Building one course, start to finish
Take a single paid course with eight lessons, a quiz at the end and a certificate. In Learnomy Free you create the course, add sections and lessons in the course builder, attach the quiz, switch certificates on and set a price. Stripe or PayPal keys go in once under the payment settings, and the course is for sale. Nothing else needs installing.
LearnDash can sell the same course, and its builder is mature. The difference is mostly in how many separate pieces you assemble. LearnDash is a WordPress plugin you license, and the vendor’s own site describes memberships through a bundled membership feature and payments through Stripe, PayPal and WooCommerce. Read the plan you are looking at to see which of those it includes.
On our side the pieces are tied to tiers, not to add-ons. Free covers the course, quiz, certificate, checkout, coupons and memberships. Pro adds the things a growing academy asks for next:
- scheduled drip by days after enrolment, a fixed date or a prerequisite
- cohorts and learning paths
- assignments and a gradebook with CSV export
- SCORM, xAPI and H5P content
- a front-end course builder for instructors
What a student sees in the first week
A new student buys, lands on the course and sees an outline where each row shows whether they can open it. Free preview lessons stay open, locked ones say so. They watch a video lesson, tick it off and the progress bar moves. If the course uses a per-lesson Available date, later lessons show the date they open.
The quiz runs in one of two layouts, autosaves as they go and resumes at the exact question if the connection drops. At the end the certificate is issued on its own, with a public page anyone can open to check it. Students get an email receipt for the purchase.
We have not built a native phone app, and LearnDash is the stronger pick if you need one today. Our answer for mobile is a responsive site, a web app mode that is still in beta, and a REST API your own developer can build against. Check the vendor’s site to see what its mobile options are now.
Groups, companies and reporting
LearnDash has a long history with company training. Group leaders, seat purchases and reporting for managers are things its users rely on, and the vendor’s site shows which plan includes which. If your whole business is selling seats to employers, weigh that history seriously.
In Learnomy, single-person access is simple, and teams are a Pro feature. Spaces is the seat system for companies, and gift codes let a buyer pass a seat to someone else. You can also enrol people in bulk by pasting emails or uploading a CSV, which suits a company that sends you a list on Monday morning.
Reporting follows the same split. Free gives instructors a grading inbox. Pro adds analytics and a weighted gradebook you can export. Neither is a replacement for a dedicated learning analytics suite, so decide early whether you need one.
Where your data lives and how it leaves
Learnomy keeps courses, enrolments, quiz attempts and orders in its own database tables rather than in WordPress post meta. That makes reports and exports a query, not a scavenger hunt through meta rows. If a student asks for their data, the built-in export tools produce it, and the erase tools delete learner data across every table that holds it.
Some records are kept on purpose, with the person unlinked. Payments and audit entries are the main ones, because accounting rules usually require them. Say so in your privacy policy so a student is not surprised.
LearnDash also runs on your own WordPress site, so ownership is not the question here. The question is how easy the data is to work with. Ask your developer to look at both before you commit, especially if you plan reports beyond what the dashboard offers.
Moving over from LearnDash
Learnomy includes an importer that reads LearnDash directly on the same site. It brings across categories, courses, sections, lessons, quizzes and questions. LearnDash topics become sub-lessons, so your lesson and topic structure survives. Course prerequisites are carried over once every course has arrived, a lesson’s forced timer is kept, and lessons marked as free samples stay free previews.
You can also choose to bring enrolments and lesson progress, so people who finished a course are still marked as finished. Their original enrolment and completion dates come across too, and nobody gets a welcome email for an enrolment that is years old. What does not come across matters just as much:
- Prices. Every course arrives free, and you set prices afterwards.
- Certificates and their templates. They are built from LearnDash’s own templates and shortcodes, so you choose a Learnomy template per course and completions issue from that.
- Drip settings.
- Group leaders and group seats. Groups are not among the things the importer reads.
- Quiz attempt scores. Learners who passed are marked complete, but old per-question results are not rebuilt.
- Orders, coupons and anything to do with money.
The importer never writes back to LearnDash, and there is an undo for each run. It works in batches, and you can drive the same job from the command line if the library is large. Our migration guide walks through the steps in detail.
How the importer behaves
Three details save people from surprises.
It needs both plugins on one site. The importer reads LearnDash live, so LearnDash stays active until you are finished. That is why a staging copy is the right place to run it, not production.
It has a dry run. In the admin, open LMS Settings and choose Import. From the command line, wp learnomy migrate preview learndash prints counts and warnings and writes nothing. Question types with no Learnomy equivalent are listed there, so you know what will be skipped or converted before it happens.
It is safe to repeat. The importer remembers what it created. Running it again skips what already exists, and wp learnomy migrate undo followed by the run id removes exactly what that run made.
