Tutor LMS Free vs Pro – A Detailed Analysis

With Tutor LMS free you can create and sell online courses. But Tutor LMS pro takes your LMS website to another level. This post is all about Tutor LMS free vs pro features.

Unlike most other LMS plugins, Tutor LMS is very generous with its free version. It gives you enough features to create and sell online courses. But what are the differences between Tutor LMS Free and Tutor LMS Pro? In this article, we discuss what you get with Tutor LMS Free vs Pro.

Tutor LMS is one of the most popular LMS plugins today. Are you already are using another LMS plugin and thinking of switching? Or, maybe you’re already using the Tutor LMS free version and want to know the benefits of upgrading to Pro? Then this post will be really helpful for you. So, let’s get started.

Introduction to Tutor LMS

Tutor LMS is a freemium WordPress LMS plugin that you can use to create your own online education platform. Tutor LMS is developed by Themeum and was first launched in 2019. It quickly became one of the most familiar LMS plugins in the market. It is a complete, feature-enriched, robust WordPress LMS plugin to create and sell online courses.

With Tutor LMS you can create fun and challenging quizzes, and interactive lessons, generate reports, and create that dream online education marketplace you always wanted. It supports multi-instructors and single instructor courses as well.

Tutor LMS has a very beginner-friendly interface and anyone can use it to create a full-fledged LMS website. You require no coding skills at all. Using this plugin you can make:

  • Blended learning
  • Community education center
  • Academic institute
  • Online classroom
  • Training programs
  • Professional courses
  • And more

These are just a few of the possibilities that you can achieve using Tutor LMS. With the given features, things you can do with your online learning platform are limitless.

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What you get with Tutor LMS free

In all the articles we wrote about Tutor LMS, we didn’t get a chance to go into the details of what you get with Tutor LMS free. We discussed many aspects in our Tutor LMS review post as well. It’s high time we discussed what you can truly do with Tutor LMS free. Who knows, the free features might seem enough to build the LMS website you are planning!

We won’t get into deep analysis of each feature because we did it several times in the past. We are going to take a look at what kind of features you get with the free version. Later on, we’ll see what extra features we get in the pro. Now, let’s begin our Tutor LMS free vs pro article.

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Do you get addons in Tutor LMS free?

Before starting our list it is important to mention that Tutor LMS Free doesn’t give you any of their addons. And some of the most advanced features of Tutor LMS are only available through the addons. Features like push notifications, assignments, gradebook, Zoom integration, etc. will be unavailable in the free version.

As you can see, some of these features are required if you want to create a professional LMS website.

Tutor LMS addons pro banner

But on the plus side, when you purchase the Pro version, you receive all 21 addons all at once. Now with that being said, let’s look at the free Tutor LMS features.

Easy Installation Wizard

The setup wizard is available on both the free and pro versions. It would seem rather rude of Themeum if they hadn’t included it in the free version, wouldn’t it? Well, the wizard lets you set up your entire LMS site with a few on-screen instructions.

The course builder

Without the course builder you cannot build your course, so that’s a very important tool. It’s included in the free version but some of the pro features are missing from the course builder. For example, the course pre-requisites, quiz categories, assignments, etc. Some of these features are available as addons and unfortunately, you don’t get those in the free version.

Advanced quiz builder

Tutor lms free quiz categories

You can still add quizzes to your topics in the free version. But you will not have all the quiz categories. The available quiz categories in the free version are as following:

  • True or False
  • Single choice
  • Multiple choice
  • Open-ended
  • Fill in the blanks

As you can see, you still have 5 categories to select from and build your quiz. You’ll also have advanced settings as well as general settings to make your quiz more fun and challenging.

Questions & Answers Section

You can also add the Q & A section to your course forum. Students or guests can ask questions on this forum and receive answers from the course instructors or admins. 

Advanced Video playing

enabling tutor player video option

If you’re building an eLearning platform today, video tutorials or lessons are very important. In Tutor LMS, you will find the options to add videos to your lessons. You can upload native videos, YouTube, and Vimeo videos. Tutor LMS also has a unique video player and you can use this video player for YouTube and Vimeo videos embedded in your website.

tutor lms video player

So instead of the default YouTube or Vimeo player, you’ll get a unique video player.

