Do you run a website for a learning institution? Then you need the best free WordPress LMS plugin to help you manage the functionalities of such a site. WordPress features many plugins dedicated to learning management systems (LMS). With such a plugin, you can create and manage online courses, manage fee payments, grade courses, handle subscriptions, and manage course content, among other functions.
The downside to having many plugin options is that you might choose a low-quality plugin. To save you the time you’d spend searching for the best LMS plugin, we’ve assembled a list of the five best WordPress LMS plugins. Moreover, we have gone the extra mile and compared them so that settling on the perfect one is even more straightforward. This piece includes the prices of the plugins and their pros and cons. Allow us to take you through the best five choices of free and premium LMS plugins.
If you need a free educational wp theme instead, Here are the best free education WordPress theme.
What features do you look for in WordPress LMS Plugin?
- A good LMS plugin must have a better user interface and experience to create courses. You can create classes by uploading different contents like videos, PDFs, links, and other files and clicking publish.
- LMS that supports drag & drop features to customize course modules.
- A better course management system can seamlessly manage enrollment and track students’ progress and homework.
- Support content dipping for displaying scheduling content to a registered student.
- A powerful quiz system analyzes students’ positions and assesses their learning outcomes.
- An intelligent LMS plugin will offer live conferencing support with Zoom and Google Classroom.
- Buddy press & bbPress support for forum creation.
- Mobile App support for LMS system.
- Students can learn their courses in their native languages with multilingual support.
- A great LMS plugin will offer email and mobile notifications to announce any notice regarding classes.
- After every course completion, the LMS will offer certification and badge service.
- A robust store and payment integration to manage course payment and membership.
- Allow affiliate offers, course coupons, and discounts for the students.
- The best LMS plugin must have excellent support to fix any flaws quickly.
All the plugins we have selected in terms of functionality and popularity.
Best free WordPress LMS plugins bellow.
Tutor LMS
The Tutor is another best free WordPress LMS plugin which facilitates your online school management. It satisfies all the checkpoints for a full-fledged online market for courses with a lively and interactive interface.
With this plugin, you get high-quality premium addons. Like LearnPress, Tutor is incredibly lightweight but has addons to enable issuing certificates, mail notifications, and many more functions. In addition, this plugin brings you shopping carts to facilitate the sale of courses. Finally, if your theme is compatible with Gutenberg, you can edit this plugin with a drag & drop interface.
You can create unlimited courses and lessons with an excellent intuitive course builder. The Tutor has an amazingly crafted front-end student dashboard. So that you can even give video lessons, this plugin supports embedding videos from multiple sources such as YouTube, Vimeo, and self-hosted.
Teacher profiles and panels are easy to create and manage. You can include course requirements and instructions for your users and manage lessons straightforwardly. Also, you can create challenging and fun quizzes with timers and attempt trackers.
The Tutor offers many withdrawal options too. It supports bank transfers, PayPal, and ECHECK. The plugin allows you to allocate earnings and commissions to your users. It is easy to track course sales with a purchase history always ready.
The plugin offers numerous styling options so that you can personalize your site. A course widget is available too. The Tutor offers a teacher registration form so that you can add new tutors. A course review and rating system are also in place to gauge your courses’ popularity. All the monetization settings are centralized so that they are easier to manage.
Tutor LMS core feature:
- Personalized dashboard for students, instructors, and admin.
- Easy front-end course creation.
- Supports drag & drop certificate design feature.
- Content drip and restriction feature.
- Supports multiple content sharing and live sharing media like Zoom, YouTube meets, etc.
- Integrate payment with WooCommerce and Paid Membership Pro.
- Report and analytics for courses.
Pricing Details
Tutor LMS has a free version for which you can buy premium addons. However, the pricing of the premium version of Tutor LMS starts at $149 per year with the same period in support and updates. If you prefer lifetime plans, the pricing starts at $399.
Summary
If you might need too many functionalities that might be expected with a large institution, the accessible version of Tutor may not be the best option. The premium version has more addons and features to offer you. However, the free version has its fair share of perks too. If it fits your needs, you’ll love it.
LearnPress
Although free, LearnPress is a robust WordPress LMS plugin that creates the best online platforms for creating, managing, and selling courses. It also offers loads of free addons that make its core system incredibly powerful. In addition, this plugin provides an easy-to-use interface to facilitate the creation of course curricula with easily manageable lessons and quizzes. Despite lacking an installation wizard, the setup process is straightforward and requires no coding knowledge.
LearnPress allows you to sell courses with billing methods such as PayPal, Stripe, and WooCommerce. This plugin has both free and paid addons. Using it on your LMS site works seamlessly with all integrations such as WordPress membership plugins and bbPress.
If you don’t have a site and don’t want to endure the process of creating one, you might opt for an equally fruitful choice. For example, you could take a top-class WordPress LMS theme, such as Eikra, whose builders have based it on LearnPress. It saves you a lot of setup work. Beyond that, it helps you avoid encountering plugin compatibility errors with your site’s theme.
LearnPress’s Best Features are:
- Create courses with any theme and support multi-site.
- It has mobile app support to convert your website into a mobile application.
