WordPress online course plugins, or Learning Management System (LMS) plugins, allow you to create, manage, deliver, and even sell online courses directly from your dashboard.
So, they help you convert your WordPress website into a powerful eLearning platform without touching a line of code.
Hence, we’re here to help you pick the best WordPress online school plugin that will let you build a stunning online learning website effortlessly.
Let’s start!
What to Look for in the WordPress Online Course Plugins?
While you may find oceans of WordPress online course plugins, it’s also true that not each provides you with the features your website requires.
So, if you want a full-fledged online learning platform of yours, you should look for the important features given below:
- User-friendly Interface: An online school WordPress plugin with an intuitive interface allows you to create courses, lessons, and quizzes easily.
- Course Builder: The plugin must let you create interactive courses, including multimedia such as audio, video, PDF, links, slides, and so on.
- Course Progress Information: It allows learners to track their progress. They can easily determine which courses they’ve completed and which still need to be completed.
- Student Enrollment and Management: You can easily track the number of students enrolled in your courses and manage them.
- Content Dripping: With drip-feed content, you can release the content over time as the student progresses through the course.
- Assignments and Quizzes: Adding assignments and quizzes make your online courses more effective.
- Badges and Certificates: To encourage your learners, you can offer badges and certificates for good performance and, upon successful course completion.
- Support for Payment Gateways: Integrating WordPress LMS plugins with secured payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, etc., allows for easy payment collection.
Note: For an in-depth guide on how to choose the best LMS plugin, make sure to read this article.
10 Best WordPress Online Course Plugins
We have created a comprehensive list of WordPress LMS plugins based on the above features and other additional criteria.
Besides, we have strictly watched the plugins follow WordPress standards and bring regular updates.
Let’s dive into the lists.
1. Masteriyo
Masteriyo is a brilliant WordPress plugin with powerful LMS features. It is based on React JS and has a clean and minimal design. Hence, this plugin allows anyone, including beginners, to easily and quickly create effective courses, lessons, and quizzes.
However, Masteriyo isn’t limited to course building. It also has an in-built order system to let you sell online courses and accept payment via a trusted payment gateway like PayPal.
It also supports offline payment. You can allow registered or non-registered users to access your courses freely.
Another unique feature of this free WordPress LMS plugin is its dedicated place for questions and answers. Thus, learners can place their queries for quick interaction with the instructor and fellow students.
Further, you can create interesting quizzes to engage your students with the advanced quiz builder.
Key Features:
- Option to create unlimited courses
- Distraction-free learning page to focus on reading
- Progress bar to help learners know their progress with the course
- LMS migration tool to easily migrate between LMS plugins
- Open AI ChatGPT integration
Cost: Free or $74.50/Year
2. Tutor LMS
Tutor LMS is a comprehensive online school WordPress plugin that helps you build a full-fledged eLearning website. It allows the creation of detailed courses with videos, attachments, excerpts, etc.
Also, it’s fully compatible with Gutenberg, so you can easily create courses with this new WordPress editor.
One of the unique features of Tutor LMS is its spotlight mode. This feature hides headers and footers, enabling students to focus on learning without any distractions.
Further, it’s a secured learning management system that allows only the enrolled students to access your content.
With this LMS plugin, you can also set up registration forms easily and approve the instructor for a particular course curriculum. Besides, it provides full support to the page builder plugins.
Key Features:
- Automated email notification to teachers and students
- Student frontend dashboard to view courses, progress notifications, etc.
- Set up a time limit and restrict attempts for quizzes
- Purchase history to keep track of all purchase options
- Integration with WooCommerce and Easy Digital Download
Cost: Free or $199/Year for 1 Site License
3. LearnDash
LearnDash is another of the best online course plugins for WordPress, having won the Capterra Top 20 award. It is self-explanatory why big names like Tony Robbins, Digital Marketer, Yoast, and so on trust this WordPress eLearning plugin.
Once you install the plugin to your WordPress site, it provides everything you’ll ever need to build a successful online learning platform.
This LMS solution has everything from drip-feeding content to rewarding learners with certificates and badges. Moreover, it provides sophisticated marketing and sales information for your online courses.
It offers different options, such as one-time purchases, subscriptions, course bundles, membership, and more. If that isn’t enough, you can still extend your capabilities by connecting LearnDash to the tools you love.
Key Features:
- Drag and drop course builder
- Advanced quizzing option
- Discussion forum for interactive courses
- Easy management of course-relevant assignments
- Integration with PayPal and Stripe
Cost: $199/Year for 1 Site License
4. LearnPress
LearnPress is one of the top WordPress LMS plugins that allows you to create, manage, and sell online courses without any hassle.
It’s lightweight, powerful, and has an excellent user interface for impactful course creation.
Likewise, this WordPress education plugin offers bundles of free and premium add-ons. Free add-ons like LearnPress Wishlist allow students to add their favorite courses to their wishlists.
The Course Review add-on lets all enrolled students review the courses to get ideas about the curriculum. Besides, premium add-ons like Assignments, Frontend Editor, etc., can further enhance your site’s LMS functionalities.
Moreover, it’s compatible with all the WordPress themes, including Zakra. The online course demo of Zakra is built using this plugin. Hence, you can instantly use this theme to build an amazing eLearning site.
Key Features:
- Actively developed WordPress Learning Management System
- BuddyPress integration for easy communication with the instructor and other students
- Import and export courses from other websites using LearnPress
- Support WordPress multisite
- Support offline payment
Cost: Free or $149 for LearnPress Semi-Pro Bundle
5. LifterLMS
LifterLMS is a wonderful online school WordPress plugin designed by talented course creators, developers, and designers.
