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

Teachable, Kajabi and LearnUpon

Reasons for Choosing LearnDash

See my previous comments.

Switched From

TalentLMS

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

See above.

Pros

The features/functions of this product are top notch. Particularly if you are building a new eLearning site and are willing to use their theme and their UX OOB, this is very easy to implement and has great features.

Cons

The support experience has been horrendous! My task has been to integrate this LMS into an existing website which is very complex and sophisticated, without turning the existing UX on its head. The Support organization has been utterly useless either re-directing me to other plugins or mis-directing me with information that was simply wrong. The GravityForms integration is so poorly conceived as to be useless for my needs, and Support cannot provide any developer-level assistance at all. I've tried everything to get through to them - even contacting the CEO via LinkedIn - with no success. I'm now on the verge of demanding they cancel my license and refund the fee.

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

Professionalism, beautiful interface, course management features, topics, tests, certification. The number of sortcode pongs is rich, making it easy to choose from when it comes to creating custom pages.Integrates well with a large number of other software based on wordpress.This is a platform that offers very good online courses.

Cons

course packaging function, I have a hard time transferring a course to another system or importing a course from another system

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

Moodle

Reasons for Choosing LearnDash

LearnDash provided a larger community with more integrations, a better interface, and additional features.

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

LearnDash was more flexible and user-friendly it's integration with WordPress provided access to a much wider community.

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

WPLMS

Reasons for Switching to LearnDash

Scorm capability and other features need it at the time.

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

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

Honestly, after banging my head against a wall trying desperately to Frankenstein other options together, I finally broke down and bought LearnDash and wish I had done so sooner. It solved a LOT of stressful issues oof how to create courses online, membership management, and the whole process of putting a system in place that works and doing so in a fairly straightforward way.

Cons

I absolutely hate WordPress. Every time I fix one issue, the solution causes two more. I spend more time building my site and working on it than I do actually creating content. So my only complaint about this software is that I have to use it on Wordpress.

Pros

I started tinkering with LearnDash a few years ago but never launched my initial product. However, I kept my license active and watched as the LD team continued to upgrade and refine the product. I'm very much a DIY developer and I love that this full-featured package allows me to run a very sophisticated LMS system off of WordPress. The Notifications Add-on fills in a missing piece and enables me to create subscription content wit email notification of timed course content.

Cons

When setting up notifications, it's necessary to manually specify a recipient. If you miss this, nobody will get the email. If "user" was the default recipient, you wouldn't have to double-check in most instances. And in the list of notifications, this would be a great setting to be able to change in bulk or at least see in the dashboard without having to open each notification. Also, while I'm able to do this with shortcodes, I'd love to see a header and footer template for email notifications, and maybe even a visual builder.

Pros

The lesson page are amazing especially when LD is coupled with Presto Player and Buddyboss.
The various courses page are also pretty awesome (again when coupled with BuddyBoss).
The quizz, lessons, courses are overall pretty quick to set up.

Cons

Updating or finding quizz / course / lessons is a real pain.. and I feel a lot of time is lost while adjusting structure of course and all. The builder is amazing but then to change lesson and so on it becomes a rabbit hole and once a lot of lesson and so on are created it becomes a real maze....
I wish the interface would be a bit more minimal so we could maybe see more things at the same time...
Also LD is overall pretty buddy (in term of front end) stuff sometime shows, sometimes not, and I had to ask alternate developper to fix all the issue that are within LD. Also updating the plugin is very scary, as so far I updated two times, and had to roll back because the website ended up being totally broken.. :) (visually)

Pros

It has many of the features that we were looking for right out of the box without added plugins. The Course Grid View feature with video previews and custom layouts is also exceptional. The codebase is robust and it's got a lot of fantastic documentation.

The support is just next level as well. That's played a huge role in our development, as we needed quite a bit of advice on advanced customization for our build. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] on the support team went above and beyond, with same-day replies packed with detailed, and useful information.

Cons

There are a couple of features that are currently available only as WSDM Labs plugin add-ons that I would like added to the core functionality, such as instructor roles and customized testimonials/reviews. But in general, it's extremely good.

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

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.

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.

Pros

Support is always key for me - even if I never need it and even presale the support team was responsive and helpful. After that comes an intuitive interface and they score high here as well. I also used an extensive online library of video lessons any time I wanted to fill in my personal knowledge base. Also, with the inclusion of a partner like Elementor I was able to deliver a workspace to the client that is reflective of their core website.

Cons

We ended up creating this as a subdomain to the parent site and that worked well for us. The addition of Elementor to their pool of available tools is fairly recent and the documentation is slim from both parties. I hope that this improves and that there is a greater ability to customize even more in the future. Also, I wish the documentation was better for user login, especially when you have incorporated WooCommerce.

Pros

I'm using Learndash with WooCommerce and Cartflows. Perfect integration. Seamless integration also with Elementor, I customized my entire site easily. LearnDash plays very well with other major plugins. That's perfect.
The support is very good and quick to answer to any questions. Nevertheless, I didn't have much problems with LearnDash. And when I had, it was because of other plugins. But the support even helped me to find a solution.
In term of learning, it's very easy to construct courses and to sell them. I love the focus mode and the ProPanel. I can't wait to see what will be next !

Cons

There are not a lot of things I don't like about LearnDash. Maybe I would like to have more native functions of customization. But that's not much. The entire experience as a creator and as a user is very good.

Pros

I really liked how it works to upload classes and the platform in general. Everything worked very well easy to post and is separated by course, insert users to assemble the course.

Cons

I was a little more confused when it came to customizing some internal parts, but the support was exceptional helping me with everything I needed.

Pros

The reason for our choice of Learndash software was to build our own LMS platform, without any coding and now we run on it all our courses, short and long. Easily and without great problems.

Cons

- Reporting could be improved a lot. In France, we need a lot of it for legal reasons. At the end of a course, we need to export a complete and individual report for each student.
Pdf export of such a document would be a great improvement for all French training organizations .
- Impossible to send easily an email to all or a group of students ... Or didn't I find the way to do it ?

Pros

* LearnDash allows me to style my course the way I want it. * It integrates well with WordPress. * It provides the opportunity to sell courses online. * There are great sharing options. * LearnDash is easy to install and use

Cons

* The need for installing some plugins is a bit annoying. * Customization is a bit hard in some areas.* The need for add-ons to better the software functionality.