If you are looking for a plugin to create your own WordPress online courses what you’re looking for is a Learning Management System (LMS).
There are many of them in WordPress.org repository and in plugin markets like Envato or Codecanyon.
Finding a LMS is easy, the hard thing is to decide which one to use, and it’s even harder to make a decision when you are going to spend some money on it.
It’s kind of disturbing when you install a plugin and after some time using it you realize that it’s not what you wanted at the first time.
So you uninstall it and start all over again, but time you spend on it was a total waste of time.
I hope I can help you to choose the right LMS for your project. Remember, before installing any plugin read documentation, read users reviews, make comparisons between plugins.
Before purchasing or installing, you want to be sure if it’s the right plugin you need to accomplish whatever you want to do in your WordPress website.
5 best plugins for creating WordPress online courses
LearnDash ($ 159)
This premium plugin is one of the most easiest to use. It comes with so many features that makes possible creating any kind of course you can imagine.
Unlike the rest of LMS plugins, LearnDash comes with its own membership system, and this is only one of the helpful features it offers.
It also allows to integrate the most popular payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout and more.
You can schedule lessons for the entire course duration or set requisites to students such as finishing a lesson first before going to next lesson.
These are only some of the awesome features LearnDash have to offer. Visit official Website to take an in-depth view of this amazing plugin.
A highly recommended plugin for large projects with many extensive courses.
LifterLMS (Free)
Even this plugin is quite complete in its free version, if you want to add some functionalities to it you’ll need to purchase and addon. And each of them will cost you $99. So to obtain the desired results it may be more expensive than other plugins with same capabilities.
But for the average users that want to create not so complex courses the free version could satisfy requirements. It offers all the main features needed to create very decent WordPress online courses.
It allows to accept payments with Paypal, Stripe or manually via check. Multi-tier courses with training modules, lessons, categories and much more functions allows great flexibility to create from the smallest courses to full–fledged degree programs.
Content dripping, course prerequisites, group membership, automated emails, gamification badges and completion certificates are some of the features offered by this plugin.
A nice plugin to create WordPress online courses that sells. Addons are expensive but its free version is quite complete and offers a ready-to-go solution.
LearnPress (Free)
Another complete plugin to create WordPress online courses in a simple way. There are many free and paid addons to add functionalities that adds very interesting features.
But for creating online courses the free version will satisfy most of the users.
Unique feature of this plugin let’s you export and import lessons and quizzes, so you can use them in any other course you’ve created with this plugin. A very nice feature that will sure speed up the creation process when working with a large number of online courses.
It also support WooCommerce and bbpress integration and it’s fully compatible with most of the membership plugins. Some other features of WordPress LMS are: Scheduled content, quizzes, assignments, grading and more.
Unlike other plugins, this one does not come with a setup wizard, so you have to set up courses from draft. That will require you to learn how to control the plugin, something that may be a little difficult for beginners but nothing that can’t be done with putting some time and dedication on it.
Sensei ($ 129)
As could not we otherwise from the creators of WooCommerce, Sensei is the perfect plugin to use in a running ecommerce WordPress website with WooCommerce plugin. It’s high quality coding folloes the best practices recommendation given from WordPress.org. So you can be sure that it will work without any kind of issue.
Creating online courses with Sensei is very easy but at a first glance it seems to be some missing features that turn it into an incomplete plugin.
But for most of users it will fully meets their requirements. And if you are going to integrate with WooCommerce, then it might be the best option. In fact this plugin must have WooCommerce installed in order to sell courses.
Lack of addons could complicate things for beginners and it offer fewer features than other LMS plugins. But that does not prevent it to be a solid and efficient solution for selling WordPress online courses.
WP courseware ($ 99)
This is the most popular premium LMS plugin available. It is easy to use and comes with lots of useful features. Both for simple and complex online courses, this plugin will satisfy any requirement.
Each course can have multiple modules, units and quizzes. Some other cool features are: prerequisites for accessing lessons, drip content, instructor profiles and gradebook, student gradebooks, custom emails and much more.
The bad new is that it doesn’t offer any payment method integrated so in order to sell your courses you’ll need to use with a WordPress membership or eCommerce plugin.
Although it is fully compatible with most popular eCommerce plugins, it may be a hard task to put it all together. This is the only disadvantage we found that could make it hard to set up for beginners.
This being said, WP Courseware is still a good choice to create online courses with WordPress. It is easy to use and thanks to its flexibility it gives great freedom to create an engaging learning environment.
