LearnWorlds is a promising up-and-coming online course platform. But is it worth switching from other platforms, or choosing over others if you’re just getting started?
Is LearnWorlds any good as an online course platform? Yes, LearnWorlds is a high-quality new competitor that gives other online course platforms like
In this article, I’ll look at the different pricing plans that LearnWorlds offers and what features you get for each. Then I’ll talk about whether the platform is easy to use or not, and some other factors you may consider when choosing an online course platform.
LearnWorlds is a newer all-in-one platform that looks like it could be a great alternative to existing online course platforms.
It allows you to make, market, and sell your online courses in unique and interactive ways. It also features a built-in social network feature that really sets it apart.
Since LearnWorlds is a more recent online learning platform, there isn’t a ton of feedback or user reviews for it so far.
So I’ve put together this LearnWorlds review to give you a good overview of the platform and what it offers.
By the end, you should have a good idea if this platform would be a good fit for you.
If you’re anything like me, then one of the first things you’ll want to know about a platform is how much it’s going to cost you.
LearnWorlds is positioned as more of a premium course platform. So while they offer a free 30-day trial that doesn’t require a credit card, they don’t have a free plan that you can use long-term.
If you pay annually, you’ll get up to a 20% discount on any of their plans.
The LearnWorlds starter plan is aimed at newbie course creators and costs $24 per month.
A big downside of this plan is that you’ll get charged a flat $5 fee per course sale, whereas there are no transaction fees on higher plans.
The starter plan gives you more limited access to features. You get a page builder, but an incomplete version that will only help you make 3 page layouts.
You get access to basic integrations like Google Analytics, Facebook pixels, Mailchimp, and others, but not the complete list.
So in my opinion, the starter plan is quite limited.
Once you get up to the pro trainer plan at $79 per month, you unlock much better features.
No transaction fees, unlimited courses and landing pages, a complete website builder with blog, subscriptions and memberships, installment payments, and more. Plus you can integrate with Zapier and other premium integrations.
I feel that the pro trainer plan is probably the best value that LearnWorlds offers.
Compared to the $99 mid-tier plans that both Thinkific and
The learning center plan costs $249 per month and unlocks some additional features. You can have up to 20 admins or instructors. You can do bulk student upload.
Plus there are full white-label options unlocked at this stage. This tier also unlocks interactive video, advanced affiliate management, and even the ability to get a custom iOS and Android app for an additional fee.
Personally I don’t feel like the few additional features you get on the learning center plan is worth the steep jump in price.
Most of the extras it offers also aren’t things that individual instructors will really want or need.
There are also high volume and corporate plans which offer additional admins, a branded corporate academy, a dedicated account manager, and other features.
But I think this is beyond what most people would need from the platform, so I won’t go into too much detail.
LearnWorld’s pro trainer plan is in a great sweet spot where it offers most of the features you want, at a slightly lower price than many other popular online learning platforms.
Considering both the depth and breadth of features that their mid-tier plan offers, it’s priced reasonably.
But that’s really the only plan I would recommend looking at.
The starter plan is too limited in its features to really be worth the money, and there are better free options.
If you’re on a budget or just getting started, I would go with Thinkific’s free plan that features no transaction fees instead.
The $249 plan doesn’t offer enough extra value to be worth it for individual course creators, and seems more aimed at larger organizations.
Of course if you’re still unsure, you can get a free 30-day trial on any of the plans. Since it doesn’t require a credit card or any kind of commitment, there’s really no risk.
LearnWorlds offers most of the features and tools that you’d expect out of an online course platform.
Plus a few extras like an interactive ebook maker that you won’t find on many other platforms.
Since I think that the Pro Trainer plan is most well-suited to most course creators, I’ll focus on the features that are available at that tier level specifically.
For me this is a must-have if I’m paying a platform $79 per month. On a free plan, I might not mind paying transaction fees as an alternative to a monthly rate when I’m just getting started.
But I think that any platform that offers a paid plan that charges transaction fees on top would be a dealbreaker for me since there are simply better alternatives out there without it.
LearnWorlds won’t limit you to a specific number of courses on their pro plan. This even includes free courses, if you want to offer them.
There are a few reasons you might offer a free course, as a way to help build an audience of students, or to upsell some other offering that you have.
It’s nice that you have the option to create as many courses as you want with the platform.
So no matter how your online course business grows, you can be confident that you’ll still be paying the same flat rate each month.
LearnWorld’s starter plan limits you to a page builder that can only create three pages: A home page, a course catalog, and an after login page.
But their pro plan unlocks everything you can create everything you may want on your course website, including a blog.
Price may be a barrier to entry for some students. So the more flexibility that you can offer them, the less like you are to lose sales.
LearnWorlds gives you the option to have students pay in installments, so they can split the cost of your course up into 3, 5, or even more payments.
Or you may choose to offer a subscription or membership model. This is a great way to build recurring income, instead of just selling a course once and never getting money from a student again.
It can also help you to split the cost of an expensive course over a several-month subscription instead too.
LearnWorlds really has a leg up on many of its competitors when it comes to their sophisticated testing engine.
The platform allows you to offer graded or ungraded, formal or informal, and closed or open type questionnaires.
You have a wide variety of different kind of tests at your disposal for measuring performance, verifying knowledge, and testing the critical thinking of your students.
The platform’s question banks allow you to create giant pools of questions, and then connect them to multiple different tests and courses. So your tests are always secure and randomized.