It enables you to create engaging courses with multimedia-based lessons, including video, audio, text, images, etc. This LMS plugin also lets you create dynamic quizzes to test the efficacy of your course curriculums.
In addition, you can use a drip-feed content feature to make your lessons available to your learners on an allocated schedule.
LifterLMS even offers an amazing feature that allows you to download worksheets, ebooks, PDFs, etc., for offline learning.
Furthermore, it allows you to easily integrate form plugins to collect assignments, contact messages, and so on.
Key Features
- Assign multiple instructors for a course
- Set time limit with quiz timer
- Student dashboard to track their activity and stay organized
- Achievement badges and certificates on course completion
- Content protection to make them available at the right time and to the right users
Cost: Free or $149.50/Year
6. WP Courseware
WP Courseware is a leading drag-and-drop course builder that lets you create dynamic courses for your online learning site.
Since this WordPress online school plugin allows embedding any type of content, you can create a media-rich environment for learning to engage your students.
Additionally, instructors are free to create, edit, and manage their course curriculum. Likewise, students can submit their assignments in a designated format, and you can review them when you’re ready.
Apart from that, you can customize the layout of your lessons with WP Courseware’s visual builder block. Also, you can style your courses using its styling customizer.
Moreover, you can create customized messages and notifications for your students.
Key Features:
- Create unlimited courses
- Options to duplicate courses, modules, quizzes, etc., in a click
- Integration with membership and eCommerce plugins
- Works well with any WordPress theme and page builder plugins
- Self-enrollment option to allow students to register for your courses from anywhere on your site
Cost: $159/Year for 2 Site License
7. MasterStudy LMS
Yet another amazing WordPress eLearning plugin on our list, MasterStudy LMS, allows you to build an online course in WordPress.
With this flexible LMS tool, you can quickly create interactive courses, lessons, and quizzes and deliver them to your students.
Your users can easily view the course details on your site, add them to their wishlist or shopping cart, or purchase them.
In addition, it enables you to add interesting topics, news, etc., to communicate with your students via Announcements.
You can also assign co-instructors to the course to share your responsibilities. Above all, MasterStudy LMS also allows you to manage your earnings and commission distribution effortlessly.
Key Features:
- Easy assignment management
- Course rating system
- Teacher and student profile page
- Awesome certificate builder
- Translation-ready
Cost: Free or $89/Year for 1 Site License
8. Sensei LMS
Sensei LMS is one of the outstanding WordPress LMS plugins developed by Automattic, the same company behind WooCommerce.
The plugin integrates seamlessly with the WordPress website, so creating courses, lessons, and quizzes is easy.
The core plugin is available for free. However, you’ll need a WooCommerce Paid Courses extension to sell your courses and earn a passive income. It also lets you accept recurring payments.
Further, you can use this extension to restrict your content and make it available only to the enrolled students.
Sensei LMS fits perfectly with any WordPress theme. Therefore, you can rest assured that your LMS website looks great enough to grab your students’ attention.
The plugin is extremely user-friendly, and you don’t need any coding skills to use it. All these features make it one of the top LMS plugins for your WordPress website.
Key Features:
- Powerful quizzes
- Drill-down reporting system to track the progress of the students
- Import/export of courses, lessons, and questions
- Easy management of learners
- Seamless integration with WooCommerce
Cost: Free + Premium Extension Available
9. GoodLMS
If you are searching for the best premium WordPress online course management plugin, your search ends right here at GoodLMS.
It’s a popular learning management system for WordPress with great features for creating and selling courses online.
The plugin has a vertical course progress bar so students can easily track their course progress. It also allows you to create and share coupon codes to attract more students to enroll in your courses.
Similarly, you can enable a course rating system to share learners’ opinions to help others evaluate the efficacy of your course content.
Furthermore, you can award your students with badges and beautifully designed certificates.
Key Features:
- Easy setting of commission rate for instructor
- Several payment options (PayPal, Stripe, Paymill, etc.)
- Option to retake quizzes
- Amazing profile page for instructors as well as students
- Awesome plugin support and documentation
Cost: $32 for Regular License
10. Teachable
Teachable is an independent LMS software for building online courses. However, you can also connect your WordPress website with Teachable using the custom domain.
This allows you to create a highly customizable online school with engaging lessons, coaching sessions, multimedia lectures, and many more.
It also comes with a flexible page editor to make gorgeous sales pages. Thus, you can sell your courses easily and earn a good living. Moreover, it lets you record your students’ insights and sales with detailed reports and analytics.
Besides, Teachable lets you add more authors, contributors, and other team members. Also, you can assign them specific roles and permissions without any hassle.
Additionally, it supports and integrates with vast arrays of tools to provide powerful features to your eLearning website.
Key Features:
- Allows accepting payment in 130+ currencies
- Affiliate marketing tools to boost student enrollment
- Collect feedback via third-party forms and surveys
- Flexible page editor to design attractive sales pages
- Coupons and advanced pricing options like memberships, one-time payments, etc.
Cost: Free or $39/Month
Conclusion
If you want to build educational websites with WordPress, choosing a powerful LMS plugin is necessary. And that’s precisely why we’ve handpicked amazing WordPress LMS plugins to make your task easier.
Still confused about which WordPress online school plugin to choose?
Masteriyo is the best pick if you’re on a tight budget. It has a simple and user-friendly interface yet delivers powerful LMS features. Similarly, LearnDash can also be your other option, but it’s only available in the premium version.
And that’s the end of our article on the best WordPress online course plugins. Hope it was helpful to you.
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