LearnDash Reviews

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing LearnDash

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

Pros

Because it's based on WordPress, LearnDash not only comes with a lot of customization settings out of the box but plugs into a huge community of themes and plugins that can take your design and functionality practically any conceivable direction!

Cons

Some third-party developers created low-cost add-ons that didn't provide as reliable of a codebase as the core LearnDash software. Stick with reputable developers for third-party add-ons such as those mentioned on their website.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing LearnDash

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

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.

Pros

It offers deep functionality that lets us build and customized courses for the management team. Very well structured and run smooth.

Cons

Nothing about the functionality of the software , but the integration of third- party plugins to some important functionalities that should have like a robust reporting, a student (user) portal page and a gamification structure.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

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

Pros

Building my course using LearnDash was simple, even though I had no previous experience in building a webpage. I really like the interface and the ability to customize the branding. My students have had great feedback about the format of the course, especially since I switched to focus mode.

Cons

I'm still learning the software so not I'm note quite sure yet. User management and setting up reporting and email strategies could be better, but there are some add on solutions that may help with this.

Pros

I bought 2 another WordPress LMS but ur system it's pretty all the e-learn community need . It have the taste of many time inverted very well to have a very impressive LMS.

Cons

Specially for my project: i need to have freedom to organize the quizes like topics, buy it have some restriction and put it the bottom.

Pros

Easy to use and configure. Support has been great, they try to understand and help.

Cons

Certificate editing, simply awful. I found my way around and make it work, but for sure it can be better.

Pros

I really enjoy building my online courses and course portfolio - it is very enjoable and user friendly process to use.

Cons

Nothing, it has allowed me to create a great course platform

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

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.

Pros

It does function as a learning management system if you are just getting your business started, this is a good place to test your product.

Cons

Support seemed challenging to come by, there was no online support and I ended up having to pay a developer from Upwork to set up my learndash for me after watching countless youtube tutorials.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

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.

Pros

LearnDash is packed with useful features that make it perfect for creating and managing online courses. Its course builder is straightforward to use. It has helped me create engaging lessons, quizzes, and assignments effortlessly, saving me a lot of time. I love the flexibility that LearnDash offers in delivering course content. Whether it's text-based lessons, videos, audio files, or downloadable resources, I can choose the format that suits my students' learning preferences. This adaptability enhances the overall learning experience.

Cons

One limitation I noticed is the visual customization. Although LearnDash offers some customization options for course layouts and branding, users with advanced design requirements might find them somewhat limited. However, with basic HTML and CSS knowledge, it is possible to make additional visual customizations.

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.

Pros

LearnDash is easy to set up and works well with WordPress. I've been using LearnDash for over 4 years and each version gets better, with more options and power. It is the best way to offer online courses, either paid or free and we've set it up with grading or certification for several websites. LearnDash has a lot of features including courses, lessons, quizzes, and more. Also there's additional plugins to help extend it further or if you're a PHP programmer, you can extend it even further. It costs but it really is a premium plugin and they do have great support.

Cons

There is definitely a learning curve the first time you use it but it's all laid out logically and you'll figure it out in no time. Quizzes can take a while to set up but straightforward. There's a few things that are buried in the settings that can be gotchas but overall a really solid product.

Pros

I looked at other options, explored Moodle extensively. All our sites are built in WordPress, so I had a fair bit of familiarity - so when I discovered LearnDash, I was excited to try it. This is the exact plugin I needed to solve my compliance and training problems. They keep upgrading its core functionality, I've found other plugins to extend its features, and their support team is very helpful when I make stupid mistakes.

Cons

One would really benefit from a solid understanding of WordPress to make the best use of LearnDash.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

Pros

It is just great value for money - what you get even as standard is really good. Loads of free plugins which are great. And I really like Notes and Private Sessions paid plugins. The support is also very good and genuinely helpful

Cons

The only tricky part was working out the plugins needed for user registration, but there is an excellent guide on line. Like with all Wordpress tech theres always a few different options and it takes a while to figure out what is best for you.

Pros

I like that LearnDash works seamlessly and that it has a lot of useful features (although sometimes I even feel like it's too much).

Cons

Sometimes LearnDash is too complicated and can overwhelm you with the amount of features.

Pros

As an experienced WordPress user (for over 12 years) and a course creator for as many years, I can say that hands-down, LearnDash offers a fantastic, easy-to-use, powerhouse course creation software. Not only is it easy to add and update courses and content, it provides a wonderful user experience for our students! We often receive comments as to how sleek and attractive the online classroom looks and how easy it is to use.

Cons

I can't really say there are any cons however I did need to reach out for support to ask a few questions when initially setting up the interface. That said, we were able to get up and running in record time and able to set up many courses quickly and easily. We produce approximately one course each month, so we needed something that would make it possible for us to replicate the process over and over again.

Pros

I'm a non-techie and LearnDash seems to be a good LMS. After encountering problems early on, I eventually managed to understand the basics.

Cons

Insufficient awareness by the coprorate office of the extreme challenges of the L-D LMS for non-techies. [I started using it in 2018]

Pros

Instructs are straight forward, took me a bit to figure out exactly how to make things work the way I wanted them too. If I got in to a bind, LD support was there to help make the program do what I wanted. Two thumbs up for the Tech Support

Cons

The thing that I don't care for is when building a certificate, you almost have to have two windows open to figure out where the placements go. You setup a fake test/quiz, with one question and use that to get a certificate window, go into your builder, and start laying out your certificate. If you try to click on the certificate in builder you get a forbiden page, Would be nice to just be able to open up the certificate and not have to go though so many steps to build or edit a certificate overlay

Pros

LearnDash makes it possible for our members to learn English more easily thanks to quizzes and interactive lessons and learning paths (progress tracking, personalized corrections, asynchronous learning and so on).

Cons

It takes a bit of time to understand how LearnDash works but the learning curve is not too steep as the customer support department is really, really good!
Beware that LearnDash can be super ressource-intensive if you have many members and/on many concurrent users on your membership site.

Pros

There are many pros to Learndash. First, I have not encountered any bugs, and I have built a quite expensive course. Second, it can be integrated with with many other plugins that Wordpress sites typically have, such as Memberpress and Woocommerce. It think the quizzes themselves are great, although it would be better if you could create a quiz in Google sheets and then import it.

Cons

The way quiz results are displayed is really lacking. When a student takes a quiz, he or she can see the result right after taking the quiz. But, if the user comes back to the quiz later, the user cannot see their previous attempt, they cannot see which questions they got wrong or right, or any information at all about their previous quiz attempt. This seems to be a very important feature that almost all students would want. I guess I will have to build them out in a custom way with PHP and MySQL. The other is to buy a plugin, but it still won't do what I want.

Pros

When it Comes to WordPress lms plugin, Learndash is the best. The interface is very easy to understand both for authors and students, it is having many features compared to other plugins thus saving Space and money you dont need to buy and install extra plugins and it integrates well with third party plugins or Platforms

Cons

Eventhough Learndash is an excellent plugin, their customer support is not hundred percent active. At Times i have to open a ticket and wait several days before having a solution

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.