LearnDash, no doubt, is an exceptional learning management system that has been around for the past nine years.
So, it has gained a lot of ground over the years to win users with its easy-to-use platform. Plus, it can get you started in a snap if your only focus is learning management.
But you’re here because you’ve tried using LearnDash and discovered the LMS tool is limiting because of its lack of:
- CRM integration
- Functionality
- eCommerce robustness
- Design flexibility
Its increasing cost makes things even more difficult!
So, you’re in the market again to find the best LearnDash alternatives that can meet your business needs.
I’ve got good news for you!
There are LearnDash alternatives with affordable price packages; some even come free, like Google Classroom. There are also alternatives like Podia that offer unlimited access to students, bandwidth, etc.
If you’re looking for functionality and eCommerce robustness, alternatives like Thinkfic, TalentLMS, or Teachable can give you what you need.
So, no matter the feature you’re looking for, whether you run a small education firm or a large training center, we’ve got you covered.
This article will talk comprehensively about the ten best LearnDash alternatives you can use in 2021.
I’ll also briefly discuss some key factors to consider when choosing a learning management system or LearnDash alternative.
Are you ready?
Let’s jump right in!
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Best LearnDash Alternatives 2021
1. Teachable
Teachable is an online learning platform that enables professionals from any industry to share knowledge and produce courses for new learners.
So, you can build and sell your online courses—using the various tools on the platform to personalize and curate your content.
With Teachable, you can generate engaging multimedia courses and connect your existing websites under a custom domain name. All you need to do is add a link to the school’s page because it’s an online course builder, not a WordPress plugin like LearnDash.
So, you don’t need to add extra effort to set up your LMS—it’s super easy and fast. In other words, you don’t need a technical background to set it up. But it’s not the same thing for LearnDash. You need to spend some time and run the installation.
You can also add a team of lecturers to your dashboard and allot notable roles and permissions under their names.
Teachable also makes it possible for you to produce eye-catching, money-making sales pages thanks to its flexible editor. Plus, you can track insightful data like your sales and students’ data with teachable inbuilt wide-ranging dashboards.
Can you run one-on-one call sessions with your students?
Yes, you can! You can even use special task features in the tool’s dashboard to connect with new learners. That way, you’ll get honest feedback from your students and improve the experience based on those recommendations.
What about the payment system of Teachable?
The tool supports over 130 currencies from different countries, enabling a broader audience across the globe to process payments.
When it comes to security, you can rest assured that Teachable’s 2048-bit SSL certificate will protect your data. It runs 24/7 security monitoring for your data—with seamless hosting technology.
Teachable comes with three packages which include:
- Valued at $29 per month is the basic package
- The most popular package, Pro, goes for $99 per month
- $249 per month is the price tag for its business package, which comes with more features
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2. Kajabi
Are you looking for a solution that will help you create, market, and sell short online courses or training programs without a line of code, broken integrations, or plugins?
Then, consider going with Kajabi, which is a professional online business platform that refers to its courses as digital products.
Kajabi may not be the option if you plan to build learning paths. The platform is perfect for businesses and training programs that want to sell short and straightforward eLearning products.
So, here’s what you should know.
This learning solution allows you to build your customizable storefront like an eCommerce platform. You can also integrate your business branding into your dashboard while producing and hosting your online courses.
If you want to launch marketing campaigns for your storefront, it’s possible. The only snag is you’d need to have a digital marketer on your team.
Also, you may need to jump on a crash course to effectively understand how to create and upload your course content on the platform.
But managing your uploaded courses is as simple as clicking a few buttons. You can even logically structure your content. Kajabi supports all types of video files, audio files, images, and documents.
With Kajabi, you can create quizzes for your online courses—whether it’s paragraph questions, multiple-response, or multiple-choice. However, it doesn’t support randomization or question banks, which are advanced features.
Kajabi has a more advanced payment system than LearnDash’s. The platform supports multiple currencies, order bumps, and automated expiring coupons.
Also, if you’re facing cart abandonment issues, Kajabi may be an excellent choice to consider. LearnDash, however, seems to fall short in this area. It doesn’t offer any solution covering cart abandonment issues.
Kajabi comes with a 14-day free trial and three different payment plans, namely:
- Basic – $149 per month ($119 per month billed annually)
- Growth – $199 per month ($159 per month billed annually)
- Pro – $399 per month ($319 per month billed annually)
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3. Thinkific
If you’re looking for a learning management software that can help you produce, deliver, market, and sell online tutorials on your website, Thinkific is an option to consider.
