What actually sends people looking
Nobody searches for a LearnDash alternative because the software stopped working. The reasons that come up are narrower and more practical than that.
The most common one is the order of operations. There is no free version, so the way you find out whether LearnDash fits your course is to buy a licence and then find out. That is a reasonable ask for a mature product, and it is also the moment a lot of people pause and go looking to see what else exists. If you are at that moment, the useful thing to know is that a free LMS which can already take payments is now a real option, which was not true a few years ago.
The second is the shape of the total. The base licence is rarely the whole bill once you add the pieces a real academy needs. This is not a LearnDash-specific criticism, it is how most of the category is priced, and it is worth adding up before you commit rather than after.
The third is renewal. An annual licence on the thing your business runs on is a recurring decision, and some people would rather that decision not exist.
Your first afternoon, step by step
The point of a free tier is that the evaluation costs you nothing but time, so it is worth spending that time properly. Here is the order we would follow on a staging site or a spare install.
- Install the free plugin and run the setup wizard. It asks for your currency, the catalog address and the kind of academy you are building, and it can connect Stripe if you want that now.
- Create one course with two or three sections and a handful of real lessons. Use the lesson types you actually plan to teach with: video, a PDF, plain text, a download.
- Add a quiz with the question types your subject needs. Free has six, so check the list against your material before you assume.
- Give the course a price and switch on the test payment gateway. A test purchase runs the whole checkout without real keys.
- Turn certificates on for the course and finish it as a student. Open the public verification page the certificate links to.
- Look at the admin side of that test student: enrolment, progress, the order, the email that went out.
If you get through all six without meeting a wall, you have learned more about fit than any licence trial or demo would tell you. If you hit a wall, note exactly what it was. That note is the real output of the afternoon.
What the LearnDash importer reads
If you do decide to move, the importer is the part worth understanding in detail, because it is narrower and more specific than “it imports LearnDash”. It runs on the same site where LearnDash is installed and active, reads LearnDash data directly, and writes it into Learnomy. It never changes anything in LearnDash, so your current academy keeps running while you check the result.
Here is what it takes from LearnDash:
- Courses, with their categories and tags, and each course’s prerequisites.
- Section headings inside a course, which become Learnomy sections.
- Lessons, and topics, which arrive as sub-lessons under their lesson.
- Quizzes, with passing percentage, time limit, shuffle setting and the cap on repeats.
- Questions, with points, explanations and hints.
- If you tick them, enrolments and which lessons and topics each learner completed.
A lesson with a video address arrives as a video lesson. A lesson without one arrives as rich text, with the body brought across as content. Learners already finished with a course keep that standing, because completed enrolments are marked complete.
What does not come across
The dry run prints a “not migrated” list before it writes anything, and it is worth reading line by line. These are the gaps that matter for a LearnDash site.
Money is never touched. Prices, orders, coupons and access plans stay where they are, and every imported course arrives free until you set pricing in Learnomy. That is deliberate: importing content should never be able to affect billing.
Certificates are not carried over, and neither are old quiz attempt scores. You choose a Learnomy certificate template per course, and completions issue from that. Learners who passed are marked complete, but per-question history from old attempts is not rebuilt.
Some structure is simply not read. Drip schedules are not imported, so scheduled release has to be set up again, and scheduled drip is a Pro feature. LearnDash groups and assignments are not read either. Survey-style questions (the Likert kind) have no target and are skipped, and the run warnings name each one.
Matching and ordering questions do come across, but both are question types that Pro adds. If you import quizzes that use them on a Free-only site, open those quizzes and check how they behave before you tell anyone the move is finished.
A staging checklist for the move
Treat the importer as a way to get a head start, not a finish line. This is the order that keeps surprises small.
- Clone the live site to a staging copy and take a database backup first. Keep LearnDash active, install Learnomy, and open the import wizard under LMS Settings > Import.
- Import content only on the first pass. Leave enrolments and progress unchecked until you have read the courses.
- Read the dry run, then run it. Large libraries run in batches in the background, and the same run is available from the command line.
- Open one full course as a student: every lesson, the video lessons, one quiz, the last lesson.
- Rebuild what the importer left out: pricing, drip, certificates, any survey questions.
- Run a second import with enrolments and progress, check one real learner, and only then think about production.
