Choosing the right LMS plugin is a significant decision. In this article, we will be discussing two big LMS plugins, Tutor LMS vs LearnPress.
An LMS or Learning Management System is software that you can use to build an eLearning platform. It comes with features that allow you to document, track, administer, automate and deliver educational content or materials online. Basically, it is an application that you can use to create and manage online educational materials.
Over the years, online learning has become very popular. LMS platforms are making education easier for the students as well as the teachers and instructors. Tutor LMS and LearnPress are two of the familiar LMS plugins for WordPress. From building courses and adding quizzes to awarding certifications, these plugins enable you to do a lot of things. But which one of these plugins is better for you?
Introduction to Tutor LMS and LearnPress
In this article, we will explore the features, interface designs, and usability of both these WordPress LMS plugins. Hopefully, this article on Tutor LMS vs LearnPress will help you figure out which product is best suited for your eLearning portal. Let’s begin with knowing each of these plugins.
Tutor LMS
Tutor LMS, the eLearning WordPress plugin is developed by Themeum for providing modern online learning solutions. It takes online education to the next level. Tutor LMS provides you with all the tools necessary to create and manage an eLearning platform. The plugin was launched back in 2019 and since then, it has garnered 40,000+ active installations.
One of the reasons why Tutor LMS has gained so much popularity and positive reviews is because of its user-friendly interface. An LMS is a complex piece of software and the interface might look complicated at times. As a result, it gets much more difficult to manage an eLearning platform. But the folks behind Tutor LMS took all those difficulties in mind and offered a solution.
Tutor LMS was designed to simplify and deliver efficient eLearning functionalities. It can be used for schools, universities, single instructors, multi-instructors, or even large organizations. You can use their advanced quiz options to include image answers as well as classic true-false, multiple-choice, short answers, and more. Other activities like generating filterable reports, creating student forums, and selling online courses is extremely simple and easy with Tutor LMS.
Tutor LMS significantly expands WordPress website functionality for schools and educators. The plugin brings many useful features that are typically available in standalone products. Users can manage enrollments, build courses, customize lessons, and track success with analytics. There’s a lot to love if you want to construct a virtual learning space that stands on a WordPress foundation.
What you get with Tutor LMS
When you think about operating a Learning Management System you might think that you need a standalone program. But Tutor LMS brings the power of standalone software in one plugin. It has been designed with all the features and tools you need to create and manage your online education platform. Tutor LMS could very well be the best WordPress LMS plugin in the market.
The entire LMS has several different features built within it. We will not be discussing each one of those. But instead, we will discuss some of the aspects of the LMS for example, the course builder, the quiz options, Monetizing options, etc. With that being said, let’s jump right ahead and see what we get from Tutor LMS.
Setup wizard
Both Tutor LMS and LearnPress have setup wizards. This is very important as it helps you set up your LMS into the configuration suitable for your eLearning platform. Tutor LMS presents you with the setup as soon as you install the plugin. It lets you choose your category if you want to build an LMS site for Individual teaching or for a marketplace.
If you choose the Individual category, you will have 6 steps to follow. These steps are general, course, quiz, profile, payment, and finalization. If you have selected the marketplace option, you will have an extra step for instructors.
Overall, the Tutor LMS setup wizard covers all the basic information that you need to get started. This is very helpful because you don’t need to manually do these things. And even if you skip the setup wizard, you can re-launch it anytime you want!
Drag and drop course builder
We all love the revolutionary drag-and-drop system. It allows us to easily create amazing websites. Tutor LMS comes with Gutenberg support. You can use the Gutenberg block building system to create your courses with ease.
However, by default, the Gutenberg editor might be disabled. You have to enable it from the “Tools” menu of Tutor LMS in order to use it. Go to Tutor LMS > Settings > General and from the general tab, enable the Gutenberg Editor checkbox.
Tutor LMS is also compatible with Elementor, the most popular drag-and-drop WordPress page builder. Themeum has also developed a companion plugin for Tutor LMS that consists of multiple Elementor elements. This plugin is called Tutor LMS Elementor Addons and can be installed from wordpress.org or from within your WordPress dashboard.
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Advanced quiz builder
When discussing the features of Tutor LMS, it’s essential to mention its advanced quiz builder. Quizzes make your courses more interesting and ensure that your students are paying attention. It’s a crucial part of learning. In the free version of Tutor LMS, you will have access to 5 quiz categories along with limited quiz options. That is enough to build a course, but if you want to experience the complete feature suite of the quiz builder, you need Tutor LMS Pro.