Thinkific can make specific decisions about your online courses and tailor them down to your audience’s needs.
But that’s not all.
Thinkific allows you to integrate rich media content such as:
- Images
- Links
- Surveys
- Videos
- Typeform
- Google docs
- Articulate
- Captivate
- Discussions
- Quizzes
- Downloads
You can also organize all your content using the Thinkific drag and drop builder feature—without coding.
Thinkific makes it possible for you to tailor your online learning platform with one click. So, you can create hidden and private courses and give access to specific students. If you want new students to join an ongoing online course on your platform, you can leverage the “Prerequisite lessons” feature.
Other features you stand to enjoy are:
- Creating Evergreen or expiring content
- Drip schedule online content
- Multiple instructors, etc.
LearnDash, on the other hand, doesn’t have the “Private and hidden courses” feature.
One remarkable feature of this learning application is the total control you get over your data, content, and pricing. With Thinkific, you get complete flexibility and freedom to manage your online course business. So, whether it’s the site design, student information, etc., you own it 100 percent.
Thinkific provides seamless automation that lets you run your online learning business without stress. The tool helps you with student messaging, onboarding, certificate awarding, and many more—to give your students a first-class education while you tackle bigger goals.
Social proofing is available on the Thinkific platform. In other words, you can get course reviews from your online students for particular courses. But this feature isn’t available on the LearnDash platform.
Thinkific has four packages which include;
- Free – With this package, you can test-drive Thinkific’s features
- Basic – At $49 per month, this package offers Thinkific’s basic features—required to launch your online learning startup
- Pro – The Pro package is the most popular, at $99 per month, and it comes with a plethora of tools that will enhance your students’ experience
- Premier – If you want to build an education empire with advanced tools, this package is what you need, valued at $499 per month
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4. Podia
After seven years in the eLearning industry growing its market share, Podia is fast becoming a brand to reckon with.
The creators of Podia built the software with a creator mindset. This platform helps you to overcome any potential technical bottlenecks linked with producing and hosting digital content.
In other words, you can upload your eLearning courses in a wide range of formats such as:
- eBooks
- Checklists
- Video
- PDFs
- Audio
- Cheat Sheets
Another striking feature about Podia is the unlimited access it gives you. So, you don’t have to have to pay additional costs to enroll additional:
- Students
- Memberships
- Bandwidth
- Storage
- Digital downloads
- Hosting
Your subscription fee covers it all, unlike LearnDash that has certain restrictions on student enrollment, data usage, etc., based on the package you choose.
Despite Podia’s minimalist design, it supports a wide range of pre-designed content, except for AICC, Tin Can, or SCORM packages.
From a marketing and sales standpoint, Podia has the edge over LearnDash. For instance, Podia is the only eLearning platform that enables you to host your membership website with your products.
Most eLearning platforms host their membership sites and products separately, including LearnDash.
The only snag with Podia is its payment system that supports only Stripe, which is a blind spot they need to fix.
Overall, Podia is a superb all-inclusive LearnDash alternative.
Podia has a competitive pricing package that is comprised of:
- Mover – $39 per month
- Shaker – $79 per month
- Earthquaker – $179 per month
Podia also comes with a 14-day free trial that requires no credit card.
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5. iSpring Market
Talk about functionality and simplicity? Then, the iSpring Market is the choice to consider. You can produce and start selling your courses in few minutes with this solution. So, you can easily upload your course content and design your storefront in a snap.
Because iSpring is a complete learning management system, it enables you to:
- Create customized courses
- Manage your lecturers
- Complete the training process
So, you can allocate various assignments to different users, add them to specific groups, and monitor the overall data from sales to user-growth statistics.
One of the things that make iSpring Market a great LearnDash alternative is its ability to support all types of content. So, whether it’s a SCROM 1.2/2004 package, audio, video, etc., iSpring Market covers you.
iSpring Market can also help you with your sales and marketing strategy. With a few clicks on the iSpring Market dashboard, you can incentivize your students with freebies, discounts, or coupons.
It’s also possible to incorporate your brand into the tool’s platform by changing the color scheme, adding your logo, etc.
iSpring Market has three price packages—based on the students subscribing to your course.
