9 Best WordPress LMS Plugins

  • Plugins

Nowadays online courses have become a popular way for people to advance in life and career without spending too much money. In fact, it is an easy way to turn your own knowledge and experience into revenue. So, if you are looking forward to sharing your knowledge online, in the form of online courses, your best bet is to choose from one of the popular WordPress LMS plugins. These LMS plugins help you to create and sell courses online and users all over the world can access them, as long as you choose one with the features you want.

In this article, we are covering our picks for the best WordPress LMS plugins that make it extremely easy to present the knowledge and experience you already have. Now, there are many LMS plugins out there and it will be difficult for you to choose the best one for your needs. So you need to first understand your basic requirement before selecting a particular plugin. Whatever your necessities may be, here are some of the most essential features to look for in your LMS plugin:

  • Uncomplicated to create and manage a course.
  • Potentiality to monitor the progress of students.
  • Content dripping to schedule lessons.
  • Option to offer certificates and badges as incentives
  • Built-in payment gateway support and monetization options.
  • Quizzes and tests for students to evaluate how much material they’ve absorbed.
  • Student enrollment and management for seeing how many people are in your courses and to collect payments based on memberships.

Now that we know what the basic features should be, let’s get started with the list of the best LMS WordPress Plugins.

1. Tutor LMS

We have already shared an article on how to create an online teaching website using Tutor LMS. This plugin is developed by Themeum and is one of the newest additions to the world of WordPress LMS plugins. It has some unique features like the frontend course builder, drag-and-drop quiz creator, and strong theme support from the parent company, Themeum.

The core plugin is free, while the premium plan starts at $199 which offers a single-site single license. With it, you get access to some premium addons like Certificates, Course Previews, Multi-Instructor, and more. Tutor LMS also boasts a very secure platform, with top tier content security and coding practices. 

Key Features

  • 10+ question types in the quiz builder.
  • Q/A and Student Forums.
  • Supports multiple eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce, EDD, Restrict Content Pro, and Paid Membership Pro.

2. LifterLMS

LifterLMS is a powerful premium WordPress LMS plugin with a lot of useful features. It allows you to build engaging online courses and provide interesting learning experiences to your students. You can smoothly expand its core functionalities by integrating it with powerful extensions, including Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, MailChimp and more. Lifter LMS comes with a graphics pack with backgrounds and other design elements.

You can also collect customer testimonials which will help you sell the courses in the future. Another reason the Lifter LMS plugin looks interesting for beginners is because of its integrations with Divi and Beaver Builder. Its Addons can be purchased individually for $99 each, or save big with a bundle set for $299.

Key Features

  • It has content dripping, course pre-requisites, and group memberships to offer greater control over the entire course duration.
  • Offers has built-in content restriction allowing you to restrict any WordPress page on your site to members only.
  • Create discussion areas and social profiles for your students to interact with each other and their teachers.

3. LearnDash

LearnDash is the most popular and user-friendly WordPress LMS plugin on the market. This plugin makes it super easy to create and sell courses, deliver quizzes, award certificates, etc. It enables you to offer a hearty learning experience to your members and supports the latest gamification, social learning, and micro-content trends.

LearnDash comes with a simple drag and drop course builder and you can deliver all your lessons at once or schedule them for the entire course duration with its Drip-Feed content feature. One downside of LearnDash is that there is no free trial. However, you can cancel it within 30 days if you don’t like it.

The plugin is also mobile compatible and customer support is provided by industry-leading experts through a sophisticated ticketing system.

Key Features

  • Ability to set prerequisites for students such as finishing a lesson first before going to the next lesson.
  • Includes an option to create multi-tier courses where you break up the courses into more advanced experiences.
  • Allows for user-profiles and group management–this is perfect for any group work you would like to assign.

4. LearnPress

LearnPress is a free WordPress LMS plugin with powerful features. Most of the basic LearnPress add-ons are free, and the email support team respond to you within 24 hours. You can also choose to pay for premium add-ons for items like certificates, co-instructor support, and WooCommerce support. The major difference between LearnPress and most of the other plugins in this list is that LearnPress comes with a setup wizard that makes onboarding easy for all levels of users.

It has a simple interface which will help you to create courses, and import or export courses from various websites that also use LearnPress. There are also some WordPress LMS themes created with this plugin. If you cannot decide which WordPress theme to choose for your learning website, then you can use one of those themes. 

Key Features

  • LearnPress supports a large collection of payment gateways including 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and Stripe.
  • LearnPress allows for multiple instructors, where two or three teachers manage one course.
  • LearnPress includes a landing page template for linking from ads and talking about course descriptions, curriculum, and more.

5. WP courseware

WP Courseware is a drag and drop course creation tool for developing an online learning website. Once your course units are created, you just need to drag and drop them according to your needs, and your course is built. Each course can have multiple modules, units, and quizzes. It supports course prerequisites and content drip features. WP Courseware is also packed with advanced automation tools that send personalized emails caused by student activities. In order to help improve your students’ proficiency, you can set up custom feedback messages that can be configured to be sent based on students’ scores.