- Student Wishlist feature for adding favorite classes.
- Offer Prerequisite courses to students.
- Supports Content dripping.
- Supports PayPal by default.
- Many addon support in free and pro versions.
Pricing Details:
LearnPress is free. Even though you will get free addons, you might have to acquire some paid ones if needed. The plugin offers free support as well.
Summary
Beginners might find the setup process a little tricky, but the free support will help you if you encounter problems. You could use LearnPress without paying a dime. However, it would help to buy the premium addons to get the most out of it.
LearnDash
LearnDash is one of the most preferred LMS plugins, with sparkling reviews. It is comparatively more manageable to set up this plugin than LearnPress with a setup wizard to help you out. Institutions of all levels, professional trainers, developers, and designers will find its features very appealing.
This plugin gives you access to all the trends in the e-learning industry. You can create and sell courses, award grades and certificates, deliver quizzes, manage users, and download reports, among many more functions. Creating lessons is incredibly comfortable, with a drag & drop course builder.
You can even set schedules for automatic content delivery to have a content drip-feed for your users. While selling courses, it’s easy to set the prices, pricing models, and publish. LearnDash comes with engagement triggers that facilitate interaction with your users based on their actions on your site.
LearnDash offers you robust administrative functions over courses and learners, which are easy to access and manipulate. You can even set designations for courses such as private and free courses. It is within your power to create user groups and assign group leaders. This plugin allows you to send messages for specific courses or classes and automatic email notifications. You can also manage learner progress by marking tasks upon completion and reviewing submissions.
If you aim to sell as many courses as possible, LearnDash will help you do it. You can use any pricing model, for example, subscriptions, bundles, one-time sales, and more. Besides, this plugin has automatic renewal reminders. In addition, LearnDash facilitates using several payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout, and over 300 others with WooCommerce.
Learn Dash Key Features:
- Create courses with text and media support.
- Offers Scheduled Content drip-fed feature.
- Automatically play and skip lessons after any lesson got finished.
- Set prerequisite requirements to complete any task for course completion.
- Gamification and certification support
- Course forum feature
- It comes with Zapier integration
- Automated mail support
Pricing Details
The Basic Package sells a single site license for $159. If you want to license up to 10 sites, the Plus Package offers that for $189. Finally, the Pro Package goes for $329, granting you a license for up to 25 websites. All three packages provide one year of support and updates.
Summary
LearnDash offers the best user-friendly interface. Also, it comes with many third-party plugins and addons to enhance its performance. These qualities and its wealth of features make it worth every penny.
Lifter
The Lifter is a fantastic free LMS plugin for WordPress with incredible functionality and compatibility with countless themes and other plugins. Like LearnDash, this plugin has a straightforward setup process.
Lifter supports one-time as well as recurring payments. With this plugin, your users can pay for courses using credit cards. You can create unlimited pricing models and manage payment plans too. This plugin supports payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal. It can arrange to offer specific courses free of charge. So you can edit the country and currency to fit your users’ locations and preferences. An E-commerce dashboard is available to give you a stellar shop experience.
You can create courses quickly with an intuitive course builder. Like LearnDash, Lifter offers the chance to develop a content drip that releases your content automatically but systematically. In addition, your users can access the excellent student dashboard from the front.
The plugin allows you to set quiz time limits as you deliver quizzes. You can even import and export courses and enable students to download lessons. Even you can also take course reviews so that you can be sure to deliver quality for your audience. In addition, this plugin comes with a graphics pack to style your look as you want.
You can optimally engage your students with text messaging and personalized emails. Also, Lifter allows you to award certificates and achievement badges.
This plugin allows you to integrate it with a wide range of tools you may need for your sites, such as payment gateways, CRMs, and E-learning authoring tools. Apart from being compatible with any good theme that you may have, Lifter is mobile-friendly and incredibly responsive too.
You can protect courses and user accounts with passwords. As you enroll members, you can provide members-only content.
Lifter’s outstanding features are:
- Easy course creation with drag & drop feature.
- It offers WooCommerce integration to sell courses and allows paid membership plan.
- Payment support with stripe, Authorize.net, and Paypal.
- Support email marketing platforms.
- All the features are completely free except for the payment gateway.
- Offer courses on social media to integrate with the social learning tool.
- Drip-fed content based on schedule along with quizzes.
- Private coaching support
Pricing Details
A single site license with individual addons goes for $99. The universal bundle, which goes for $299, grants you a license for up to 5 sites. Finally, the infinity bundle has a license for an unlimited number of websites and goes for $999.
Summary
This plugin has an intuitive setup wizard. It is easy to use for anyone, and the single-site package is worth the price.
Sensei
Sensei is the brainchild of Automattic, the creators of WooCommerce and WordPress.com. Therefore, you can expect no problems creating courses, lessons, and quizzes. Furthermore, with WooCommerce, you can sell your courses and earn passive income.
This plugin is easy to set up but might be challenging for a coding novice. It works with your theme without a hitch. You can set most elements of your LMS website, such as issuing and grading quizzes, to deliver automatically.
Unlike most other LMS plugins, Sensei doesn’t have many third-party integrations.