So, here are its three price packages—based on the number of users and bandwidth:
- 500 users/25GB – $77
- 1000 users/50GB – $147
- 2000 users/100GB – $277
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6. LearnWorlds
Are you a small business, nonprofit, or entrepreneur that wants to build and sell online courses? There’s something for you: LearnWorlds.
This platform offers third-party marketing tools, a robust sales engine, and extensive analytics features. Also, it has a ton of features like a landing and sales page.
Other features include importing SCORM courses which is an international standard for eCourses.
How vital is SCORM?
Every learning management system recognizes your content when you publish it in the SCORM format. Plus, your students can save their progress as they go through your course. LearnDash, however, doesn’t come with this feature.
The interface of this platform has a lot going on at first glance, but if you focus on the analytics, the design will make a lot of sense. Another feature that makes LearnWorlds standout is its digital downloads—which is absent in LearnDash.
LearnWorlds is super easy to operate, and it supports you at every step. Plus, you don’t have to be a tech guru to understand its platform. In short, a newbie can navigate through the platform with ease.
LearnWorlds promotes a lot of engagement and interactivity. So, it emphasizes different learning styles and instructional design techniques.
Some of the features this LearnDash alternative provides are:
- Online testing engines
- Interactive video player
- Interactive eBooks
This online learning engine lets you create custom digital certificates that can feature course name, date of issue, brand, logo, etc. The “interactive video” function is another exciting feature that allows you to engage different learning styles simultaneously.
In other words, you can include things like external links, questionnaires with feedback on your responses, text, navigation buttons, etc. Also, you can pause the video automatically if you want to give your students time to ponder on questions or assignments.
In summary, this feature allows you to engage kinetic, visual, verbal, and auditory learners.
With this tool’s interactive ebooks, your learners can choose to highlight essential or exciting areas to make annotations directly on the text.
When it comes to pricing, LearnWorlds has four plans:
- Starter – $24
- Pro Trainer – $79
- Learning Center – $249
- High volume & Corporate – you have to contact the company
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7. TalentLMS
TalentLMS is a stylish and straightforward cloud-based online course platform that helps to provide engaging content for your students or employees. This platform doesn’t stop at creating, delivering, and managing courses, however.
It also provides other valuable features like:
- Blended learning
- Course authoring
- Web conferencing
- Email communications
- Content download and uploads
- Custom branding/White-labeling
- Integrations
- Assessments and polling
- Mobile responsiveness
- Security
- Progress tracking
- Engagement and interactivity
- Registration forms
- Reporting and analytics
- eCommerce selling
TalentLMS has a minimalistic design with a highly intuitive course authoring feature. Thus, the platform delivers all you need without overkilling it. This LMS allows you to create content from scratch or upload pre-existing content, making it stand out.
Also, it comes with instructional design elements like gamification—where students can earn achievement badges, points, unlock levels, etc., based on their progress.
You can also organize competitions and tests for students to compete for first place on leaderboards. In the long run, it makes your courses more attractive.
Interestingly, you don’t need coding or specialized knowledge to operate this LMS tool.
Another unique feature of this solution is its social/collaborative learning. Your students can use any device for interaction on discussion forums.
The cloud-based solution is compatible with CM15, SCORM, and xAPI. Plus, it offers API integrations that add extendibility—which LearnDash doesn’t possess.
If you plan to sell courses, you can do that easily by adding some of the integrations available:
- Javascript (1000+ widgets, Google Analytics, Zendesk chat)
- eCommerce (Shopify, Stripe, Paypal)
- Zapier web apps (Mailchimp, Slack, Trello)
- Video conferencing (zoom, BigBlueButton)
The class management feature is another value this solution offers, which LearnDash also lacks. The management feature helps to boosts the flexibility of your learning platform.
TalentLMS has a free option—limited to five users and ten courses. If you want more, you can opt for its other price plans: Small, Basic, Plus, and Premium.
Each of the plans cost $29, $99, $199, and $349 respectively.
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8. Google Classroom
If you want to explore a free LMS that allows you to communicate with students and offer constructive feedback when necessary, Google Classroom is up to the task.
The solution lets you share assignments and classroom documents with ease. Since the solution delivers via the Chrome browser, it’s accessible from tablets, computers, and mobile phones, unlike LearnDash, which doesn’t support any of these devices.
With this feature, it’s easy to add links, attach files from Google Drive, upload YouTube videos, and create Google documents for managing announcements and assignments. On the students’ end, they can log in quickly, tune in and receive their assignments.
