What actually moves people
LearnPress does its job for a lot of course sites, so the people searching for alternatives are usually at a particular moment. The site was a side project, and now it takes money. Or a client asked for memberships. Or you opened the add-on list to fix one problem and saw the total.
That moment is a fine time to look around, because nothing is broken yet and you can compare without pressure. It is a bad time to migrate in a hurry, so give yourself room.
Count what the free core leaves out
A free core is only free for as long as it covers what you need. LearnPress takes payments in its free core through its default methods. Stripe, WooCommerce checkout, certificates and memberships are listed as paid add-ons. The lineup changes, so we are not going to price it for you. Open the LearnPress site, write down what your academy needs, and total the add-ons that cover it.
Then do the same exercise for Learnomy. Free includes Stripe and PayPal checkout, memberships, coupons, instructor commissions, certificates with a public verification page, and quizzes with six question types and two layouts. Pro adds content drip, cohorts, SCORM, xAPI, H5P and AI authoring, as one licence.
If the two totals are close, stay where you are. Moving a site is work, and a small saving does not pay for it.
Before you decide, take an inventory
A move from LearnPress is a rebuild, so the first job is to find out how big the rebuild is. Open your LearnPress site and count four things: courses, lessons, quizzes and the people enrolled. Then note which add-ons are active and what each one does for you.
The numbers decide the approach. Under about five courses, rebuilding by hand is an afternoon or two. Between five and twenty, it is a week of steady work and worth doing in stages. Beyond that you are in project territory, and you should give serious thought to running both plugins for a while instead of cutting over.
Be honest about the quizzes. Lessons are mostly text and video that you can copy. Quizzes need every question retyped or re-created, and they take longer than people expect.
What a hand rebuild looks like
Here is the order that keeps a rebuild manageable. It works the same whether you have three courses or thirty.
- Install Learnomy on a staging copy of the site and run the setup wizard.
- Create the course shells first, with titles, categories, descriptions and thumbnails.
- Add sections and lessons, copying lesson text and pasting video links across.
- Set the lesson content type for each: video, audio, PDF, download, embed or rich text.
- Rebuild the quizzes from your question list, using the question bank for anything you reuse.
- Add pricing, coupons and certificates last, once the content is right.
Copying from one admin screen to another is dull, but it is also a free review of your own material. Most people find lessons they want to rewrite or drop.
When a script makes sense
A developer can shortcut the content work. Learnomy has a REST API with endpoints for courses, sections, lessons, quizzes and questions, and a command line tool that can create courses and memberships and enrol people. So a script that reads LearnPress and writes to Learnomy is possible.
It is custom work, though, not a feature. Nobody has to build it for a handful of courses, and it needs testing like any other migration code. If you have a large catalogue and a developer, ask them to price a script against the hours of copying. If you do not have a developer, copy by hand and do not feel bad about it.
The API reference lives on the developers page, and the command line guide lists the commands that exist.
Moving the students
Students are easier than courses, because enrolment can be done in bulk. Export the email addresses of your learners from LearnPress, then open the course in Learnomy and paste the list into the bulk enrol box, or upload it as a CSV.
Learnomy creates an account for anyone who does not have one and sends them an invite to set a password. People who are already enrolled are skipped, so running the same list twice is safe. If a course is set to be granted outside the site, as it would be for a legacy cohort, this works without any payment step.
Progress does not move this way. For students who finished a course, set it to manual completion, enrol them and mark them complete, which issues a certificate. Partial progress is not carried across, so tell mid-course students plainly that they will restart or be credited by you. The bulk enrolment guide covers the screens.
Redirects and search traffic
If your courses rank in search, plan the URLs before anything else. A course page on a new plugin will have a different address, and a missing redirect loses the traffic you spent years earning.
Write down the address of every LearnPress course page and the page it should land on in Learnomy. Learnomy lets you choose the catalog address and has per-course SEO fields for the title, description, social image and robots setting, so a rebuilt page can keep the wording that was working. Set up the redirects on your server or with a redirect plugin before you switch, then check them.
Do this on staging, and again the day you cut over. A broken redirect is quiet, and you only notice it weeks later in the traffic numbers.
The part we cannot make easy
Learnomy has an import wizard, but it reads LearnDash, Tutor LMS and LifterLMS. It does not read LearnPress. We would rather say that here than let you discover it halfway through.
Moving from LearnPress means recreating courses, sections, lessons and quizzes in Learnomy by hand, then reconnecting students. For three courses that is an afternoon. For a large catalogue with years of enrolment history it is a real project, and you should price it before deciding. A sensible compromise is to keep LearnPress running for current students and launch new courses on Learnomy.