Tutor LMS Pro gives you 10 categories of questions to choose from. You can give true/false, single choice, multiple-choice, image answering, image matching, etc. Creative quizzes keep the students more engaged and make your lessons much more fun.
Customizable certificates
Another feature that you will enjoy using. With Tutor LMS pro, you will have access to the certificate template library. There are multiple certificate templates for you to choose and customize from. This interface will become available on the course builder.
Themeum has another plugin called “Certificate Builder”, which gives you a new interface to design your own certificates. This is a unique feature of Tutor LMS as it’s not seen on any other LMS plugins.
Course prerequisites
When taking advanced courses, students must learn the basics or take some other basic courses. For example, React is a framework of JavaScript. In order to learn React, students must have a good grasp of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It will be beneficial for the students if you add JavaScript, HTML, and CSS as course prerequisites to your React course.
Tutor LMS gives you the option to add the prerequisites to a course. So, instead of informing the students about the prerequisites within your course lessons, you can display it on the front end. This will inform the students what courses or materials they need prior to taking your course.
Built-in student forum
It has been scientifically proven that when you learn as a community, you learn faster and better. Tutor LMS encourages interactions and participation through online discussions. Now you can harness the power of social learning with student forums.
Using the student forums, instructors can spark conversation by asking questions or joining discussions. This is a great method for connecting the students with the instructors.
Tutor LMS themes
One of the great things about Tutor LMS is that it has some native themes for you to use. Currently, there are 7 beautiful themes designed by Themeum. Among these, 5 themes are designed for Tutor LMS. Let’s take a look at these themes:
Tutor Starter is a free theme built for any eLearning site. All Tutor LMS themes have a modern and responsive design. These themes are also optimized for performance and are SEO-friendly. There are several non-native themes for Tutor LMS also. Be sure to check out our list of 10 Best Tutor LMS Themes.
But LearnPress has several more themes than Tutor LMS.
LearnPress
LearnPress is a free and comprehensive LMS plugin for WordPress. It is developed and maintained by ThimPress. The core plugin is free and there are many free and paid extensions available. LearnPress is one of the most popular LMS plugins in the market. When it comes to creating and selling online courses, LearnPress is considered one of the best.
Even though the core version of LearnPress is free, in order to add additional functionalities, you need more add-ons or plugins. Some of these plugins are free but most of these have to be purchased. However, the amount of features made available to you for free is enough to create a course.
But you might find yourself in need of some other useful functionalities like different membership levels, more monetization options, etc. To get these advanced features, you need the help of additional plugins.
LearnPress offers a “Pro Bundle” package where they include most of the premium plugins. It will also give you their front-end builder.
What you get with LearnPress
LearnPress is one of those few LMS plugins that give you a free version to work with. There is a useful documentation that you can refer to when you run into trouble. You can ask for support through their support forum which is the fastest way to get support. The support team of ThimPress continuously keeps checking the support forum for new topics.
However, there are some concerns, regarding the plugin causing some sites to crash. But LearnPress goes through regular updates and these issues could have already been fixed by the time this article is published. LearnPress has a decent amount of features to work with. Let’s take a look at some of these features.
Setup Wizard
LearnPress has a nice setup wizard that guides you through the installation process of your LMS plugin. This speeds up and simplifies a lot of your work. As soon as you install LearnPress you will be directed to the setup wizard. You can skip this process and manually set up the plugin.
The first section of the setup wizard is the welcome page. When you run the setup, you will be directed to the Pages section. Here you can customize your courses, profile, checkout process, instructor options, and terms & conditions pages.
The next phase is the payment option. LearnPress accepts both online and offline payment systems. By default, LearnPress will have PayPal installed. If you want additional payment options, you have to install the payment plugins for LearnPress.
The LearnPress setup wizard is a fantastic way to set up your LMS website. Currently there is no way to relaunch this setup wizard; so if you skip it, you need to manually set up everything.
Drag-and-drop Course Builder
LearnPress has a good interface that provides you with multiple options to create courses. You can build courses, add multiple lessons to them, add quizzes with different categories, etc. You can also add text, images, videos, PowerPoint slides, documents to your lessons and quizzes.
With the given options, you can create a full curriculum layout and manage that. It also has the easy drag-and-drop feature. You can use this to create & arrange lessons and quizzes.
