LearnPress vs LearnDash: Which Plugin is Best For You?

Whether you want to knit the perfect beanie or learn Python coding, online courses are an irreplaceable tool for learning a topic or mastering a skill. If you are a course creator planning to sell your courses through WordPress, LMS plugins can make your course creation easier! And yes, you might come across the long-standing LearnPress vs LearnDash debate!

While Learndash and LearnPress have been popular among course creators for quite some time, they are baffled about which is best! So, which LMS plugin would aid your course creation process? 

Both, in a way, serve the same purpose of creating and selling courses! However, there are some similarities and differences among these two platforms. 

To determine which plugin is best for your website, we have crafted this comprehensive blog that compares LearnPress and LearnDash. So, let’s navigate these platforms and find which fits the bill!

What is LearnPress?

Learnpress is one of the best learning management system(LMS) plugins developed by ThimPress. It is a free plugin tool complemented with premium add-on extensions. 

Source: ThimPress

So, how does LearnPress help in your course creation journey? 

LearnPress has a user-friendly interface that helps create an organized curriculum with lesson plans, quizzes, assessments, etc. It is well-rounded software that offers different ways to monetize your courses. This helps you seamlessly launch your course-selling website in no time!

Features

• Drag & Drop Course Builder
• Payment Integration with Popular Third-Party Platforms:
• Drip Feed Content
• Discussion Forums
• Gamification Features
• Multi-lingual Support
• Certificates and Course Reviews

Applications

Listed below are the use cases of LearnPress:

• Online Educators
• School Learning Management Systems
• Online Coaching Platforms
• Corporate Training LMS
• eLearning Marketplace

What is LearnDash?

LearnDash is another feature-rich WordPress plugin that helps you to create and sell custom online courses. Its seamless user interface offers course creation and management, course sales, tracking user progress, grant rewards, and more.

It also helps grow your business with third-party ecommerce tools like PayPal, RazorPay, WooCommerce, etc. Although the plugin renders complete control, it doesn’t have a free version. Overall, its visual course builder integrates quizzes, forums, and assignments to make your course interactive.

Source: LearnDash

Features

Here are the features of LearnDash:

• Visual Course Builder
• Assignment Management
• Integration with Third-Party E-commerce Tools
• Reward Management
• Drip Feed Content
• Advanced Quizzing
• Community Support
• Analytics and Reporting

Applications

The following are the use cases of LearnDash:

• Advanced E-learning Business
• Educational Institutions like the University of Florida and the University of Florida
• Brands like Yoast Academy, Digital Marketer, Keap, etc.

The Long-standing LMS Plugin Battle

Now, you know that WordPress is one of the most popular content management platforms. In fact, 43.2 % of websites worldwide are powered by WordPress.

One of the reasons for WordPress’s popularity is the extensive plugins available for customization. And guess what you get to customize your website without mastering coding? Over the years, WordPress has been the fastest-growing CMS with a 62.8% market share.

Sellcoursesonline.com, along with BuiltWith, conducted a survey on different WordPress LMS plugins to develop some interesting insights!

• LearnDash stands as the most popular plugin with a market share of 34%, followed by LearnPress with a 31% market share. 
• 83,415 course websites use LearnDash, 74,379 websites use LearnPress, and about 45,623 websites employ TutorLMS(19%)
• With 60.3% of high-tech spend websites leveraging LearnDash, it’s no surprise it’s preferred by industry leaders.
• Considering the low-tech spend category, 97.8% use free LMS plugins. In fact, LearnPress is used by 50% of users, and 28.8% depend on TutorLMS.  

Source: Sellcoursesonline.com

LearnPress vs LearnDash 

If you are a creator planning to sell courses through WordPress, LearnPress and LearnDash might be top contenders in your checklist! But although they serve the same purpose, they have significant differences in many aspects. 

Let’s take a look at how the two LMS plugins score points on the following aspects!

1. Course Creation

Two popular LMS plugins, LearnPress and LearnDash have an excellent drag-and-drop course builder that makes course creation a seamless experience. Both of them also offer drip feed and scheduling. 

Content Drip allows the course creators to release lessons as scheduled parts. Learners don’t get everything all at once, which increases their engagement. 