If something is not right, a run can be undone, which deletes exactly what that run created. A repeat run skips items it already brought across instead of duplicating them. Expect the second pass to take longer than the first, because that is where you find the details that only a real learner notices. The wider process is in the migration guide and the switching from another LMS walkthrough.
What we would actually tell you to do
Install the free plugin and build one real course in it. Not a test course with placeholder lessons, but something you would genuinely put in front of a student, with a price on it and a certificate at the end. That takes an afternoon and it answers the question properly, which is the whole advantage of a free tier that is not crippled.
If it works, you have a working academy and nothing to buy. If it does not, you have lost an afternoon and learned something specific about what you need, which makes the LearnDash decision easier rather than harder.
What we would not tell you to do is migrate an existing, working, paid-for LearnDash site on the strength of a comparison page. The importer handles the heavy lifting, but checking every course afterwards is still a project. If LearnDash is installed and your students are learning, the honest advice is to leave it alone until you have a reason that is worth the work.
A normal week once the academy is running
Most weeks on a Learnomy academy are quiet, which is the point. You answer the odd student question from the instructor Q&A inbox, grade any essay answers waiting in the grading queue, and glance at the dashboard for enrolments and revenue.
Every purchase, renewal and refund appears in one transactions list, and refunds are issued from there. Instructor commissions are tracked as sales come in, and instructors request a withdrawal when they want to be paid. None of this needs a separate add-on.
The upkeep is the ordinary WordPress kind. Update the plugin when a release comes out, test on staging if the site earns real money, and keep backups running. Nothing about the plugin asks for more than any other WordPress plugin does.
Where your student data lives
Learnomy keeps courses, enrolments, progress and orders in tables inside your own WordPress database. Nothing is sent to a vendor to be stored, so you can back it up, query it and connect it to other tools without waiting for an export.
Privacy requests are handled through the standard WordPress tools. Learnomy registers exporters and erasers for the personal data it holds, so a student’s export includes their learning records, and an erase request removes learner data. Financial and audit rows are kept but unlinked from the person, and a deleted student’s certificates stop verifying. There is also a setting for how many days the audit log is kept before it is pruned. See the data management settings for the details.
What it costs to run each side
Both products are WordPress plugins, so the running costs you already know carry over: hosting, a theme, backups, updates, and someone who can fix a plugin conflict. Moving does not remove any of that, and it does not add to it either.
What differs is the licence line. Learnomy Free has no licence cost at all, and that includes checkout, memberships and certificates. Pro is optional, either annual or a one-time lifetime purchase, and the free plugin underneath keeps working if you stop paying for it. The free versus Pro page lists exactly what Pro adds, so you can decide whether you need it at all.
For the LearnDash side, add up its current licence tier and every add-on your academy depends on, using the figures on learndash.com on the day you check. We have left numbers out on purpose, because tiers and discounts move. Do the sum for a year and for three years, then compare it to what Learnomy would cost for the same feature list.
What Learnomy will not do for you
A fair comparison includes the gaps, so here they are.
Learnomy has no built-in live video. A live session lesson holds a join link, a start time and a length, and students see a countdown and a join button, but Learnomy does not create the Zoom or Meet room. There is no built-in single sign-on, and no native mobile app. A REST API with token sign-in is there for a developer who wants to build one.
The importer only reads LearnDash, Tutor LMS and LifterLMS, so anything that lives in a LearnDash add-on or a custom integration has to be rebuilt or reconnected. Plan for the integrations your site depends on, not only the courses. If one of them has no equivalent, that alone can be the reason to stay.
Who should stay on LearnDash
Stay if the academy is paid for, your students are learning and nothing about the renewal bothers you. A working site is worth more than a better comparison table.
Stay if your site leans on integrations or a theme built around LearnDash. Rebuilding those is where the real cost of a move hides, and the importer cannot help with them.
Stay if the people who run the site every day already know LearnDash well. Familiarity is a genuine saving, and it does not show up on any licence invoice. For a head-to-head view of the two products, read Learnomy vs LearnDash.
Where this leaves the decision
LearnDash earns its reputation on maturity, ecosystem and the number of people who already know it. Those are not small things and no comparison table captures them well.
What has changed is the assumption underneath the category, which used to be that a free LMS is a demo and the real ones cost money before you start. Certificates, memberships and checkout shipping in a free plugin makes the first step cheaper, and that mostly matters to people who have not committed yet. If you have, this page is probably not for you, and that is a fine outcome.