LearnDash VS MemberPress LMS Comparison

WordPress is one of the most famous, trending, and utility-friendly content management systems. It allows you to create your own blog sites for free and also provides custom domain websites for a nominal fee.

It has a robust plugin architecture with thousands of WordPress themes and templates to choose from. WordPress is the easiest and most popular open-source CMS, used by over 75 million websites on the internet. 

With a flexible, powerful, and simple interface, it reduces development costs and deployment time, too.

And if your goal is to create a membership website for your audience, WordPress can do it as well.

Using an LMS WordPress plugin, you can create an effective membership website with ease. 

Two of the most popular, helpful, and functional LMS WordPress plugins are Memberpress and LearnDash. In this article, we will compare the two of them to understand which one is the right plugin for you.

Both the platforms have unique features and benefits that are helpful to cater to different goals of individuals and businesses. Let us detail each one of them –

LearnDash

Released in 2013, LearnDash is a WordPress Learning Management System created by e-learning experts, which lets you create and sell your learning courses online.

Being one of the most popular LMS platforms in the market, it is used worldwide by eminent universities, professional training organizations, and Fortune 500 companies. 

Through LearnDash, you can easily convert useful, academic, and professional information into e-learning courses. The customers who want to take up these e-learning courses do so by paying a course fee, through which you earn. 

It is trusted by big names, including Yoast, Keep, University of Michigan, University of Florida, and many more. LearnDash is the only WordPress LMS on the list of ‘Capterra Top 20 Training Software Winner’, as well.

The 4 main features of LearnDash are –

Structured content maximizing delivery:

LearnDash uses leading online learning principles to develop structured course content maximizing delivery and increasing the course completion rates. 

Superior quizzing engine:

It has a comprehensive and excellent quizzing engine that engages students with 8 different types of quizzes. It supports all forms of media, graduation levels, and automation sequences to make the quizzes more fun and exciting.

Immersive learning experience:

LearnDash offers your students not just a course but a full-fledged learning experience by converting your knowledge into an interesting pack filled with information and engrossment. This also helps in retaining and repeated customers.

A growth journey:

LearnDash grows with you, for you. It helps you create additional content layers, lets you splice out vast information into micro-courses, adds gamification, automates notifications, and so much more to make the process seamless and interactive. 

Since LearnDash gives you complete control over selling your courses the way you want to, with the price you wish at – it gives you multiple pricing models, up-selling offerings, reminder notifications to boost sales.

These key features distinguish LearnDash from others in the market –

• It offers several pricing models for you to choose from in order to give to your customers, including one-time sales, subscription packs, memberships, and bundles.
• 300+ payment gateways, including Paypal, Stripe, 2Checkout, and more.
• Provides automatic renewal notifications and cancellations.
• It gives you refund protection and increases revenue through scheduled content.
• Set up and installation within minutes.
• Deliver content with a predefined schedule.
• Engagement triggers helping you engage with the learners and interact to improve communication.
• Robust user management with groups of learners, bulk enrollment, automatic course removals, and more.
• It helps you reward the learners by providing certificates, points, and badges to the learners for participating in quizzes and completing courses. 

More features:

• Comprehensive integration with Zapier, BuddyPress, Gravity, and many more.
• They have a pool of e-learning experts from around the world.
• Several add-on, videos, tutorials, and features make the learning experience rich and innovative.
• It helps you create courses like a regular blog.
• Builds quizzes and exams for the courses.
• Existence of customizable certifications supporting dynamic data.
• Numerous initial guides and tutorials to help you get started.
• Concise video tutorials of the key LearnDash functionality.
• Responsive help desk and customer support.
• Regular webinars covering and explaining the latest features.
• Clear documentation for configuring your courses.
• Discussion forum to discuss ideas and questions with other LearnDash users.

LearnDash Accolades:

• G2: Top 20 Highest Rates Corporate LMS 
• Capterra: #1 most affordable LMS
• G2: Top 20 Easiest to Use Corporate LMS
• eLearning Industry: Top 20 LMA based on User Experience
• G2: Top 20 Easiest to Use General LMS

Pricing:

Their basic package starts at $199 (now discounted at $159), giving you a site license for 1 site. 

The plus package costs $229 (discounted price $189), offering up to 10 site licenses. 

And the pro package costs $369 (discounted at $329), offering up to 25 site licenses. 

LearnDash also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, in case you are not satisfied with their services.

MemberPress

MemberPress is a WordPress plugin that is a powerful tool to create a bunch of membership programs. It allows you to sell digital content, downloads, and courses. Additionally, it enables you to grant members early-bird access and discounts to events and sales. 

It helps you to start charging all your users for accessing your content instantly. Also, it assists you in confidentially creating, managing, and tracking all membership subscriptions. 

It is a simple, user-friendly, and effective plugin to create membership sites and suits bs tig you wish to create a simple and easy membership site with walled connect and run courses.

Known as one of the best membership plugins in the market currently, the tool is intuitive and organized. It offers complete control to the website owner about who has access to the membership. 

It enables you to restrict tags or restrict access to a particular post or page to members not particularly subscribed to the content.

There are various websites where you can use this plugin, including community sites for clubs, magazine websites with restricted content, course websites with paid content, digital downloads sites, and more.