LearnPress: Its drag-and-drop builder helps you organize courses, lessons, and quizzes the way you want. Does your course include multiple content formats? The popular plugin allows you to integrate different images, videos, audio, and slideshows into your lessons and quizzes.

You can even export the courses and re-use the content on other WordPress websites! Content Drip is a premium feature in the LearnPress Pro bundle.

With LearnPress, you can create free or paid courses and choose one-time or monthly payment options. Furthermore, you can offer previewable lessons so learners can understand the course better.

LearnDash: On the other hand, LearnDash offers more specialized functionalities to create a multi-layered curriculum. The course content section can be broken down into lesson plans and quizzes. 

Each lesson plan can include either images, embedded videos, link files, etc. Further, these lesson plans can be divided into topics. 

Like lesson plans, topics can include multiple media types. Quizzes can be part of either lessons or topics. We will discuss quizzes and assessments in detail in the next section! 

Source:LearnDash

LearnDash offers 5 different access modes for a particular course: open, accessible, buy now, recurring, and closed. 

Additionally, two other distinctive features of LeanDash are course prerequisites and course points. These help define conditions like gaining certain course points or completing one or more courses to unlock a particular course. They are great ways to incentivize your learners to complete a course.

Verdict: So, comparatively, LearnDash allows creating more structured courses, while LearnPress is for creating a basic course.

2. Quizzes & Assignments

Do you want to test how far learners can grasp the course topics? Include an interactive quiz or a quick assignment at the end of the module. While both the LMS plugin contenders have the quiz and assignment feature, their effectiveness differs.

LearnPress: Quizzes are an essential part of this LMS plugin. However, it renders limited options. For instance, you can include true/false and multiple-choice questions but no essay questions. 

Assignments are another excellent way to examine how far learners can comprehend the course concepts. LearnPress’s assignment add-on feature helps to assign and manage assignments to make them more engaging. Customized assignments incorporate a practical approach into the course.

LearnDash: At this point, LearnDash gains an edge with advanced quiz types and grading methods. You can set your quizzes’ prerequisites, passing grades or even time limits. 

Here are the different question types LearnDash offers:

• Single choice question
• Multiple choice questions
• Fill in the blanks
• Essay questions
• Free Choice
• Sorting Choice
• Matrix sorting choice
• Assessment (survey)

Like LearnPress, LearnDash allows uploading assignments for each lesson or topic. You can even gamify your assignments with a manual or auto-approve point-system.

Verdict: Overall, LearnDash has a far superior quizzing and assignment feature than LearnPress. The former provides a comprehensive list of question types to create a more detailed course.

3. Design & Ease of Use

Speaking about design and usability, both LearnPress and LearnDash have user-friendly and interactive design. The drag-and-drop course builder and dedicated dashboard make creating and organizing the course elements easy.

LearnPress: It has a more simplistic design that makes it easier for beginners to start with their course creation process. Given its intuitive user interface, creating your first course is just a few clicks away! However, its minimalistic design does hinder the creation of complex courses that require depth and structuring. 

LearnPress offers a host of premium LMS themes to create a professional course-selling website, and Eduma is one of the best-selling LearnPress themes.

LearnDash: In contrast, LearnDash’s feature-rich software offers all the possible options to create a comprehensive course. Its dashboard encompasses a set of advanced tools and features to create different quiz types, design sophisticated course structures, and embed dynamic delivery methods.

LearnDash also comes with a collection of compatible WordPress themes, such as Astra, BuddyBoss, and Sydney, rendering an unparalleled design!

Verdict: While LearnPress’s subtle design makes it the perfect platform for beginners, its functionality is limited to basic courses. LearnDash is a viable alternative for designing an intricate course that might be daunting with LearnPress. 

4. Pricing 

LearnPress: When it comes to pricing, LearnPress edges ahead with its free core plugin. The free version allows unlimited courses and includes free add-ons and all the basic functionalities to create and sell courses online! So, it’s perfect for small e-learning projects. 

However, its free plugin allows payment integration with only Paypal. So, if you are looking beyond small e-learning businesses, opt for the semi-pro bundle or pro bundle. The semi-pro bundle costs $149 and allows multiple third-party payment integrations, certificates and gradebooks.

