Building one course, step by step
Take a six-week course with video lessons, a quiz at the end of each week and a certificate at the finish. In Learnomy Free you add the course in the admin area, set its price and access, then open the course builder and arrange lessons into sections. Sections are optional, so a short course can be a flat list. Each lesson picks one of seven content types: video, audio, PDF, embed, download, live session or rich text.
Quizzes come next. Free gives you six question types and two layouts, with partial credit on multiple-choice answers and an inbox for grading essays by hand. Turn on the certificate, and the finish line is done. The only Pro step in this flow is releasing a lesson after a set number of days, which the content drip extension handles.
On Circle, the same course starts inside a space in your community. Circle’s own site describes courses, a feed, a member directory, events and live streams all under one roof, so the course sits next to the conversation. Check circle.so for how it handles quizzes and certificates today, because the front page does not say.
A student’s first week
A Learnomy student buys or is enrolled, then lands in an account area with a dashboard, a course library, quiz results and certificates. They open a lesson in a full-screen player, tick it off and watch a progress bar fill. If you set lessons to open in order, the next one opens when they finish the last.
A Circle member arrives somewhere livelier. They see a feed, other members, upcoming events and perhaps a live stream, and the course is one place to go among several. For people who join mainly for each other, that is the better first week. For people who joined to finish a syllabus, it can bury the syllabus.
We think this is the real divide between the two. Learnomy treats the course as the room you live in. Circle treats the community as the room and the course as a door off it.
Live sessions and events
Circle has events and live streaming built in, and Learnomy has neither. Say that plainly to yourself before you weigh anything else.
What Learnomy does have is a live lesson type. You paste a Zoom, Meet or Teams link, set a start time and a length, and students see a countdown, then a Join button during the session window, then the lesson as a normal one afterwards. Nothing streams inside your site. It is a scheduled link with good manners.
If you want an events calendar with RSVPs on WordPress, a separate events plugin can supply it. That is more parts to look after, which brings us to the next section.
What each one asks of you
Circle asks for a subscription and a few hours of setup. Updates, uptime and security belong to the vendor.
Learnomy asks for WordPress hosting, a theme you like and someone who is comfortable updating plugins. Expect an afternoon for the first course if WordPress is familiar, and longer if it is not. In return you get a site that looks the way you want, because it is your site.
- Free covers the course, quizzes, certificates, checkout and memberships.
- A community needs a second plugin, such as BuddyNext.
- Live events need a third-party tool or another plugin.
- Backups and updates are yours or your host’s.
Payments and student records
Learnomy checkout takes cards through Stripe and payments through PayPal, with coupons and memberships in Free. Money goes to your processor account, and Learnomy takes no share. Circle describes its own branded checkout, one-time purchases, memberships and subscriptions; check circle.so for how it charges you.
Student records are the other difference. In Learnomy, enrolments, progress, quiz attempts and orders are rows in your own database. Free exports students and transactions as CSV, and WordPress’s built-in personal data tools handle export and erase requests. Removing the plugin keeps your data unless you tell it not to.
On Circle, member data sits on the platform. Ask the vendor what you can export before you commit, and test it with a small group.
Who should stay on Circle
Stay if the community is the product and courses are one feature of it. Stay if live streams and events carry your revenue, or if nobody on your team wants to touch a server. Circle also lists branded mobile apps and automations on its own site, and Learnomy has no ready-made app.
Move, or add Learnomy, if you sell a structured course with graded work and certificates people can verify, and you want the records in your hands. Plenty of teachers keep a small Circle community for chatter and put the course itself on their own site.
Moving over
There is no importer for Circle, so the course is rebuilt by hand. A developer can script it against the REST API or WP-CLI if the catalogue is big. A staging run goes like this:
- Export your member list from Circle and keep it safe.
- Build the course shell and one sample lesson in Learnomy.
- Copy lessons over, section by section, and re-create quizzes.
- Paste member emails into bulk enrolment, which creates accounts too.
- Mark finished students complete by hand, because a spreadsheet carries no lesson progress.
- Test checkout with the test gateway before real money moves.