 Also, the pricing of the plugin is relatively less than most of the plugins mentioned here. Indeed, you even receive a bonus of a two-site license for the least expensive package. 

Key Features

  • Supports instructor profiles, instructor and student grade books, custom emails, and many other features that help create an engaging experience for users.
  • The quizzes provide multiple question types and question tags. In addition, question banks are available if you’d like to generate random quizzes throughout a course.
  • It has a built-in shopping cart option where you can directly connect PayPal or Stripe and start selling your courses.

6. Sensei

Sensei is a powerful premium plugin that transforms your WordPress website into an advanced learning platform. Sensei is built by the folks behind WooCommerce, one of the leading eCommerce plugins. It comes as an extension for WooCommerce, so this plugin is used in an eCommerce store that wants to include online videos and courses.

Sensei is not a fully-featured membership plugin. It handles the creation and publishing of online courses, but in order to sell access, you will need an affiliation with membership or eCommerce plugins. For each course you want to sell, you will have to create a product and then link it to your course.

Creating courses with Sensei is easy and straightforward. Sensei provides simple reporting facilities that give you an overview of your content, grades, and students registered with the site.

Key Features

  • The seamless WooCommerce integration is the bread and butter of Sensei, especially since it’s made to work with all WooCommerce themes.
  • The simple course analytics provide information on grading, course completion, and students registered.
  • Offers several templates like true/false, single line, file upload, and multi-line tests.

7. Good LMS

Good LMS is a premium LMS plugin available on the CodeCanyon marketplace. As with most good WordPress LMS plugins, Good LMS has features for creating courses, selling them, and implementing quizzes and certificates. Creating online courses is easy with Good LMS since it’s much like creating a WordPress blog post, enabling you to build quizzes, courses, and certificates right from the WordPress dashboard.

The course process meter provides an appealing look into student achievements, and setting a commission rate for an instructor allows for you to manage the people who work on your team. Course ratings are also available. Other features include coupon codes, process lines, course badges, real-time countdowns, student backend where learners can see their scores and progress, retakable quizzes, etc.

Key Features

  • Good LMS leans heavily on the WordPress interface, so a regular WordPress user won’t need to learn new design techniques.
  • Course badges and certificates are revealed in the student backend, where users also have access to progress reports.

8. Namaste! LMS

Namaste LMS is a free WordPress LMS plugin that allows you to create unlimited courses, lessons, and assignments. Compared to other WordPress LMS solutions for WordPress, the addons and features for Namaste! are limited. However, Namaste! is a good option for anyone who wants to create an online course for free and wants to add advanced features to their courses like creating certificates for their students, grading systems to analyze students, etc.

Namaste! Pro offers options for awards and badges, along with file and course protection. You can also enable shopping carts for premium courses and connect with the WooCommerce or WP Simple Cart plugins.

Key Features

  • It’s simple and intuitive enough for beginners, but you still have access to more advanced customization options.
  • Support for payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal.
  • You can enable a shopping cart to collect money and manage subscriptions for individual videos or packages.
  • There’s a tool for protecting your files from unwanted intruders.

9. WP Learn Manager

WP Learn Manager is an extensive, feature-rich free learning management system(LMS) plugin for WordPress. It comes with a lot of features like course list, course search with many filters, create courses, create lectures, add quizzes, take lectures, enrollment, shortlist courses, Messaging, Social logins, Social sharing, Awards, and many more. WP Learn Manager LMS plugin offers more than 250+ configurations and 45 shortcodes with full power. The plugin also has its own login/sign in & registration interface.

Key Features

  • Built as user-friendly and include hundreds of functions, action hooks, and filters that can use to create their own purpose customization.
  • WP Learn Manager offers a feature to make your Course featured. When the student enables it, the course will be a Featured.

Conclusion

So these are the best top free LMS plugins for WordPress. If you want to build a strong flexible Learning Management System, without any doubt you can use these plugins for your website. We hope this learning management system comparison article helped you find the best WordPress LMS plugins for your needs.

Some Frequently Asked Questions

What is LMS plugin?

Learning Management System (LMS) plugins enable you to create and run online courses with WordPress. A good LMS plugin should be uncomplicated and easy to use and monitor the progress of students. It should also have built-in payment gateway support and monetization options.

Is WordPress good for LMS?

Yes!  It is one of the best content management systems with a smooth learning curve and does not require much training or coding knowledge. It also offers unlimited flexibility in designing and managing the website. Other plus points are easy navigation, high scalability and excellent interface.

What are the advantages of LMS?

The advantages include unlimited access to eLearning materials, reduced training and development costs, availability of content in one location and better tracking of learners’ progress.

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