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Student & instructor dashboards

The dashboard has become a crucial part of the online education system. It gives the students and teachers a fantastic user experience where they can access everything from one place. It also gives them a place to customize their public profile.

Tutor LMS teacher dashboard

It is truly amazing to see that Themeum has made this advanced feature available in the free version. This makes your LMS site look more professional and gives your registered users a better overall experience.

Revenue sharing

There are some LMS plugins out there that offer a free version but don’t allow you to monetize your content. Tutor LMS is a plugin that allows you to not only create but also sell your online courses. With the revenue sharing enabled, you can now share your commission with your instructors and get paid as well!

Tutor LMS monetization options

However, the free version only allows you to use WooCommerce. To sell subscription based courses, you need to install WooCommerce Subscriptions, which is a pro feature.

Unlimited courses and instructors

This is also awesome! Tutor LMS free doesn’t restrict the number of instructors that can register on your site. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about how many instructors can teach in your marketplace. You can also create unlimited courses with unlimited lessons!

As you can see, Tutor LMS is generous with its features. You can not only create courses with multiple instructors, but you can also freely keep expanding your online education marketplace.

Bonus Video: How to Create a Course with Tutor LMS (Complete Tutorial)

What you get with Tutor LMS Pro

At this point you might be wondering, what else is there? To be honest, that’s what we thought too when we were exploring Tutor LMS. But the Pro version introduces more advanced features to the plugin. It gives you the ability to create a more professional eLearning platform. With this, you can create your own Udemy or Coursera clone.

In order to create our Tutor LMS free vs pro list, we have divided the pro features into 5 segments. These are core features, advanced quiz builder, advanced functionalities, integrations, and monetization options. Let’s dive in!

Core features

The pro version has all the core features of Tutor LMS free plus some extra. Among those extra features, below we are mentioning the most notable ones (in our view).

Push Notification

This feature allows you to get on-site and push notifications of specified Tutor events. The push notifications are served by an addon that you get with the pro version. You have to enable it in order to send those notifications. If it’s enabled, you’ll see a bell notification icon on the top of the teacher or student dashboard.

Tutor LMS student notification

To actually define which events will be considered as a notification you need to go through some options. You will be able to select which events will trigger a notification and also decide if it will be a push, on-site, or both. There are options for customizing the instructor and admin notifications as well.

Certificate templates

Once you enable the certification addon, you will find some certificate templates to attach to your course. There are 7 free certificate templates you can choose and customize for your courses.

Tutor lms certificate templates

Also, if you want to design your own certificates, Themeum has another plugin called Certificate Builder. Although this plugin isn’t pre-installed with the pro version yet but you can download it from Themeum’s official website. However, you need a Tutor LMS pro plan to download the certificate builder.

Public courses

This is a feature that you might use. With Tutor LMS pro you can also create public courses. These courses can be purchased by guest users without the need of registering to your site.

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Advanced Quiz Builder

As you’ve seen in the free version, you get the quiz builder along with most of its features. But there are some more advanced features for you in the pro version. Let’s find out what these are.

More quiz categories

In the free version, you get 5 quiz categories to choose from to make your course more engaging. Actually in many cases that’s more than enough. But if you’re really looking to make an intuitive quiz, you can use the advanced quiz categories. You get 5 more quiz options in the Pro version. These are:

  • Short Answer
  • Matching
  • Image Matching
  • Image Answering
  • Ordering

Detailed quiz report for students

Another thing that you get in Tutor LMS pro is the detailed quiz report for the students. Once the students take a quiz on a subject, a notification is sent to the course instructor (option can be disabled also). The instructor can grade the score and send an assessment report back to the student where he/she may check it.

This is also an addon. You need to enable the Tutor Report addon to get access to this feature.

Quiz Import/Export

You can import your quiz from a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel. You can also export the quiz items as well. However, this is also another addon ‘Quiz Export/Import’.

