LearnDash vs. WP Courseware: A Software Comparison (2023)

The right WordPress plugin can set your business up for long-term growth and success. LearnDash and WP Courseware are two options you might want to consider.

Let's dive into these two options and compare features, pricing, customer support, and more. By the end of this article, you will have a clear idea whether LearnDash or WP Courseware is right for you.

With all the options available in the market, you might feel overwhelmed.

And it's very difficult to know how any software or platform will actually support your business model once it's up and running.

Our goal with this article is to provide details about LearnDash and WP Courseware and how they really work with your business and what you can expect from each.

And since we're the developers of AccessAlly, we'll also show you how LearnDash and WP Courseware stack up against our software.

We want you to make the best decision for your business, even if it's not AccessAlly.

LearnDash and WP Courseware are WordPress plugins that work with your WordPress site. This means that both are software options and not a platform.

When it's aboutLMS Comparisonsyou must first decide whether you want to use a platform or software. This choice really depends on your business goals and how you want to use your members area.

The main differences between LearnDash and WP Courseware are in their features, available integrations and pricing. We'll look at these head-to-head comparisons below.

Both LearnDash and WP Courseware were founded with the same mission to support your online courses. LearnDash offers advanced LMS features while WP Courseware is simpler.

With LearnDash and WP Courseware, you can expect to use integrations and plugins to complete your setup, which we'll cover a little later in this article.

LearnDash features an innovative course builder that is easy to use and requires no technical expertise. WP Courseware takes a top-down approach, which may be less intuitive for some users, but also doesn't require advanced technical knowledge.

LearnDash gives you a little more control over how your students interact with lessons and modules than WP Courseware.

With either option, you can expect features like the ability to protect your content, publish all at once, orWordPress content crash,Create video coursesand add other media and create a course dashboard for your users.

The pricing structure is quite similar for LearnDash and WP Courseware. Both offer promotional pricing when you go to their pricing pages to shop.

WP Courseware's most popular plan is the $299 per year Professional plan.

With LearnDash's Plus package, you're looking at $229 per year.

That's just a difference of $70 a year, which probably won't sway your decision one way or another.

Remember to factor in the cost of the integrations needed to make your membership site and courses work.

Unfortunately, when it comes to integrations and plugins, there is no one-size-fits-all solution that works for every business. Make sure you create a list of integrations that fits your needs and calculate your costs from there.

Both LearnDash and WP Courseware make it easy to capture promotional pricing when you log in or visit their website. Both also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is nice if you're not really happy with the option you've chosen.

There are other level options with LearnDash and WP Courseware. The main differences are the number of licenses you get at each level.

Here is a summary of LearnDash tier options and site license restrictions:

• • Basic: $199/year – 1 site license
  • Plus Package: $229/year – 10 site licenses
  • Pro Package: $369/year – 25 site licenses

Here is a summary of WP Courseware tier options and installation limitations:

• • Teacher: $249/year – 2 onsite installations
  • Teacher: $299/year - 10 site installs
  • Guru: $399/year - 25 site installs

If you only need one install, you can quote for the lower tier for LearnDash and WP Courseware.

Knowing what to expect from customer support and where to get answers if you have a setup issue can go a long way toward knowing what to expect from a company.

If you're in a setup situation and find that you don't get any response from customer service for 1-3 days, that's not going to be good for you.

While both LearnDash and WP Courseware offer customer support, neither place a huge marketing focus on what they offer.

That said, both platforms offer an extensive knowledge base of articles on how to implement features.

LearnDash provides an article with steps to get support. They have a list of 6 things to try before contacting support. While it's important to test a few things out before contacting support, sometimes it's nice to be able to send an email and get a quick response. You cannot expect that from LearnDash.

WP Courseware offers a ticketing system through its member portal. They also have an extensive knowledge base that you can use to find solutions.

Neither company sets an expected response time for tickets.

You need plugins and integrations to make LearnDash and WP Courseware work as a fully integrated and robust learning management system.

In fact, it's not uncommon to have six or more plugins to make your subscription work the way you want it to.