The LearnPress Pro Bundle is $299. The pro version includes additional features, such as selling multiple courses, Stripe add-on and content drip availability. 

LearnPress Pricing Source: Thimpress

 

LearnDash: Unlike LearnPress, LearnDash doesn’t have any free core plugins. Instead, it caters to a premium audience involving large organizations and businesses.

The robust LMS plugin provides three different packages. The basic plan includes one site license at $199/ year, including updates and support. Next, the pro plus package costs $399/ year and involves 10 site licenses. It is typically designed for businesses with multiple sites. 

Lastly, the pro package offers unlimited site licenses at $799/ year. This ideal solution is for massive organizations with high bandwidth and storage requirements.

Additionally, you can extend the LMS plugin with different add-ons for propanel, gradebook, notes, etc. These add-ons are available individually or as course creator bundles at a discounted price.

Verdict: If you are looking to build a basic course-selling website, the free core plugin from LearnPress is enough. But if you are planning to build an advanced LMS website, opt for a feature-packed platform like Learndash. 

LearnDash Pricing Source: LearnDash

5. Monetization Options

The ultimate goal of selling courses from your website is to monetize your content. Both these LMS plugins support monetizing your courses through popular payment platforms.

LearnPress: Its free core plugin allows you to sell your courses through the PayPal gateway. Besides, you can use add-ons to integrate popular payment providers like Stripe, 2Checkout, Authorise.NET, and WooCommerce with your website. 

Do you wish to sell your courses on a subscription or as a one-time payment? LearnPress allows you to sell courses with a membership plan, or monthly payment. 

LearnDash: Conversely, LearnDash leverages a more flexible pricing model. Course creators can sell paid courses or lessons, monetize courses as bundles or sell them as membership plans. Additionally, they can create a Udemy-like marketplace, offer free trials, or even charge for course certificates.

LearnDash’s in-built payment gateway list includes popular payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay, 2Checkout, WooCommerce, ThriveCart, etc. 

Verdict: With its inbuilt monetization feature, LearnDash offers a more convenient pricing model. It allows you to sell course bundles rather than selling courses individually.

6. Marketing & Sales Tools

While creating your course is crucial, it’s just the tip of the iceberg! Marketing and sales management are also pivotal aspects of course creation. LearnPress and LearnDash integrate with third-party marketing tools to grow your business.

LearnPress: With this LMS plugin, you can perform basic marketing such as email notifications and coupons. You can also integrate LearnPress with email marketing solutions like FluentCRM to upscale your marketing. 

Here’s how FluentCRM helps to market your course:

• Import your LearnPress students’ data and categorize them 
• Segment students easily with different labels like course enrollment, lesson completion & course completion
• Create and manage stunning email campaigns for your targeted audience
• Send trigger-based emails and nurture relationships with the audience

LearnDash: It allows integrations with email marketing, content marketing, and affiliate marketing automation tools. For email marketing, LearnDash integrates with FluentCRM, MailChimp, Zapier, etc.

Another popular integration is WooCommerce, which provides a variety of marketing and sales features to choose from.

Here’s how you can sell courses with WooCommerce:

• Customize the account store’s checkout and user account page
• Integrates with all popular CRMs to create stunning marketing campaigns
• Access to all the popular third-party payment integrations
• Enables the use of discount codes and maximizes course sales 

Verdict: LearnDash supports email, social and content marketing by integrating with different automation solutions. However, LearnPress integrates with limited marketing tools.  

7. Support & Documentation

Support and documentation are essential for customer satisfaction and retention. Let’s compare both plugins and see which fares better!

LearnPress: With dedicated WordPress forums and detailed documentation, LearnPress offers support to users. LearnPress’s documentation is detailed and easy to understand. From the basic installation and admin guide to more advanced features, it covers it all!

LearnPress Documentation Source: LearnPress

LearnDash: It provides more advanced support with a ticket-raising system. Users can fill out the request form and raise a ticket to fix an issue. Besides, LearnDash’s documentation is more detailed and categorized. It explains all the features and settings with screenshots to guide the users while using the plugin.

Additionally, LearnDash’s community forum is large, offering a host of available resources. 