If you wish to create powerful and compelling WordPress sites, leveraging robust features and solutions offered by MemberPress and other WordPress plugins, this is the right place for you to know it in detail.

The 4 main features of MemberPress are –

Full-blown subscription management system:

Through MemberPress, your members who have subscribed to your content can create, update, upgrade, and cancel the subscriptions directly from the website itself.

It leverages the automated billing systems on the payment gateway, eliminating complex set-ups. The payments come in regularly in a systemized manner, and MemberPress automatically grants or revokes access to the members based on the payments.

Clear and relevant reporting:

MemberPress makes sure that you always have a crystal clear idea about what is happening on your WordPress website. It gives you all the information that you need and skips the information that you do not require.

MemberPress reports let you know how much money you bring, the high selling products, courses that perform better than others, and much more through proper analysis and examination.

Dynamic pricing pages:

Memberpress allows you to generate dynamic prices for your membership products.

This means you can sort the order, change copies, change the look and feel with several pricing for your products to suit the customer. It features many pricing page themes, which are unique and attractive. 

Powerful access rule:

MemberPress gives you a fully grained fine control over the content that your users can see according to their membership or the products they have purchased.

So, if your customer has purchased an X course, he/she will never be able to get access to the Y course unless and until he/she pays for it. It allows you to restrict access to pages, child pages, posts, custom post types, categories, tags, and every other file in your WordPress installation.

These key features distinguish MemberPress from others in the market –

• It does not require any CSS or HTML coding. However, it allows you to create your own CSS styles if you are an advanced user.
• Fully customize your page by creating a page template. 
• Offers custom post types, easily customizable, having group pricing pages.
• Incredibly easy start-up. All you need to do is install the plugin, enter the payment gateway details, set up products, and you are ready to go!
• The LMS plugin allows you the ease of building online courses with an uncomplicated add-on. It is a simple click-and-go process, and the courses are built-in without the need for a separate download.
• MemberPress generates coupons to make promotions and giveaways easy. It also allows you to control when they expire, the number of uses, and customizable coupon codes.
• You can build your very own password-protected community forum with MemberPress, integrated with BBPress and several other form plugins.
• Works with all the WordPress themes. Even if you are using a custom theme, Memberpress works like wonders.
• It also includes the feature of content dripping, which means a pre-scheduled/timed release of the content along with content access expiration. 

More features:

• Membership works simultaneously with another powerful plugin, Affiliate Royale. It is an affiliate program plugin for WordPress that lets you create your own affiliate programs and monitor sales, clicks, and payments.
• MemberPress offers simple payment gateway integrations, where all you need to do is enter your gateway API keys and set up any notifications required. 
• The MemberPress support team offers unwavering customer support to its clients. 
• They have an outstanding user manual covering every admin page and all the features in detail. 
• They have an extensive set of integrations that also allows you to integrate your own codes as a developer. This will enable you to customize each and everything on your site with MemberPress.
• Integration with Zapier allows you to connect MemberPress to thousands of software products and services for seamless operations. 
• MemberPress is built with ultra-tight WordPress integration, following PHP and WordPress’s best coding practices ensuring stability and utmost security. 
• User-friendly dashboard. 
• It lets you create multiple membership levels and manage accordingly.
• Configures one-time prices, recurring subscriptions, and plans.
• Controls duration of memberships and trial periods effectively.

Pricing: 

Their basic plan starts from $249 (discounted at $149) per year, allowing use on 1 site.

The most popular plan, the plus plan, costs $399 per year (discounted at $249), allowing use on 2 sites.

The pro plan costs $549 (discounted at $349) per year, using up to 5 sites.

There are no hidden costs, and they also offer a 100% no-risk money-back guarantee in 14 days, with no questions asked.

LearnDash VS MemberPress: Final face-off

LEARNDASH	MEMBERPRESS
Dedicated plugin to create online courses.	Serves a wider purpose that includes course creations. Primarily creates membership options.
No technical knowledge or coding is needed.	No technical knowledge or coding is needed.
Built-in content protector to protect courses and grant access to the ones subscribed to them. Does not allow multiple membership levels.	Allows multiple membership levels – silver gold and platinum. Permissions are set accordingly.
Learndash has more integrations than MemberPress.	Integrates with roughly 40 other third-party services and software.
The self-help option available on the site let’s you find the answers to your queries without having to contact the support staff.	Works on a support ticket system only. It takes 1-2 business days to receive a response from their team.

Our Verdict: LearnDash or MemberPress?

Both the tools are powerful and incredibly equipped to enhance your WordPress website. However, if you are only looking to build courses seamlessly, LearnDash is a better solution.

You get access to all you need in order to create and publish courses and quizzes online and boost your revenue from its sales.

But if you want to offer memberships along with these courses, MemberPress is the option for you! It allows you to create multiple membership levels and grant access to the lessons accordingly.

It comes equipped with features to build a course from scratch. This basically means that MemberPress is an extension to LearnDash, as it offers what LearnDash offers along with the membership system. 

Finally, MemberPress serves as an all-in-one solution to create any membership in order to sell our services/products in the form of courses, individual videos, quizzes, exam packs, and much more.