Integrations are very useful for connecting two of the existing systems that you need to work together. However, with each integration, your configuration becomes more complex and your technology stack expands. Depending on the integration, you may incur additional costs and time for configuration, maintenance, and troubleshooting when needed.

To be clear, you'll need a paid integration with LearnDash and WP Courseware, which we'll detail in the ecommerce section of this comparison.

LearnDash has integrations without the need for a third-party connection tool like Zapier.

Here are some of the most popular integrations they offer:

• • bbPrensa
  • course grid
  • easy digital download

LearnDash offers many other third-party integrations, some free and some paid.

When it comes to WP Courseware, many users use a different plugin to complete their membership site setup. WP Courseware makes these integrations easy, offering the following integrations:

• • MemberPress
  • mouse member
  • By Paid Subscription.

Again, while these are greatthe integrationare offered, this can complicate your configuration. And you're also paying for two completely different systems to complete what one full-featured software could do on its own.

Also think of features like the affiliate program, bulk ongoing enrollment, and reporting.

These features are limited in LearnDash and WP Courseware. So if you want this functionality, pay for it and add an extra integration to your list.

Marketing automation tools are here to stay.

Use your marketing automation tool to improve your course and membership program by taking advantage of AccessAlly's deep two-way integration.

It's designed to help you sell more, teach better, and engage with your students longer.

Learning reinforcements: quizzes, progress tracking, homework and certificates

LearnDash and WP Courseware work with your WordPress theme or page builder. This makes it much easier to customize the look and feel of your brand when creating your Members Area.

LearnDash works with page builders like Elementor, Divi andbeaver builder.

However, there are limitations. For example, in Elementor, you can only edit LearnDash's dynamic content, i.e. H. Content that LearnDash automatically adds to specific page types. If you're using Divi or Beaver Builder, you'll need to hire a developer if you want to fix this.

LearnDash provides templates that you can use as a starting point in these page builders, which is very helpful so you don't build from scratch.

WP Courseware also works with popular WordPress themes and page builders. You have less feature limitations based on page creation options, which is an advantage over LearnDash.

WP Courseware automatically takes care of styling your theme. From there you can edit individual items in the dashboard. You can customize it to your liking or keep it more out of the box.

In general, they offer similar design flexibility, but WP Courseware wins here because it has fewer restrictions on using widgets, shortcodes, and adding or removing elements.

As AccessAlly is a WordPress plugin, you can use any WordPress theme or builder you like.

Or start with the AccessAlly theme, which has all navigation menus and progress tracking built in by default.

Power, flexibility and beauty all in one course platform.

A bulk course registration feature allows you to sell a bundle of licenses to team leaders, who can then assign those licenses to team members.

A fully automated experience allows team leaders to purchase, view progress, add more licenses, review and fully manage their team members from one well-designed dashboard.

Offering this kind of purchase option can expand your market in a whole new way and meet the needs of learning online now.

WP Courseware does not offer a standard bulk registration feature. There are integrations and plugins that can help with this type of setup, but they're glued together and don't integrate seamlessly.

Also, WP Courseware has a feature that allows you to import students in bulk. Which, again, wouldn't make for a fully integrated scenario that could exist, but it does make it much easier to add multiple students at once.

LearnDash also lacks a native bulk class registration feature, but it does offer a paid plugin called Group Registration.

With this premium plugin, a team leader can purchase multiple licenses and assign them to team members. Your purchase automatically creates a group. The team lead has control over the users which can be removed or added, the team lead can manage the group from his own dashboard outside the WordPress dashboard.

Ease of payment for your users can mean the difference between a sale or not. If the checkout process is confusing or complicated, they are much less likely to complete their purchase.

WP Courseware allows for one-time payments, subscriptions, installments and packages. Alsointegrates with Stripeand PayPal, which offers its users payment options and checkout experiences they are familiar with.

However, you cannot offer upgrade and downgrade paths to your existing users, offer free trials or prorated subscriptions with WP Courseware. Achieving this functionality would require integration with a more sophisticated eCommerce plugin.