Running both for a while
You do not have to cut over. A sensible pattern is to keep LearnPress running for current students and launch every new course on Learnomy. Nothing breaks, nothing needs to be migrated on a deadline, and you find out how Learnomy behaves with real sales before you commit.
Over time the old catalogue shrinks as courses reach the end of their life. When the last LearnPress course has no active students, you retire it. A few sites will find they never need to move the old courses at all.
The cost is two plugins to update and two places to look for a problem. Keep that period short, and write down a date.
Keeping your records straight
During a rebuild it is easy to lose track of which student has access where. Keep one spreadsheet with a row per course and a column for each stage: rebuilt, quiz checked, students enrolled, old course retired.
Student data in Learnomy lives in tables in your own database, and export and erase requests run through the standard WordPress privacy tools. The email log shows whether the invitation sent to each newly created account was delivered, which saves a lot of guessing when someone says they never got one. Your LearnPress data stays where it is until you delete it, which gives you a record to compare against.
When you finally remove LearnPress, back up the database first and keep the backup. Past orders do not move across, and a backup is the only copy.
What it costs to run each side
Both are free to install, so the difference shows up later. The cost of staying with LearnPress is whatever add-ons you buy as the site grows, and the cost of moving is your time plus an optional Pro licence on the Learnomy side.
For LearnPress, open the vendor’s site, list the add-ons you would need for payments, certificates, memberships and reporting, and note the current prices that day. For Learnomy, Free includes those four jobs, and Pro is optional, annual or lifetime, for things like drip, cohorts and SCORM. The free versus Pro page shows what falls where.
Hosting and upkeep are the same on both. Include your own hours in the sum, because a rebuild is not free labour.
What Learnomy does not do for you
Learnomy cannot read a LearnPress site, so there is nothing to click for the content. It also has no built-in live video, no built-in single sign-on and no native mobile app, though a REST API with token sign-in is there for a developer who wants to build one.
Reports, orders and past payment history do not move across at all. Keep your LearnPress records, or an export of them, for as long as you may need to answer a question about a past sale.
Your first thirty days
A rebuild is easier when it has a calendar. This is a pace that works for a small or mid-sized site.
- Week one: inventory the site, set up staging and rebuild one course end to end.
- Week two: buy that course with the test gateway, finish it, and check the certificate.
- Week three: rebuild the rest in order of revenue, starting with the best sellers.
- Week four: bulk enrol current students, then switch checkout for new buyers.
- After that: keep LearnPress read-only for a few weeks, then retire it.
Who should stay with LearnPress
Stay if you have more than a few courses with live students and the add-ons you already have do the job. The saving from moving is small next to a rebuild.
Stay if your team knows LearnPress and nobody has time for a new tool. Familiarity pays out every week and never shows up on an invoice.
Stay if the site is a hobby or a first course and likely to stay one. A free core with a short add-on list is a perfectly good home. Come back when the add-on list starts to grow.
A normal week afterwards
Once the rebuild is done, the week is calm. You check new enrolments and any failed payments, grade essay answers when there are some, and answer questions that arrive through lesson comments.
Instructor commissions, coupons and refunds are all in the admin, so there is no tab-hopping between add-ons. The part you may miss is anything LearnPress did through an add-on you liked, so keep a short list of those as you go and check each against what Learnomy covers.
Updates are the same as any WordPress plugin: read the notes, test on staging, update. Because Free is the whole selling stack, you have one plugin to watch for the core jobs instead of several.
Test the money path early
Whatever else you rebuild, prove the payment path in the first week. Create one cheap course, connect Stripe or PayPal in test mode, and buy it as a new visitor. Check the confirmation email, the receipt, the enrolment and the order in the admin.
Then test the awkward cases: a coupon, a refund, and a card that fails. Most migrations that go badly go badly here, because it is the part nobody looks at until a real customer is waiting. Guest checkout is a setting you can turn on if you want buyers to pay before making an account, and it is off by default.
Where this leaves the decision
LearnPress is a good starting point and plenty of sites never need to leave it. Learnomy is worth a trial when the site has become a business and you want the selling parts in the plugin you already run.
If the comparison you really want is between the two older names, the LearnDash vs LearnPress post covers it. For a closer look at two-way detail with us, see Learnomy vs LearnPress. If the add-on model is what you are tired of, the LifterLMS alternatives page is worth reading before you commit.