Best WordPress LMS Plugins To Create and Sell Course Content

WordPress LMS plugins all promise the same four things: courses, quizzes, payments and certificates. The gap between them shows up in year two, when the introductory discount expires and you find out what the license really costs. Two of the five plugins below advertise a first-year price that doubles on renewal. One has no free version at all. Every price here, renewals included, was re-checked against the vendor’s own pricing page for this update.

The best WordPress LMS plugins in 2026, compared

Read the renewal column before the price column. That is where these five plugins separate, and it is the column most comparison pages leave out.

Plugin	Free version	Entry paid plan	Renews at	Sites	One-time option
LearnDash	No	Essentials, $259/year	$259/year, no intro discount shown	Not stated on the pricing page	None
Tutor LMS	Yes, full core	Individual, $199/year	Not published	1	$499 lifetime, 1 site
LifterLMS	Yes, full core	Earth Bundle, $199 first year	$398/year	1 active site	$10,000 Infinity lifetime
LearnPress	Yes, 8 free add-ons	Pro Bundle, $299 for 12 months	$209.30/year	1	None; add-ons from $19
Masteriyo	Yes, full core	Basic, $99 first year	$199/year	1	$499 Elite lifetime, 1 site

LearnDash

LearnDash is the grown-up option and it charges like one. It is also the only plugin here that has moved house: learndash.com now redirects to Liquid Web’s LearnDash page, which is where the pricing and the buy buttons live. Nothing about the plugin changed, but if you bookmarked the old pricing URL it no longer resolves.

The thing LearnDash does that the cheaper plugins do not is tell you what is happening inside your courses without exporting anything. Enrollment trends, completion rates by course, quiz score breakdowns, at-risk learner flags. If you have ever rebuilt lesson four because half the class quit there, you already know why that matters. The uncomfortable part is that all of it sits in the Pro tier.

Key features

• Drag-and-drop course builder with lessons, topics and assessments, plus a quiz builder with eight question types.
• AI course outline and quiz generation from a prompt (Pro and Elite).
• Advanced reporting, enrollment tracking, weighted grading, custom report cards and student notes (Pro and Elite).
• Memberships, subscriptions and bundles built in, with MemberDash included on every tier.
• Group course management, an instructor role, front-end course creation and seat selling (Elite only).
• Stripe and PayPal, video progression, focus mode, certificate builder, plagiarism detection, no per-student fees.

Price: Essentials $259/year, Pro $399/year, Elite $599/year. There is no free version and no introductory discount on the page, so the number you pay in year one is the number you pay in year four. The page states “one license, unlimited courses, unlimited learners” but does not name a site limit for any tier, so confirm at checkout if you plan to reuse a license across client sites.

Best for: a course business with revenue to protect, an institution selling seats to groups, or an agency building an LMS for a client who will fund it properly. Our full LearnDash review goes deeper on the builder, and the LearnDash vs LifterLMS comparison covers the head-to-head most readers land on.

Skip it if: you have not sold a course yet. There is no free tier, no trial price on the pricing page, and $259 is a lot to pay to find out whether anyone wants what you are teaching.

Tutor LMS

Tutor LMS is the plugin we install when someone says they might want to sell a course. The free core is not a demo with the useful parts removed; it builds courses, runs quizzes, enrolls students and gives instructors and learners their own dashboards. Its WordPress.org listing shows 100,000+ active installs and 4.4 stars from 587 reviews, the largest WordPress.org install count of any plugin on this page.

Key features

• Unlimited courses, lessons, learners and instructors in the free plugin.
• Advanced quiz builder, including five interactive question types added in version 4.0: Draw Image, Pin Image, Graph, Puzzle and Range (Pro).
• Native ecommerce and subscriptions, with PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, Paddle, Mollie, Klarna, Razorpay, Paystack and manual payment.
• Multi-instructor marketplace with earnings, commission allocation and withdrawal options.
• AI Studio for course outlines, lessons and quiz questions, which needs your own OpenAI API key rather than a bundled allowance.
• Page builder support, so it drops into a site already built with Elementor Pro or the block editor.