One subtlety is worth knowing. Marking imported lessons complete fires the usual completion hooks, and those can issue a certificate if a course has one switched on. Decide whether you want certificates for people who finished long ago before you run the progress pass.
A staging checklist
- Back up the database, then copy the site to staging.
- Keep LearnDash active, because the importer reads it live.
- Run the preview and read the warnings about question types.
- Import content first, then run a second pass for enrolments and progress.
- Set prices, rebuild certificates and recreate drip rules by hand.
- Click through three courses as a student, then switch DNS or deactivate LearnDash.
Renewal and bundle questions
If you are reading this because a LearnDash renewal notice arrived, a few questions come up again and again. For the long version, with a worksheet you fill in yourself, read Before your LearnDash renewal: renew, rebundle or move.
What changed with the LearnDash plans?
Nexcess, part of Liquid Web, now sells LearnDash, The Events Calendar, Give and Kadence as one bundled package on a single licence, according to the Nexcess software packages page. The plan change applies at your next renewal on or after 16 November, and customers are emailed their new plan, sites, price and renewal date first.
How much will it cost me?
We do not quote a number, because public figures for the bundle have been inconsistent. Read your renewal email. It states the price you will be charged, and that is the only figure worth comparing.
Do I have to move?
No. A renewal is a prompt to check your numbers, not a deadline to leave. If the new plan covers your sites at a price you accept, renewing is a perfectly good outcome. The blog guide covers when staying is the right call.
What should I check in the email?
Write down the plan name, the number of sites it covers, which of the bundled products you actually use, the price, the renewal date and what happens if you do nothing. Count your own sites before you trust the email’s count, including staging copies.
Can I try Learnomy without cancelling anything?
Yes. Copy your site to a staging environment, install the free plugin there, leave LearnDash active and run the importer preview. Nothing is written until you run the import, and the import never changes LearnDash. If it does not suit you, delete the staging site.
What is the cheapest way to test a move?
Import one course on staging. Take its quiz as a student, check the lesson order, and see whether the imported progress looks right. That single course will tell you most of what you need to know about the rest.
Quizzes, certificates and drip side by side
These are the three features most course sites lean on, so it is worth being specific about where the free plugin stops.
Quizzes in Learnomy Free have six question types: true or false, single choice, multiple choice, short answer, fill in the blank and essay. There are two layouts, Focused and Classic. Focused shows one question at a time and resumes at the exact question after a dropped connection. Pro adds five more question types and three more layouts: Sectioned, Conversational and Review board. LearnDash has a strong quiz engine of its own, and for very complex assessment designs it may still be the stronger choice. Test your trickiest quiz on both before you decide.
Certificates are signed in Free, and every certificate gets a public verification page. Pro adds Open Badges 3.0 and Credly. That is relevant to your move because certificates do not import: you will choose a template once per course and let completions issue from it.
Drip is Pro. If your LearnDash courses release lessons on a schedule, plan to recreate that schedule by hand after the import, using days after enrolment, a fixed date or a prerequisite.
A realistic week of work
People ask how long a migration takes, and the honest answer depends on how many courses you have and how much you built around them. For a site with a handful of courses, a sensible plan looks like this.
- Day one: copy the site to staging, install Learnomy, run the preview and read every warning.
- Day two: import content, then open three courses as a student and compare them against the original.
- Day three: run the enrolment and progress pass, then check a few real student accounts.
- Days four and five: set prices, connect payments, pick certificate templates and recreate drip.
- The following week: let a few friendly students try it, fix what they find and then schedule the cutover.
A library of hundreds of courses is a different project and deserves a developer. The importer batches its work, but the checking afterwards is human work, and you should budget for it.
Running both for a while
You do not have to flip everything on one day. A common pattern is to finish existing students on LearnDash and start new ones on Learnomy, so nobody loses their place mid-course. To do that, keep a simple sheet listing each course, which platform it sells on and the date it moves.
When a course is ready, bulk enrol its current students into the Learnomy copy by pasting emails or uploading a CSV on the course’s admin page. New email addresses get an account and a set-password invitation, and anyone already enrolled is skipped. Then close the old sales page and leave LearnDash installed but inactive for a few weeks, in case a student writes in with a problem you did not predict.
The cost of this approach is a short stretch of double upkeep. The benefit is that no single day carries all the risk.
Who should not switch
Stay on LearnDash if your business depends on a specific integration that only it has, or if your students expect the official native app. Stay if your team runs large group programmes there and the workflows are already trained into staff. Moving costs real hours, and a working setup deserves a good reason to leave.
Switch when the licence cost, the number of moving parts or the age of the stack is what hurts. If you are starting fresh, the free plugin lets you test with real students before you spend anything.