Another remarkable feature of this cloud-based solution is its ability to save and share documents online with an unlimited number of people.
The process of distributing an assignment is just a click away. Your students can quickly turn in projects in a few seconds. Plus, you can monitor submissions and offer feedback instantly.
What’s more, the tool has a clean interface that eases navigation and allows users to feel comfortable. It also allows learners to comment on a variety of online courses. With Google Classroom, it’s possible to create URLs with comments from online discussions.
It also has some snags like limited integration options and no automated updates or tests.
In summary, it’s an ideal option if you want an effective and free solution that eases remote studying and simplifies your students’ work evaluation.
9. Lessonly
Lessonly is a simple cloud-based solution that eases the process of building content. With its drag and drop function, you can add videos, SCORM-compliant content, documents, quizzes, etc.
Lessonly comes with data visualization, alongside an “import and export” feature, which LearnDash doesn’t offer. The feature allows users to measure their performance with its insights and show lessons completed or viewed. That way, your students can spot knowledge gaps and improve.
Other features of Lessonly include exporting lessons to bulk upload and PDF, custom branding, in-person training, etc.
That said, this LMS integrates solutions like Highspot, Slack, Zendesk, Chrome, Namely, BambooHR, and Okta.
Also, Lessonly comes with a cloud-based solution, which is ideal for big businesses with 25 users or more. The platform doesn’t put their prices out—so, you have to contact them for a quote.
But they offer two price packages: Pro and Pro+ Coaching.
The first plan (Pro) is for teams with 25 users, and it comes with the following features:
- PDF export
- Custom branding
- Image library
- User roles and permission
- Events tracking
- Single sign-on
- SCORM-compliant content
- Integrations
- Quizzes and surveys
- Chat support
- Personal account manager
- Single sign-on
- Lesson builder
- Smart groups
The Pro+ Coaching package comes with everything in the Pro plan alongside practice & coaching features (ticketing, practicing via chat, email, audio & screens) and certifications.
You can also get add-on features like integration with Salesforce, custom roles, advanced user management, tutorials, localization, preferred services, and cutting-edge custom branding.
10. Docebo
This cloud-based enterprise is currently one of the best eLearning solutions. It personalizes your users’ experience to produce more profound learning results.
This profound learning results combine with aspects such as:
- Business objectives
- Automated learning management
- Facilitation of informal learning—helpful in the flow of work
The highly secure solution also delivers superb eLearning training programs and simplifies social learning to generate a culture of continuous learning.
Docebo allows document comparison, which is one thing LearnDash lacks.
With this tool’s functionality, you can grow your education business. It provides speedy delivery and simplifies content management.
Moreover, Docebo takes training to another level with its exciting gamification functionality. With this feature, you can capture and reveal hidden value in User-Generated knowledge.
The platform doesn’t need installation—which passes for fast and easy implementation. Also, you can set up and maintain Docebo with ease.
Furthermore, it permits smooth collaboration and distribution to your workforce regardless of their location.
Docebo comes with a free trial if you want to test its features and get a feel of its platform. However, if you want more, you’d have to contact customer support because there are no price tags on its website.
Two Things to Consider Before Choosing a Learning Management System
It gets tricky making the right choice, considering the abundance of LMS available online.
To make matters worse, most of the solutions offer several advanced features. So, you’d have to consider some factors that will guide you to make the right decision.
1. Know Your Learning Needs
What is your ultimate goal?
Answering this question gives you a picture of your users’ expectations at the end of the learning session.
For instance, if you opt for an LMS for an animation course, you should expect interactions between users and tutors. With that in mind, you’d have to consider a tool with functionalities like sharing comments, exchange sketches, uploading assignments, etc.
2. Content Compatibility
When it comes to your LMS; “Content is king.” So, it’s crucial to have the ideal type of content at the right place because it determines the effectiveness of your course.
When you know the type of content you want to put out, it will guide you to choosing the best LMS for your business needs.
In Conclusion
Now you’ve got it:
The 10 best LearnDash alternatives in 2021.
Every eLearning software we listed here is a popular option that can stand head to head with LearnDash.
However, Podia caught our attention the most because of its unlimited access to users, data, bandwidth, etc. It also has the most affordable monthly pricing on this list, except for Google Classrooms that offer a completely free solution, but at the expense of your data and privacy.
In the long run, it’s ideal you go for an option that best fits your eLearning needs.