Price: the core is free. On the Tutor LMS pricing page, Pro runs $199/year for one site, $399/year for ten and $799/year for unlimited. Lifetime licenses are $499, $999 and $1,999, the last capped at 50 sites rather than unlimited. No renewal rate is published anywhere on that page, so budget the annual figure again until checkout tells you otherwise.

Best for: validating a course idea at zero cost, and for solo creators who would rather pay $499 once than sign up for a subscription that outlives the course. Our Tutor LMS review covers the builder in detail.

Skip it if: you are running a live Tutor site on 3.x and cannot absorb a redesign right now. Version 4.0 shipped in July 2026 with a rebuilt learner experience, new Modern, Kids and Legacy design modes and an overhauled quiz interface. The changelog on that same listing is long, and the plugin’s own upgrade notice tells you to back the site up before you press update. Take that literally.

LifterLMS

LifterLMS has the happiest customers of anything on this page and the most awkward pricing. The free core is genuinely complete, with unlimited courses, memberships, students and teachers, and its WordPress.org listing shows 4.8 stars from 391 reviews across 10,000+ active installs. People who pay for it tend to stay. The question is what staying costs.

Key features

• Multi-tier course structure: sections, lessons, quizzes, prerequisites and drip scheduling.
• Ecommerce add-ons for Stripe, PayPal, WooCommerce and Authorize.net, plus cart abandonment recovery and a name-your-price option.
• Email marketing and CRM add-ons including Mailchimp and ConvertKit.
• Direct integrations with Gravity Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms and Formidable, so your existing form plugin can drive enrollment.
• Memberships alongside courses, which saves bolting on one of the dedicated membership plugins.
• Sky Pilot theme included from the Universe bundle upwards, and support seats that scale with the tier.

Price: the core plugin is free. The LifterLMS pricing page lists Earth at $199 for one active site, Universe at $299 for five and Infinity at $799 for unlimited, each shown against a struck-through figure of $398, $598 and $1,598. The footnote under the table is the important sentence: all renewals are at full price. There is also an Infinity lifetime license at $10,000, the most expensive single line item on any pricing page in this roundup.

Best for: coaches and membership businesses that will use the email, CRM and ecommerce add-ons hard enough to justify the bundle, and anyone happy to run the free core indefinitely. The LifterLMS review has the setup walkthrough.

Skip it if: you plan more than one year ahead. Two years on Earth costs $597 for a single site, which is more than two years of LearnDash Essentials at $518, and the LearnDash page names no site limit at all. The first year is a discount, not a price.

LearnPress

LearnPress is the only plugin here you can buy in pieces. Everything premium is a separate add-on with its own price, so if you need content drip and nothing else, you pay $39 and stop. That is a real advantage and it is why the plugin keeps its place on this list. Its WordPress.org listing shows 70,000+ active installs and 4.3 stars from 597 reviews.

Key features

• Free plan with eight free add-ons and a lifetime license for one site.
• Course curriculum with lessons, question banks, quiz timers, attempt limits, negative marking and instant marking, all in the free tier.
• Offline and password-protected courses, plus SCORM support, without paying for an add-on.
• Individually priced extras: Live Course and Chat Room at $19, Random Quiz and H5P interactive video quizzes at $29, Content Drip and Assignments at $39, Frontend Editor at $49.
• Checkout through Stripe or your existing store, which pairs with the WooCommerce plugins you already run.

Price: free, or the Pro Bundle at $299 for twelve months of updates on one site. The LearnPress pricing page is the only one in this roundup that publishes a renewal lower than the first-year price: $209.30. Individual add-ons start at $19.

Best for: someone who needs two or three specific capabilities and refuses to rent a whole suite for them. Nobody else here lets you spend $19 instead of $199.

Skip it if: you want a quiet support queue. Seventy-nine of its 597 WordPress.org reviews are one star, which is 13.2 percent, the highest one-star share of the four plugins here that are listed on WordPress.org. Read a page of those before you commit a client site to it.

Masteriyo

Masteriyo is the cheap one, and unusually for the cheap one it is also well liked: 4.8 stars from 179 reviews on its WordPress.org listing. The problem is the denominator. Five thousand active installs is a small crowd to be standing in when something breaks after a WordPress core update.