Good enrollment experience
After you have created a course, you will have the option to share it and manage it. You can examine the statistics that will show you the number of enrollments, the revenue, the trend, and much more. Although managing the entire LMS requires a lot of backend work, it’s good to know that you have control.
You can also set the requirements to learn a lesson but you need to install premium addons like Content Drip and Prerequisite. Other features like instructor commissions and adding membership levels for students require premium add-ons.
So even though the plugin is free, in order to provide a good learning experience, you have to invest in premium addons.
Sample data
A nifty feature of LearnPress is the sample data installation opportunity. It is difficult to predict how your course will look before you are done creating it. LearnPress has a way of installing a sample course for you so that you can see how it looks. To enable this, go to the ‘Tools’ option in LearnPress and install the sample data.
When the installation is done, go to ‘Courses’ and select the Sample course to get a preview of a complete course. Of course, all the data will be dummy, but this shows you how your course generally looks like. You can also use this sample as a template and create your own course!
Monetization options
LearnPress has several payment options. You will have access to different payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, 2CheckOut, or even offline course payments. By default, you can work with PayPal. But if you need access to other payment methods (Visa, Mastercard, offline payment) you have to use LearnPress WooCommerce.
If you have WooCommerce installed, you can also add coupons to your site. However, you need to purchase pro LearnPress plugins to set up Stripe, 2Checkout, Authorize.NET, etc.
Native themes and plugins
ThimPress has developed a large number of themes and plugins for LearnPress. In fact, this is where LearnPress is strong. ThimPress has 27 themes for you to use. These themes are paid, except for the Education Pack theme. Eduma, Coaching, CropTrain, StarKid, etc. are the more popular themes. You can get these themes from Themeforest.
The extra addons and plugins make LearnPress more powerful. ThimPress has developed many plugins to assist you in creating and selling courses. It has plugins for WooCommerce, assignments, announcements, BuddyPress, course wishlist, export-import, and more. They have developed a total of 46 plugins for LearnPress. If you want to check out all these plugins you can visit the official website of Thimpress.
Tutor LMS vs LearnPress
Picking the right plugin for creating your online education platform is an important decision. It all depends on what features do you actually need and your budget. These are probably the most important aspects to keep in mind. Tutor LMS and LearnPress are both great plugins but there are many differences between them.
Tutor LMS was launched in 2019 and LearnPress was first released back in 2016. However, in a short period of time, Tutor LMS has managed to gain a lot of popularity. It now has 40,000+ active installations.
When you think about all the features and functions that you need to maintain a Learning Management System, you might think that you need standalone software. But today you can harness the power of standalone software into one plugin. An LMS plugin has a large number of features so we are not going to be discussing each one of them. Rather we will be discussing the common aspects (course builder, quiz option, certificate creation, etc.) of an LMS.
Course builder
The first tool that you will be interacting with is the course builder. This is the interface that you use to create your courses and add lessons. Typically this section lets you name the course, and add descriptions to it. It also lets you add additional information stuff such as duration of the course, how many students can enroll, difficulty level, course requirements, lessons, quizzes, etc.
To summarize, a course builder is the heart of any LMS plugin. Tutor LMS and LearnPress both have a standard course builder. While Tutor LMS has some features that are unique, LearnPress also has some features that are not present in Tutor LMS. Let’s take a look at these course builders.
Tutor LMS
Tutor LMS has both a backend course builder as well as a frontend course builder. The backend course builder is the basic course building system that is available in free and pro versions. You can create an entire course just from this page.
The frontend builder is a unique feature of Tutor LMS. In fact, Tutor LMS was one of the first among its peers to introduce the frontend builder. It lets you build your course without the hassles of the backend. It is simpler and the preview mode is fantastic. However, the frontend builder is only available in the pro version of Tutor LMS. Let us look at some of the features that you get from the course builder of Tutor LMS.
- Drag and drop course builder
- Tags and categories for courses
- Pending approval
- Scheduled publishing
- Login & registration form
- Breaking lessons into sections
- Display course difficulty
- Display course benefits
- Course instructions
- Option to include materials to lessons
- Course announcement option
- Lesson preview
- Upload video in lessons
- Encrypted download links
- Course introduction video
- And more…
After using Tutor LMS, we can say that it’s fun. The plugin guides you all the way, from creating a course to selling it. Once you get familiar with the entire setting, creating and publishing courses will become a breeze.
