LearnDashvs
Thinkific
Thinkific: Hosted, with the operational burden removed, at the cost of a recurring platform fee and a vendor controlled environment.
LearnDash
WordPress plugin that turns a site you already own into a course platform with no revenue share
As of 31 August 2026, LearnDash starts at $199/year. LearnDash adds courses, quizzes and drip content to a WordPress site for a flat annual licence, and takes none of what you sell. Softwr lists it under LMS. LearnDash is made by LearnDash (StellarWP, Liquid Web), available on Web, WordPress.
Overview
What LearnDash does
LearnDash is a learning management plugin for WordPress. It adds course structures, lessons, topics, quizzes, assignments, prerequisites, drip scheduling and certificates to an existing WordPress site, and connects to payment through WooCommerce, Stripe or PayPal so the site owner sells directly. StellarWP, the Liquid Web brand family, acquired it in 2021, and a hosted version called LearnDash Cloud is now offered for buyers who want the plugin without running WordPress themselves. The economics are the reason to consider it and they are simple. Hosted course platforms charge either a monthly fee with transaction charges or a share of course revenue, and both scale with success. LearnDash charges a flat annual licence and takes nothing from sales, so the more a creator sells, the wider the gap in their favour. A creator turning over a hundred thousand a year in course sales on a percentage plan is paying an amount that would licence LearnDash for a lifetime. The catch is what the flat fee does not include. You are now responsible for hosting, backups, security updates, plugin conflicts after WordPress core releases, video hosting, email deliverability and payment compliance, and each of those is either your evening or a contractor invoice. Buyers are individual course creators, small training businesses and organisations that already run WordPress and want the course to live on their own domain rather than a vendor subdomain. The trade off is operational rather than financial. LearnDash is the right answer for someone with WordPress competence or a developer on retainer, and the wrong answer for someone whose comparative advantage is teaching and who will discover a broken checkout at midnight on a launch day.
What people use it for
- A creator whose course revenue has grown to the point where a percentage based platform costs more than a developer would
- Organisations that already run WordPress and want courses on their own domain and brand
- Training businesses that need learner data in a database they control rather than in a vendor account
- Agencies building course sites for multiple clients under one unlimited site licence
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about LearnDash.
- The flat licence excludes everything around it. Hosting, backups, security patching, video hosting and email deliverability are now your cost and your responsibility, and they are not small once traffic grows.
- WordPress plugin conflicts are a live risk. A core or theme update can break checkout or course progression at a moment you did not choose, and there is no vendor operations team standing behind uptime.
- Performance under load needs deliberate hosting work. Shared hosting handles a small course and fails visibly during a launch, and fixing that is a hosting migration rather than a setting.
- Selling requires assembling several plugins for payments, memberships and email, so the true stack is four or five vendors with independent update cycles rather than one product.
- Support covers the plugin, not your site. When the fault sits in the interaction between your theme, your host and another plugin, resolving it is your problem and often a contractor invoice.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of LearnDash
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- LearnDashvsTeachable
Teachable: Similar hosted trade off, worth choosing if the creator has no WordPress competence and no developer available.
- LearnDashvsKajabi
Kajabi: If marketing, email and funnels matter more than owning the stack, and the higher subscription is acceptable.
Pricing
What LearnDash costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
LearnDash LMS, 1 site
$199 /yr
- Single site licence
- All course, quiz and certificate features
- No share taken of course revenue
LearnDash LMS Plus, 10 sites
$399 /yr
- Up to ten sites
- Same feature set
- Suits agencies and multi brand operators
LearnDash LMS Pro, unlimited sites
$799 /yr
- Unlimited sites
- Same feature set
- Priced for agencies building for clients
Capabilities
Features
Course builder
Sections, lessons, topics and quizzes with prerequisites and drip release
Quiz engine
Multiple question types, timed attempts, question banks and pass marks
Certificates
Automatic certificate issue on completion with custom templates
Groups and group leaders
Cohorts with a leader who can see progress, used for corporate seat sales
Commerce integration
Sells through WooCommerce, Stripe or PayPal with subscriptions and one off payments
Ownership of data
Learner records sit in your own WordPress database on your own hosting
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Does LearnDash take a percentage of my course sales?
No. It is a flat annual licence per site and you keep all revenue. That is the main financial argument against percentage based hosted platforms once sales volume is meaningful.
What is the real total cost?
The licence plus hosting capable of handling your traffic, plus video hosting, plus an email service, plus whatever developer time keeps the stack working. Budget for the stack, not the plugin.
Should I use LearnDash Cloud instead?
If you want the plugin without administering WordPress, yes. You give up some of the cost advantage and some control in exchange for not being responsible for the server.
Keep looking
Where to go from LearnDash
- LearnDash alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- LearnDash pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- LearnDash badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All LMS softwareThe full category
- Best LMS softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best LMS software for
Compare LearnDash with
- Teachable
- Thinkific
- Kajabi
- Thought Industries
- Tovuti LMS
- Chamilo
- Schoology
- Podia
- Sakai
- Claroline
- CYPHER Learning
- Schoox
- Coursera
- LearnWorlds
- Udacity
- Cornerstone Learning
- Teachable
- Podia
Other LMS software
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Pricing on request11 researched notesMobile-first learning and talent development for hourly and frontline workforces
Pricing on request11 researched notesCreate and sell online courses with interactive experiences
Free, then $24/mo13 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for LearnDash, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on LearnDash
LearnDash alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
LearnDash pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare LearnDash
Put it head to head with anything we hold
LearnDash badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best LMS software alternatives
Asynchronous training video with AI avatars, quizzes and a searchable knowledge library
Per creator per monthExternal learning platform for companies that sell training to customers and partners as a product
quoteLearning management with interactive content authoring built in rather than bought separately
quote
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Customer education platform that treats training completion as a commercial signal in the CRM
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