# LearnDash > WordPress plugin for building and selling online courses LearnDash is a learning management plugin for WordPress, first launched in 2013 and now sold by Liquid Web. It adds a drag-and-drop course builder, quizzes, assignments, certificates and progress tracking to your own WordPress site, and its built-in MemberDash handles memberships, subscriptions and bundles. It is bought as a yearly license, with no per-student fees. - **Category:** Courses & Communities - **Made by:** Liquid Web, LLC (since 2013) - **Website:** https://www.liquidweb.com/software/learndash/ - **Runs on:** Web - **Facts last checked:** Oct 17, 2026 ## Pricing LearnDash is a paid product with a free trial, starting at $399 per year. - **Pricing model:** Free trial - **Free plan:** None. - **Free trial:** 48-hour free demo site, no credit card required. | Plan | Price | What you get | | --- | --- | --- | | Pro | $399 per year, renews annually | Course and quiz builders, MemberDash memberships, Stripe and PayPal, certificates, AI course outlines and quizzes, ProPanel reporting and gradebook. | | Elite | $599 per year, renews annually | Everything in Pro, plus group management and seat sales, an instructor role with front-end course creation, multiple instructors, and ratings and reviews. | Read from https://www.liquidweb.com/software/learndash/ on Oct 17, 2026. Prices change, so confirm with LearnDash before buying. ## Key features - **Drag-and-drop course builder:** Arrange courses into lessons, topics and assessments, with shared course steps, video progression and a distraction-free focus mode for learners. - **Quizzes, assignments and certificates:** Quizzes with 8 question types including essays and sorting, assignment management, a certificate builder, and badges and points. - **MemberDash memberships:** Membership tiers, recurring subscriptions and course bundles are built in, and members manage their own payment details and subscriptions. - **AI course outlines:** Describe a topic and the AI builder drafts a course outline with lessons and a set of quiz questions to edit before publishing. - **ProPanel reporting:** Enrollment trends, completion rates, quiz performance and at-risk learners in one dashboard, with weighted grading and custom report cards. - **Groups and instructors:** On Elite, sell seats to organizations whose leaders manage their own teams, and let several instructors build courses from the front end. ## Good for - Course sellers who already run a WordPress site - Agencies building learning sites for clients - Training providers selling group seats to companies ## Worth knowing - LearnDash needs a WordPress site, so you supply and maintain the hosting, theme and updates yourself. - The pricing page does not say how many sites a license covers; LearnDash's own license docs still describe 1-site, 10-site and unlimited licenses. - Group seat sales, the instructor role and multi-instructor courses need Elite at $599 a year. - The license renews automatically each year; without a valid license the plugin keeps working but gets no updates, security patches or support. ## ToolGPA grades **GPA: 2.0 out of 4**, graded Oct 17, 2026. LearnDash turns your WordPress site into a course platform: a drag-and-drop builder, quizzes, certificates, memberships and good reporting, for $399 a year with no fee on sales. If you're not already on WordPress, though, you're also signing up for hosting, a theme and updates. And the only way to try it is a 48-hour demo. - **Value for money: C.** Pro is $399 a year, about $33 a month, with no fee per sale or per student, so $2,000 of sales costs $33 a month: the middle of this category. Hosting for the WordPress site is on top, and isn't in that figure. - **Free plan and trial: D.** No free version. There's a 48-hour demo site with no card needed, which is a look around rather than a trial. - **Features: C.** A drag-and-drop course builder, quizzes with 8 question types, assignments, certificates, MemberDash memberships, AI outlines and ProPanel reporting. Plenty, but it needs a WordPress site to be useful, and community comes from add-ons like bbPress. - **Ease of use: C.** No rating on record. The builder is drag-and-drop, but first you need WordPress running on a host, then the plugin and its settings, so there's real setup. - **Platforms and integrations: B.** Runs in the browser inside WordPress, with Stripe, PayPal, WooCommerce, Elementor, MemberPress, Gravity Forms, bbPress and ThriveCart. No apps listed. These are ToolGPA's own grades. Graded from this listing, whose facts were read from Liquid Web's own pages on 17 October 2026. Not based on using the product, and shorter than our full reviews. ## Where it stands among course and community platforms - LearnDash's GPA of 2.0 is higher than 1 of the 18 other course and community platforms we grade, and level with 2. - It stands best on platforms and integrations (B, above 0 of 18) and worst on free plan and trial (D, above 1). - Its paid plans start at $33.25 a month when paid by the year, against a middle price of $41 for the category: 5 of the 17 others that charge start lower. - On features, ease of use and platforms it scores 2.3 out of 4. 3 tools score higher and cost less. The category's chart of price against score: https://toolgpa.com/charts/courses-communities ## Keep it, or make your own? **Your call.** You could make the core of LearnDash for yourself: online courses. What you would give up is listed below. Whether that is worth the price is your call. It costs $399 a year. - You could make: Online courses: an app builder makes this well. - You could make: It runs in a browser, which is where something home-made would run too. - You could not: It plugs into other products, Stripe, PayPal and WooCommerce among them, and has an API. - You could not: AI features, unless you pay a model provider for each request yourself. A judgement by ToolGPA from this listing, by rules that are the same for every tool. Nothing was built to test it. ## Works with Stripe, PayPal, WooCommerce, Elementor, MemberPress, Gravity Forms, bbPress, ThriveCart **Tags:** Online courses, AI features, Public API ## Alternatives - [MemberPress](https://toolgpa.com/tools/memberpress): WordPress plugin for paid memberships, courses and communities. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/learndash-vs-memberpress) - [Thinkific](https://toolgpa.com/tools/thinkific): Course, community and membership platform for experts and academies. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/learndash-vs-thinkific) - [Teachable](https://toolgpa.com/tools/teachable): Online course, coaching and membership platform with its own checkout. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/learndash-vs-teachable) - [LearnWorlds](https://toolgpa.com/tools/learnworlds): Online academy builder for course creators and training teams. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/learndash-vs-learnworlds) - [Kajabi](https://toolgpa.com/tools/kajabi): All-in-one platform for selling courses, coaching and communities. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/kajabi-vs-learndash) ## Sources The prices, plans, platforms and features above were read from these pages on Oct 17, 2026: - https://www.liquidweb.com/software/learndash/ - https://docs.nexcess.com/software/learndash/license/ - https://docs.nexcess.com/software/learndash/learndash-licensing-and-management/ - https://docs.nexcess.com/software/learndash/faqs/ Page: https://toolgpa.com/tools/learndash Listed by ToolGPA (toolgpa.com).