so you don’t have to scratch your head to get started. But that’s not the only mentionable thing. The visual builder is the most crucial part I like very much. And I’m sure you’ll feel real good by seeing how easy it is to create and customize a course and lessons.

For checkout, you have three options to choose from – WooCommerce, ThriveCart, and SendOWL. Other great options such as restrict content, membership plugins integrations, custom registration and login forms, landing page templates – you’re going to enter a world of endless possibilities.

LifterLMS

With the next-level drag and drop course builder, you can easily create courses in the quickest amount of time. If you want to launch a multi-instructor-powered online course, LifterLMS will allow you to build that as an LMS platform or a membership website.

One of the fantastic reasons I like LifterLMS is that it can let you grow with a membership-style business. Without requiring any additional membership plugins, it will allow you to earn revenue with upsells and recurring cash flow.

Learning should be fun. And as a course builder, the more engagement you can achieve, the higher sales you can expect. Leverage all the enthralling features this plugin offers you to keep your students focused. That includes assignments, quizzes, gamification, community, and more.

No worries about control and security, as LifterLMS had excellent features for that. Individual user account, drip content, personalized student dashboards, secure content protection, and a lot more to discover. The integration list is versatile with add-ons from different niches: WooCommerce, Ninja Forms, Authorize.net, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Stripe, PayPal, and others.

MemberPress

MemberPress is a widely used tool for creating a membership site while offering many incredible options for e-learning platforms. That being said, you can sell online courses, accept payments, protect your content, and do everything else at ease.

As I have mentioned in my membership plugins post, a membership plugin should offer an LMS solution. Well, here it is. Using the Courses add-on, you can use MemberPress as a combination of LMS and membership plugin.

You can implement access rules on your users based on the packages they bought or subscribed to. With MemberPress, you can create restrictions to pages, posts, tags, categories, and every other file within the WordPress environment.

Content dripping (or a time-based action) is one of the most expected features of an LMS plugin. As MemberPress has dripping facility, your content will expire for students at the time you set. Or, you can control when to release a particular course.

MemberPress has an extensive list of integrations, including Elementor, AffiliatedWP, AWeber, ConstantContact, ConvertKit, and bbPress. For payment, you can use Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, ThriveCart, and more. With Zapier, you can extend the tool to unlock more features.

LearnDash

WordPress LMS plugin by Learndash can be your go-to partner for starting an online business. I will tell you why. First of all, course creation is a breeze with a drag and drop course builder. With a few clicks, you can customize the whole environment, add a logo, define colors, and tweak other things for a better user experience. Schedule content with the drip-feeding option or approve group-based learning – you can do so much with easy steps.

Dynamic content delivery is another powerful way to utilize advanced options, such as drip-feed content and linear progression. Even more, you can set prerequisites to access courses and lessons.

LearnDash has the complete solution for everything you require from a learning management tool. From that point, it has badges and certifications based on course completion or quiz results. For enhanced engagement, there are discussion forums, course points, leaderboards, assignments, automated trigger emails, and much more!

Integrations with Stripe, WooCommerce, PayPal, Easy Digital Downloads, and 2checkout will help you get paid from selling your courses. Moreover, you can use other tools like ConvertKit, GamiPress, Zapier, and Gravity Forms to extend your LMS business. 

I think LearnDash’s quizzing is the best in the industry. It outperforms its competitors with more quiz types and quiz result display. Text, video, and audio – yes, you can use several media to deliver quizzes. And eight question types include multiple-choice, mix and match, survey, and essay.

TutorLMS

To allow you an easy solution for course building, TutorLMS presents a simple drag and drop system. So, you can create lessons, assignments, and quizzes with ease. Speaking of quizzes, there’s an advanced quiz builder to enhance engagement for students. 

While you’re expecting to set your learning platform ready for monetization, TutorLMS made it solved for you. You can find all the popular checkout solutions right at your fingertip. Choose your favorite one from WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, or Restrict Content Pro.

If you want to keep a multi-instructor course, there you have it inside TutorLMS. Page builder or WordPress theme, this LMS plugin is compatible with all. They also have their own WordPress education themes for your e-learning website.

TutorLMS is rich with integrations, and some of its incredible tools are AutomatorWP, GamiPress, WP Fusion, Google Classroom, Elementor, Oxygen Builder, and Restrict Content Pro. Furthermore, TutorLMS helps you distribute earnings and commissions to several instructors. If you want to know how your platform’s performing, analyze the report section.

Final call – which WordPress LMS plugin are you going to choose?

You know about the top five LMS plugins for WordPress. All are good considering the basic features. The difference comes in some particular parameters, which might or not be your priority. What’s your goal with your coaching business? Answer that question first, and check out which tool is right for you.