Sensei’s essential features include:
- Comes with a course progress tracker.
- Support all the WordPress theme
- Support WooCommerce integration for membership, payment, and course selling support.
- Setup quizzes and grading feature.
- Content dripping feature.
- Certification after the course gets finished.
Pricing Details
For a single site license, Sensei starts at $129, which grants you a year of unlimited support and updates.
Summary
Coming from the creators of WooCommerce, Sensei has an advantage over most LMS plugins. It blends seamlessly with WooCommerce to give you an incredible online store. Nonetheless, setting up a WooCommerce isn’t easy for coding novices. Moreover, Sensei has much fewer integrations and features than the other plugins we have for you.
MasterStudy
Are you looking for an LMS plugin that is rising in popularity because of its features? Then, you need to see MasterStudy. It is a user-friendly plugin that is hassle-free to use. You can easily design, personalize, and control your online education. The plugin is free to download and compatible with all WordPress themes. The most cutting-edge and SEO friendly LMS plugin can help you draw in students from all over the world.
This intuitive plugin allows you to design great lessons with videos, graphs, slides, and anything else you can imagine. The WYSIWYG editor powers all of them, making creation and management a breeze. In addition, all essential plugin components were created using Vue.js to guarantee the fastest loading time.
Besides, the plugin can access the pre-instructional modules through shortcodes. It lets you add different blocks from the plugin to any theme. Use the WordPress default editor to add shortcodes to any page. Additionally, the LMS shortcodes can be utilized with the Classic Editor, Elementor Widgets, and WPBakery Page Builder. You’ll find new opportunities, enhance user experience, change the design and feel of your website, and appreciate the ease of use.
Not only that, you can sell the course and educational items with the help of WooCommerce, where you can offer coupon and discounts with bundle management. Also, you can set up payments for recurring subscriptions using PayPal and Stripe.
MasterStudy’s Incredible Features are:
- Offers a pretty cool course environment for students.
- Prerequisite feature for Course enrollment.
- Payment options to purchase a subscription with Paypal & Stripe.
- It comes with quizzes and countdown timer options
- Dynamic message board for the announcement
- Zoom and google classroom support
- Certificate after course completion
- Group and forum support
Pricing Details
Many functions are not available in the free plugin. But they are included in the Pro version. Individual addons for a single site license cost $54.99. For $99.99, you may get the universal bundle, which gives you a license for up to 5 sites. Finally, the developer bundle costs $199.99 and has a license for 25 websites.
Summary
This plugin has a terrific user interface. It has many features in free versions, and the single-site plan is very reasonable.
Masteriyo
One of the youngest LMS plugins in the WordPress industry is Masteriyo. It is a robust plugin with multiple features and allows easy usability. Forget about coding; this brilliant LMS plugin provides a distinct, easy course builder interface that enables you to create courses in the simplest way possible.
Under one roof, you can construct courses, sections, lectures, and tests. You don’t have to waste time grouping classes and courses. Furthermore, communicating with teachers and other students has never been so simple. Even you can add questions to the sidebar when taking courses on Masteriyo. Any enrolled student may respond to the questions, not only the administration. Additionally, you can search for earlier Q&As. Finally, the top right corner of the page has a progress bar that the students can use to scroll up to their course progress.
The plugin offers a straightforward drag-and-drop course creation. Because the LMS builder is coded using React. So loading times are rapid. In addition, you can customize the plugin with ease. As a result, you can completely change it to fit the feel of your website. Any WordPress theme you choose to use to create your LMS website is compatible with it. Besides, it provides an eLearning website template that is simple to use for developing and marketing online courses. These demos can import with a simple click. The lessons you design will look fantastic on mobile devices and other small hand-held gadgets.
The built-in order system is just another remarkable aspect of Masteriyo. Both a cart and a checkout form are available on the system. Selling courses and accepting secure payments are simple processes. You can offer offline prices, WooCommerce integration, and other payment gateways. In addition, the plugin has an excellent support team to serve its premium and free customers.
Masteriyo’s unique features include:
- Super fast course creation with drag & drop feature.
- Interactive user interface with React and loads quickly.
- Create quizzes with true or false and multiple choices.
- Progress bar feature at the top
- Sell courses effortlessly with a secure payment option.
- Compatible with WooCommerce and support payment with Paypal &Stripe.
- Front end question section for students.
- Includes a theme for ease of LMS site development.
- Very responsive LMS plugin
- Incredible support for any Masteriyo user.
Pricing Details
Masteriyo includes three distinct paid subscriptions besides the free version. All you need to pay is $199 per year for a single website plan. It costs $299/year for a license for 5 sites. The cost of the 99 sites license is $499 per year.
Summary
This plugin is very smooth and easy to manage. In addition, the free plan contains many features to create courses without any technical knowledge.
Final Thoughts
You can settle for any of these plugins since they are the best free WordPress LMS plugin. In this list, we have blended premium ones, as well as some that are available for free. Your preferences could be affected by your specific needs as well as your budget limits. We hope we have helped you narrow down to the plugin you’d want for your site. Just choose your favorite one and start reaping its benefits.