Bonus Video: How to Create a Course with Tutor LMS (Complete Tutorial)
LearnPress
LearnPress is a well-known LMS plugin for WordPress. It used to have a large number of users worldwide. It was first launched in 2016 and was one of the most popular LMS plugins at that time. It still has about 100,000 active installations and many eLearning platforms still use it. However, due to some user complaints about their sites crashing and customer support, people have been gradually switching to other platforms.
LearnPress has some great features that you can use to create and sell courses. The team at ThimPress always keeps LearnPress updated. This ensures that the users always have the latest solutions in LMS technology. Let’s take a look at some of the features that LearnPress provides:
- Drag-and-drop course builder
- Setup wizard
- Tags and Categories
- Login and registration forms
- Logout redirect
- Option to disable edits on published courses
- Display featured courses
- Breaking courses into segments
- Add profile link to the admin bar
As you can see, LearnPress provides you with many features that you could expect from a modern LMS plugin. It also has a frontend builder but you have to purchase the Frontend Editor add-on or purchase themes to enable this feature.
Remember when we talked about the LearnPress Pro Bundle? Well, if you install this bundle it does add most of its premium add-ons but there is an issue here. It installs around 26 different plugins on your WordPress site. As you may have guessed, this can slow down your website and make it a bit difficult to manage.
Quiz options
Adding quizzes makes your courses much more engaging and interesting. It is also essential for assessing students’ progress and awarding certificates. So we always expect our LMS to provide us with some quiz options so that we can create good tests.
Both of the plugins that we are discussing today provide us with some good quiz options. We can also use these options to create a quiz of different combinations. Let’s look at the different options that are available for us in Tutor LMS and LearnPress.
Tutor LMS
Tutor LMS has an advanced quiz system. It gives you a wide variety of quiz categories and options. In Tutor LMS pro you will have access to 10 quiz categories that you can use. You can choose categories like True or False, Fill in the Blanks, Single choice or Multiple Choice quiz, Image Answering or Image Matching and so much more.
In the free version of Tutor LMS, you can select from up to 5 quiz categories. The variety of quizzes that Tutor LMS provides is really amazing. It keeps your lessons more interesting and increases the interactivity of the students as well.
Besides the quiz categories, you will have access to many different options to customize your quizzes. Here are some of these features:
- Randomize options
- Quiz duration or time limit
- Import quiz
- Pagination
- Quiz description field
- Retake quiz
- Quiz answering attempts
- Score awarding and show grading
- Question required option
- Passing grade percentage
The advanced quiz system of Tutor LMS is one of its most unique and popular features. It gives you so much freedom and options that you can customize your quizzes just the way you want. But to get access to the advanced features and categories you need to purchase the pro version.
LearnPress
LearnPress also provides you with many quiz options. It doesn’t have as many categories as Tutor LMS but the offered options are good for creating quizzes. Only 4 quiz categories are available for you to use. These are True or False, Single Choice, Multiple Choice, and Fill in the Blanks.
Despite its fewer quiz categories, the quiz settings that are available will help you create engaging quizzes for your courses. It provides you with all the basic options that you need for a standard test. Let’s see some of its quiz features.
- Quiz description
- Score awarding
- Show correct answer option
- Show hint
- Explanation (displayed after students click ‘check answer’)
- Set duration of the quiz
- Set passing grade
- Negative marking
- Minus for skip
- Pagination
- Show correct answer
The quiz options of LearnPress are pretty good and we loved using it. But one of the issues of LearnPress is that many more features are available (such as the randomization of quizzes) but you have to purchase and install plugins to use those. Installing more plugins may slow down your website and can sometimes cause it to crash.
Certification
After the completion of a course, you should reward your students with a certificate. This gives the students a sense of accomplishment. This also makes your course look more complete and professional. We expect enough options for creating or adding certificates to our courses from an LMS plugin.
Both of these plugins have the feature where you can award certificates to your students. There are free and paid options as well. Let’s take a look at how Tutor LMS and LearnPress handle the certification options.
Tutor LMS
Tutor LMS has gone far and beyond in giving instructors the power to create amazing certificates. In Tutor LMS pro you will have access to many different certificate templates to use. You can modify them and add them to your courses.
If you want to get a bit more creative, you can use the Tutor LMS Certificate Builder plugin. This plugin gives you a new interface to design your own certificates for the courses. It’s available when you purchase Tutor LMS pro. To use it, you have to log in to your themeum account and download it from the official website.