LearnDash also integrates with Stripe and PayPal, although there are more limitations here than WP Courseware.

For example, the LearnDash Stripe integration does not support more complex payment structures such as B. A trial period or an initial payment for a course followed by a payment schedule. You need a third-party integration to support itrecurring subscriptionsand payment plans.

If you use LearnDash and Stripe, you will encounter limitations when it comes to customizing the checkout experience. You do not have the ability to fully manage the application process and account management.

If you plan to sell products in addition to your courses, want to offer a full membership site, or have complex pricing, WP Courseware is the best option for you.

LearnDash does not offer affiliate functionality by default.

If you want to run an affiliate program with LearnDash, you'll see a complex setup that includes your LearnDash plugin, a shopping cart integration (like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads), aAffiliate Plugin(WP Affiliate or Affiliates Plugin) and a LearnDash-WooCommerce integration (if you choose WP Affiliate).

You can also choose SamCart or ThriveCart as your shopping cart option as they have built-in affiliate functionality.

WP Courseware also doesn't offer an affiliate marketing feature. They have some recommendations including: Clickbank, Paydotcom, Payloadz, E-Junkie, Commission Junction, Share-a-Sale

While it's great that both have integration options to run an affiliate program, you've got another plugin research project ahead of you to find the one that works best for you.

If running an integrated affiliate program is part of your vision, neither WP Courseware nor LearnDash is the best option for you.

The ability to extract data about your members, courses and sales is extremely important when it comes to forecasting, making improvements and simply knowing what is going well and what is not.

When choosing software for your membership site, you want these reporting and metrics features native to the software. Plugins and integrations can improve reporting, but they add a layer of complexity that can have a big impact if the numbers don't add up or if you don't see what you expect.

LearnDash has ProPanel, a premium plugin that comes with the Plus and Pro plans.

ProPanel enhances your LearnDash administration experience by consolidating reporting and assignment management, giving you the ability to send course-specific notifications, and showing real-time student activity in your courses.

WP Courseware has nothing like LearnDash's reporting options. As mentioned, they support LMS integrations, which can provide more reporting capabilities.

CompleteMembership metrics dashboardIt gives you the ability to track metrics to improve your sales. Here are some examples of what would be possible in addition to a full LMS reporting feature:

• • Keep track of student enrollment trends
  • See student progress in real time
  • monitor test results
  • Consult sales, refunds and cancellations
  • Measure retention and growth
  • Future subscription value of the project

Monthly costs between the two platforms are negligible.

If you choose WP Courseware you can find out the real cost as you are constrained by features and pressured to buy LMS software to integrate into the WP Courseware setup.

While this might technically work, it adds unnecessary complexity to your setup, expands your technology stack, and skyrockets your monthly costs.

If you go this route and decide to switch to another option in the future, you'll face a complex, time-consuming, and time-consuming migration.

If you choose LearnDash, you can discover the true cost of not being able to create the experience you really want for your users. Due to customization limitations and the fact that they don't offer two-way integration, you can't create a robust LMS experience for your students.

Again, any migration is a challenge, but when you find yourself in a situation where your business is set up on multiple systems, it adds a lot of complexity and is time consuming, which crowds out other parts of your business.

• • It is open to a larger technology stack and uses many different plugins to achieve its goals.
  • You Absolutely Need SCORM or Tin-Can-LMS Integration
  • You are not picky about how your course looks
  • You don't need deep CRM integration to create more personalized customer experiences, but you do need lots of survey options.

• • You are already using WordPress
  • You don't mind using integrations to make your members area work
  • You want a basic setup with no upgrade plans
  • Already using a membership plugin and just looking for a course builder

Alternatives to LearnDash

• LearnDash is no AccessAlly
• LearnDash vs Finalmente
• LearnDash vs. Enseñable
• LearnDash x Podia
• LearnDash bietet LearnPress
• LearnDash vs. Mighty Networks
• LearnDash frente ao LifterLMS

WP course alternatives

• AccessAlly-Kurse vor WP
• WP-Kurse vs. LifterLMS