Advanced functionalities

As you can see, the premium addons open up new features for your LMS website. But what are some of the advanced or professional functionalities that you were promised? Let’s discuss those now.

Reports

Using the reports feature you can send detailed reports to students about their quiz or course progress. You can combine this with a notification trigger so whenever you send a report, the students will receive a notification alert and can immediately check out their report.

Multimedia attachments

When creating a course, it is sometimes necessary to provide the students with PDF documents, images, and other materials. For example, if you are teaching a topic that is difficult to explain in one single lesson, you can provide a document that students will be able to download and study. This feature becomes available only in the pro version of Tutor LMS.

Course Preview

Course Preview is another premium addon but an important one as well. It allows the students to check out the preview of the course. They can know how many lessons are in the course, what they will be learning, etc.

32 email notification triggers

The email notification trigger is an amazing addition in Tutor LMS. It means that there are 32 possible events that you can connect. If that event occurs, an email will be sent to the students. You can also write the contents of the email yourself although there will be a template available for that event. For example, if you want to notify students when a new lesson is published, you can trigger that event as well.

Frontend course builder

This might be one of the most exciting features of the pro version. You get the frontend course builder of Tutor LMS. This feature is introduced so that instructors can create a course easily. Because the backend might seem a bit more complex and time taking, but the frontend builder is much simpler. You can use it to create your courses freely and with no complexity.

Assignment submission

Giving your students some assignments after each lesson is a great idea. It makes your course more interactive and also interesting. This is a premium addon and also has a trigger event. Students will be notified in their dashboard when a new assignment is given by the instructors. The instructors can also be notified when students submit their assignments. All these are possible with the Assignment add-on feature.

Content Drip

Although having a content drip method is not compulsory, but it is a must have for a modern LMS website. The content drip is a system that allows students to complete the previous lesson, quiz or some other events before continuing with the next one. As you might have seen, this feature is seen in most of the popular LMS websites like Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, etc.

Grading system

The instructors will also be able to grade students on their assignments and quiz. This too is an addon and also has a notification trigger event. With this, students will be able to self-assess themselves.

Multiple instructors

This very crucial feature is missing from the free version. When you enable this addon, you will be able to add multiple instructors to a single course.

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Integrations

All the integrations of Tutor LMS are available in the free and pro version as well. There are no restrictions here. You can integrate YouTube API, Divi Builder, Elementor, Oxygen builder, BadgeOS, Gamipress, AutomateWP, Uncanny Automator, WP Fusion, Groundhog, Presto Player, and MyCred with Tutor LMS.

Monetization option

The monetization option is one of the most important parts of your learning management system. After all, your goal here is to sell your courses. Tutor LMS is one of those few plugins that lets you sell courses online with its free version. It supports WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and Wishlist Members Integrations on the free version. But in the pro version, more eCommerce options are made available to you. Let’s take a look at these integrations.

WooCommerce Subscription support

Although it’s a bummer that you can’t sell subscription based courses in the free version, we can’t complain about it because of the number of features we already have there. But with Tutor LMS pro, you can install WooCommerce subscription and start selling those courses!

Paid Membership Pro

Once you purchase Tutor LMS pro you can integrate paid membership pro. Simply install the plugin and then enable the Paid Membership Pro addon and start monetizing.

Manual Enrollments

With this feature, you can manually enroll the students on your LMS website. The users can fill out forms and submit them for approval. Once you approve, users become registered students on your site. You can also manually add instructors to your site as well.

Restrict Content Pro

You can use Restrict Content Pro to allow students to access only the materials you want.

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Conclusion

Tutor LMS is a comprehensive LMS plugin but it is also very easy to use and once you get used to it, you wouldn’t wanna change. We’ve stated all the differences between Tutor LMS Free vs Pro and we hope that it will help you reach a decision.

At the end of the day, it is up to you. Themeum understands the difficulty of running an online education platform and they have created Tutor LMS with the best facilities. You can start for free, and create and sell courses. Keep earning and then when you feel that it’s time to expand your website, you can easily upgrade to Tutor LMS pro.

👉 Video: How to Create Udemy Like Website with WordPress 2022


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