Verdict: Comprehensive documentation, detailed user guides, and a massive community are the key strengths of LearnDash. It provides more user support, while LearnPress has certain limitations when resolving complex issues. 

LearnDash Documentation Source: LearnDash

8. Analytics & Reporting

While both LearnPress and LearnDash offer basic analysis and reporting tools, LearnDash excels in this area. Let’s see how it scores points!

LearnPress: This well-known plugin offers basic reporting and analytics, such as tracking the student’s progress. The GradeBook add-on helps track student performance and allows data to be exported into CSV format. 

Listed below are the different reports that LearPress provides:

• Quiz Reports
• Course Completion Reports
• User Reports
• Course Revenue Report
• Site Statistics Report

LearnDash: From course progress reports to specific details like usage statistics, LearnDash renders superior performance. With this plugin, you can get dynamic monitoring for all the courses, users, and the e-learning platform. 

Google Analytics and Propanel are the two add-ons that provide a big picture of the platform’s analytics. Google Analytics offers insights like the number of website visitors, their bounce rate, pages they visited, etc. Propanel helps to track student progress, enrollments, and assignments.

Here’s a quick overview of the different reports Learndash provides:

• Track Student’s progress
• Course-specific analytics like pending actions
• Quiz Reports
• Course Analytics
• Marketing Analytics
• Usage Statistics

Verdict: In short, LearnDash is far more advanced than LearnPress in analytics and reporting. LearnPress’s basic reporting is suitable for small businesses and organizations. Conversely, LearnDash’s advanced analytics and reporting are ideal for educational institutions and businesses that need in-depth analytics.

9. Student Features

To summarize, LearnPress and LearnDash are great LMS plugins for creating a full-fledged e-learning platform. Let’s understand these two plugins from a student’s perspective to see which excels better!

LearnPress: It provides a range of diverse student features, from course accessibility to viewing course lessons and topics, quizzes, and assignments for tracking student’s progress.

Further, the students get automatic updates on their scores when completing quizzes or learning activities through the GradeBook add-on. With the certificate add-on, students can receive certificates on successful course completion. Additionally, students can ask questions or voice their concerns in the community forum.

LearnDash: LearnDash is a feature-rich plugin offering advanced features for students. From a multi-layered course structure to advanced quizzing, assignments, certificates, and coupons, LearnDash has it all to create an exhaustive course!

LearnDash’s detailed analytics can create in-depth user profiles for tracking performance. Further, LearnDash has an interactive forum with abundant resources to guide users through the course creation process.

Verdict: Comparatively, LearnDash is a powerful plugin with diverse features to enhance the learning experience. From advanced quizzing, detailed analytics and engaging discussion forums, LearnDash has much to offer!

10. Integrations & Add-ons

Add-ons are a great way to extend your platform’s functionality and create a fully-fledged course-selling platform. LearnPress and LearnDash provide a wide range of add-ons to create a feature-rich platform experience.

LearnPress: With an extensive list of free and premium plugins, LearnPress facilitates the integration of payment gateways, membership plans, email marketing solutions, e-commerce tools, and more. Moreover, different plugins are available for creating and selling courses, managing courses, and reviewing courses. 

Let’s look at some of the free and premium LearnPress plugins!

Free Plugins

• LearnPress Course Review
• LearnPress Wishlist
• LearnPress Import/Export
• LearnPress BuddyPress

Premium Plugins

• Certificate Add-ons
• WPML Add-on
• LiveCourse Add-on 
• Assignments Add-on
• WooCommerce Add-on

LearnDash: With a more robust collection of free and paid add-ons, LearnDash enhances courses with more features. Furthermore, It boasts an extensive library of plugins and integrations for communications and API, e-commerce, design and layout, grading and reports, etc.

Here’s a comprehensive list of free and paid plugins for LearnDash:

Free Plugin

• LearnDash Integrity
• LearnDash Communication Builder 
• LearnDash Course Grid
• LearnDash Migrations
• LearnDash Reviews

Paid Plugins

• ProPanel
• GradeBook
• GroupPlus by LearnDash
• Notes by LearnDash

Third-Party Plugins

• Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit
• Topic Progression for Storyline & Captivate
• Zoom WordPress Plugin
• LearnDash Notes

Now, let’s have a quick overview of all the above mentioned points!