Upon completion, you can offer students your own branded digital certificates that you design yourself. This gives learners a way to showcase the fact that they’ve completed your course.
Another area where you can really differentiate LearnWorlds from their competition is the platform’s built-in social media.
It can have a real benefit in terms of engagement for your students and can help boost their learning and their perceived value of your course.
LearnWorlds lets you create a social network where students can share questions and ideas, talk about their experience, or give feedback.
Students get their own public profiles and the ability to network with other learners. It’s a great way to connect and expand their professional network, and just adds one more selling point for your course.
You can easily extract and show a transcript of your course videos with just the click of a button. This interactive transcript can really help to boost your student’s understanding.
Plus it makes videos easier to navigate and more accessible.
The platform also allows you to add things like titles, questions, image overlays, links, and other details right inside of it. So there’s less need for editing and post-production to make your videos more engaging.
Editing can be one of the more tedious and time-consuming parts of putting your video course together, so I feel like this is actually a huge time-saver.
You have the option on LearnWorlds to either host your videos with another major video provider, or you can host all of your video content with them directly. So it’s quite flexible that way.
You also get the flexibility to decide how students navigate your course.
You can add restrictions and drip feed content, you can force them to work through content sequentially, or you can let them go through the material freely however they want.
SCORM stands for Sharable Content Object Reference Model. It’s one of the most widely recognized e-learning industry standards, and helps your course content and learning platform to better work together.
Many other platforms on the same level of LearnWorlds aren’t compliant to this standard. But LearnWorlds supports it as the default.
So you know that you’re uploading configuring your course content according to SCORM standards.
LearnWorlds can currently integrate your course with the following:
And of course if you do use Zapier with LearnWorlds, you can connect with as many as 2,000 other apps including Slack, Google Docs, Twitter, and more.
I definitely think that Learnworlds offers enough features to warrant its premium price tag.
It combines everything I’ve discussed above, plus many other features I haven’t even touched on like analytics, third-party marketing tools, and a strong sales engine.
Where it really shines is its social network functionality, which allows you to create courses with levels of engagement and interaction that simply aren’t possible on some other platforms.
There are a couple of features on higher tier plans that I wish were available in the pro plan.
Specifically full white-label options and the ability to remove LearnWorlds branding from your course.
But overall I’m very happy with the amount and complexity of features that the platform offers.
One area that I do think LearnWorlds could improve upon is being more user-friendly and easy to navigate.
I’ve used and reviewed a number of different online course platforms. So I consider myself fairly technically proficient when it comes to learning and adapting to new platforms.
However, I still initially struggled a bit with the LearnWorlds dashboard and where to find everything.
Maybe I’m just a bit spoiled by other platforms like Teachable that are extremely easy to set up and use, but still retain all of the power you’d expect in an online course platform.
But I feel like LearnWorlds could stand to be a bit more streamlined and minimalist.
With a bit of trial and error, I don’t think it would take too long for most people to adjust to using the platform though.
Once you understand how it works, the layout of everything does make a lot of sense. It just takes a while to figure out what is where.
Once you get the hang of it, the backend of LearnWorlds has some pretty cool features.
The analytics are easy enough to understand and use. You can see your sales and revenue for the last week, month, or 60 days and track how it’s changing.
One really cool feature is the ability to see which students are currently logged in to your course. This lets you engage with them in a really personal way in realtime.
It can add a nice touch to reach out to students and let them know you’re actually there to support them.
LearnWorlds features a handy wizard that will help walk you through creating your complete course, step by step.
Overall there was lots of instructions about what to do at each step, and I found it quite easy to set up a course this way.
Basically you just name your course, choose a language and time zone, and currency.
Then you can pick if it’s a free, paid, or upcoming course and set a price. It’s easy to upload an image for your course and write out a description.
So unlike the actual dashboard, setting up a course is really easy and streamlined in comparison.
When it comes to actually creating content, there are lots of great templates to choose from.
You can see how they’ll look if you applied them to your page in realtime, which is helpful for visualizing how everything will look.
You can change the background color, add text, upload or embed videos, and more very intuitively.
So while you may feel a bit overwhelmed and have some hiccups when you first sign up to LearnWorlds and log in, once you actually start creating your course there is a lot of support to make you feel comfortable and help with the process.
LearnWorlds looks like a great option for creating and hosting your online courses.
Overall, I think it’s quite comparable to other popular platforms like Teachable and Thinkific. Both in terms of price, and also the features that you get.
The Pro Trainer plan is the tier of LearnWorlds that I would personally recommend, and where most instructors would get the most value.
I feel that the Starter plan is too limited and restrictive. At $24 per month with a $5 transaction fee on every course sold, I can’t recommend that particular plan over something like Thinkific’s free plan.
Likewise, I don’t feel like the the $249 per month Learning Center plan offers enough relevant features for individual course creators to be worth the steep increase in price. So stick with the mid-tier plan.
If community engagement and interaction is important to you, then LearnWorld’s built-in social network and extensive testing capabilities should make you strongly consider using the platform to create your course.
Many other course platforms do a rather poor job of supporting networking and socialization between students, but this is one area that LearnWorlds really sets itself apart.
Jacob has a background in finance and engineering. Outside of his day job, he is a lifelong learner, who enjoys reading, taking online courses, and writing about what he's learned.
Session expired
Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page.