Key features

• Drag-and-drop course builder with unlimited courses and students in the free plugin.
• Built-in payments through Stripe, PayPal and WooCommerce, with no commission or transaction fee taken by the plugin.
• AI course creation and a quiz generator from the Basic plan up.
• Assignments, gradebook, learner tracking, prerequisites and content drip from the Pro plan up.
• SCORM import, course badges, a distraction-free learning page and live lessons through Google Meet or Zoom.
• White label and ten-site use on Elite, which is the tier agencies actually want.

Price: free core. On the Masteriyo pricing page, Basic is $99 for one site, Pro is $149 for one site and Elite is $399 for ten, each shown against a normal price of $199, $299 and $799. The footnote spells it out: special introductory pricing, all annual renewals at full price. Lifetime Elite is $499 for one site or $1,299 for ten, and lifetime plans never renew.

Best for: a first paid course on a genuinely tight budget. At $99 to start and $199 to renew, it is the cheapest first year and the lowest published renewal in the table, which matters if the course is one of several ways you monetize a WordPress blog rather than the whole business.

Skip it if: you are building for a client who will still own the site in five years. Of the four plugins here listed on WordPress.org, Masteriyo has both the smallest install base and the fewest reviews, and an LMS is the single hardest plugin on a WordPress site to replace later.

What most LMS roundups get wrong

Three things, and all three cost real money.

They rank on the first-year price. Add year two and the order changes completely. At the entry tier: Masteriyo Basic is $99 plus $199, so $298. LearnPress Pro Bundle is $299 plus $209.30, so $508.30. LearnDash Essentials is $259 twice, so $518. LifterLMS Earth is $199 plus $398, so $597. LearnPress goes from the most expensive advertised price to the second cheapest two-year cost. LifterLMS goes the other way: second cheapest to buy, most expensive to keep. Tutor LMS is $199 in year one and publishes no renewal, so we have left it out rather than guess at it.

They quote the star average and stop. The one-star share is the number that predicts your support experience, and it is not proportional to the average. On WordPress.org: LifterLMS has 10 one-star reviews out of 391, which is 2.6 percent. Masteriyo has 6 out of 179, 3.4 percent. Tutor LMS has 60 out of 587, 10.2 percent. LearnPress has 79 out of 597, 13.2 percent. A 4.3 average and a 4.8 average look close together on a listing page. The share of users angry enough to leave one star is roughly three to five times apart.

They ignore what an LMS does to a site. Course pages are logged-in pages, and standard full-page caching does not serve logged-in users, so the learner dashboard hits PHP and the database on every request. That is why LMS sites feel fine on the sales page and sluggish inside the course. Budget for decent WordPress hosting before you budget for the plugin, pick a caching plugin that handles object caching rather than only page caching, and do the usual speed work on the marketing pages that are cacheable.

Which one should you pick

• You have not sold a course yet: Tutor LMS free. Spend nothing until someone pays you.
• One paid course, your own site, small budget: Masteriyo Basic. $99 now, $199 a year from then on.
• You need two or three features, not a suite: LearnPress add-ons, from $19 each.
• Coaching business built on email sequences and memberships: LifterLMS Universe, with $598 a year in the budget from year two onwards.
• Course revenue you already depend on, or seats to sell to groups: LearnDash Pro at $399, or Elite at $599 if you need the group and instructor tooling.

Frequently Asked Questions

Our verdict

Start on Tutor LMS free. It is the most-installed free LMS plugin in this roundup, the core is complete enough to launch with, and it costs nothing to find out whether your course sells. If it does not sell, you have lost a weekend instead of $259.

When the course does sell, move to LearnDash Pro at $399 a year. The reporting is what you are buying, and it is the reason to skip Essentials rather than climb to Pro later. Budget the $399 as a permanent line item, because LearnDash shows no introductory discount and no renewal surprise in either direction.

Two plugins we would think harder about. LifterLMS is excellent and its customers clearly love it, but a $199 first year that becomes $398 forever needs to be a deliberate decision, not one you make from a comparison table. And Masteriyo at $99 is the cheapest first year on this page by a wide margin, with the smallest install base behind it; that trade is fine on your own site and harder to justify on a client’s.

Whichever you choose, choose once. The license is the cheap part of an LMS. Migrating enrollments, quiz results and completion records to a different plugin two years in is the expensive part, and no roundup can price that for you.