Feature	LearnPress	LearnDash
Course Creation	Basic Course Creations	Advanced features for structured course creation
Quizzes & Assignments	Limited quiz questions types and assignment options	Advanced quizzing and assignment grading options
Ease-of-use & Design	Beginner-friendly	Intuitive, feature-rich
Pricing	Free plugin, paid add-ons	Premium plugin, subscription-tier
Monetization Options	Less options	Wide range of options; allows selling course bundles
Marketing & Sales Tools	Integrates with many marketing automation solutions	Limited marketing automation solutions
Support & Documentation	Easy-to-go through, well-explained documentation; limited support for complex queries	Exhaustive and detailed user-guide; advanced ticket-raising system
Analytics & Reporting	Basic	Detailed
Student Features	Essential features	Comprehensive feature-list
Integrations & Add-ons	Only important add-ons	Broad range of add-ons

That’s pretty much the detailed comparison of both LMS plugins! 

LearnPress or LearnDash: Who is the winner?

While both LearnPress and LearnDash are two excellent plugins with a rich feature set, you can choose one that suits your purpose and budget. This blog delineates both the LMS plugins on different factors like course creation, quizzes and assignments, integrations and add-ons, etc. 

It was certainly a long read, so let’s recap the main points!

1. LearnPress’s free core plugin helps with basic course creation, management, and selling. Alternatively, LearnDash is a powerful LMS plugin designed for a more advanced course-selling platform. 
2. LearnDash gains an edge in student features with its multi-layered course curriculum, advanced quizzing, assignment tracking, manual grading, etc..
3. LearnPress has a minimalistic and intuitive design that makes it perfect for beginners. Conversely, LearnDash is user-friendly and feature-rich, so users can get acquainted with the software only with time.
4. If you plan to build a smooth and reliable course-creation platform that’s easy to set up and learn, LearnPress serves your purpose. However, for a premium yet lightweight plugin, LearnDash is an ideal choice!

While WordPress together with LMS plugins offer a more profound learning experience, it also has its caveats. The biggest disadvantage is that WordPress is that it is primarily designed to be a CMS rather than a course-selling platform.

To create a full-fledged course-selling platform, you need to integrate LMS plugins with separate add-ons for different functionalities. This increases the overall cost and affects website performance.

So, is there a solution? Ready-made clone scripts like Pinlearn allow you to create a professional course-selling website within no time! And it effortlessly integrates with all the popular payment platforms.

Why create a Course-Selling Platform with Pinlearn?

Pinlearn is a self-hosted, white-labeled solution with all the essential features for creating a course-selling platform. In fact, it offers both live tutoring sessions and self-paced courses to create a complete e-learning experience!

Here are Pinlearn’s core features that make it an ideal choice to grow your course-selling business:

• Create & Sell Courses: With Pinlearn’s course management software, you can easily create, sell, and track your courses. 
• Live Tutoring: Students can book both one-to-one and group live sessions for different topics.
• Multimedia Lesson Support: Tutors can upload learning materials as images, videos, PDFs, ebooks, and audio notes to create a well-rounded course.
• Dedicated Tutor Dashboard: From detailed course listing and course creation to earning dashboard, you have complete control over your platform.  
• Analytics & Reporting: Pinlearn’s dedicated dashboard includes detailed reports on student enrollment, uploaded courses, commission and payout requests.
• Integrations : Pinlearn integrates with third party platforms like Stripe, Paypal, etc. Tutors can also use interactive whiteboards with Zoom API and LessonSpace.

FAQs Related to LearnPress vs LearnDash

1. Which among LearnPress and LearnDash is a better LMS plugin?

LearnPress and LearnDash are both  popular LMS plugins. With its simplistic design and free plugin, LearnPress is suitable for basic course creation by bloggers, tutors or small businesses. Alternatively, LearnDash is a robust LMS plugin for designing more structured courses..

2. Which is the most affordable WordPress LMS?

LearnPress provides a free plugin for basic course creation and an affordable pricing model starting at $149/year.

3. Which LMS is ideal for basic course creation?

With its simplistic design and ease of use, LearnPress is ideal for basic course creation.  Small businesses and educational projects can use LearnPress as a viable LMS plugin option.