The Tutor LMS Certificate Builder interface is truly impressive. You can use its drag-and-drop feature to grab elements and place them on your certificate. You will also have access to rich options to customize your certificates. Plus, customize the dynamic contents such as students’ names, course names, instructors, etc. using the shortcodes.
LearnPress
LearnPress also has a certificate builder addon. It’s not as comprehensive as Tutor LMS but enough to get the job done. A disadvantage of LearnPress is that the certification option is absent in the free version. You will not have access to any free templates and you can’t create any certificate at all. For this, you need to purchase the certificate builder addon that is $29.99.
You have to download this add-on from ThimPress’s official website. The certificate builder add-on is included in the pro bundle of LearnPress. But we would have appreciated it if ThimPress would have at least included some options in the core version of LearnPress.
Pricing
An LMS plugin consists of a large number of features and is not cheap. When you look at some plugins like LearnDash and Lifter LMS, these plugins have really high prices. So having plugins like Tutor LMS and LearnPress is really good as both of these plugins have free versions.
In general, Tutor LMS is cheaper than LearnPress. But the thing we want to find out, is it the better value for money? Let’s compare the pricing of Tutor LMS and LearnPress.
Tutor LMS
When you have a solid course structure and great assessment options, your revenue can escalate. You need payment gateway options for all the transactions taking place on your site. If you’re a multi-instructor eLearning platform, then commission allocation & withdrawal options are necessary. Managing the revenues is also a big part to keep your transaction flow right.
If you are impressed with using the free version of Tutor LMS, then you can switch to any of their 3 paid plans. These plans are as follows:
- Individual for $199 (1 site)
- Business for $399 (10 sites)
- Agency for $799 (Unlimited sites)
👉 Get Tutor LMS Pro NOW! 🔥
📌 Unlimited License Pack Available! 😮 GET TODAY! ✅
LearnPress
As we have mentioned earlier, the core LearnPress plugin is free and will always be free, as the developers say it. But in order to include additional features, you have to purchase plugins, add-ons, and themes. You can also purchase the LearnPress Pro Bundle. The Pro Bundle consists of 20+ add-ons including the Frontend Editor, WooCommerce, Certificates, Stripe, Co-instructor, Students list, and so on.
LearnPress Pro Bundle is available at $249 including a package of premium plugins.
ThimPress has developed several themes and plugins for LearnPress. These themes are available on ThemeForest and it includes many plugins and addons. Let’s take a look at some of these themes:
However, some of these themes install over 20 plugins on your WordPress site. We all love plugins as they give us more functionalities and features to play with. But the sad fact is that the more plugins installed on your WordPress, the slower your website may become.
LearnPress Pro Bundle costs $100 more than Tutor LMS. Even though LearnPress is completely free, when you consider the number of add-ons and plugins you have to purchase to get your eLearning platform up and running, it really adds up. It becomes more expensive.
Statistics and reports
Site analytics and statistics are very important if you want your LMS to be successful. You need to monitor which course is more popular among the students and which course is not. Stats like these are very helpful when you want to make improvements to your educational website.
The success of your eLearning platform depends on your decisions. Analytics is just as important as creating courses. You need to ensure that the courses reach as many students as possible and also make sure if they are well received by them. This is where analytics comes in as it assists you in making informed decisions and boosts your course enrollments.
Tutor LMS
Tutor LMS provides comprehensive platform analytics. You have to enable its ‘Reports’ addon to access the LMS report screen.
The overall panel of the analytics shows you how many courses are online along with other information such as the number of enrollments, lessons, quizzes, instructors, etc.
When you click on the tabs above, you will see more details about it. For example, if you click on ‘Courses’ you will be directed to another screen showing you all the statistics of your courses. This screen will show you all your courses, number of enrollments, enrollment date, etc.
There are statistics of almost every single aspect of your eLearning website. Writing about all these analytics is going to tire us out, so it would be better if you look at their statistics documentation.
This is a pro feature of Tutor LMS so you will only have access to this addon in Tutor LMS Pro.
LearnPress
LearnPress uses a graph to show you the statistics. You can easily access the statistics from the LearnPress menu on your WordPress dashboard. You can view the general, users, courses, and order statistics from this panel.
The General tab shows you the overall analytics of your website. On the top, you will find tabs marked all, publish, pending, free, and paid. You can click on any of these tabs to exclude that from the statistics. The graph will adjust according to your choice. Likewise, you can select the other tabs to view your statistics and organize them the way you want.
This is a great way to view your analytics and this feature is available on the free version of LearnPress! This is something that we liked since Tutor LMS doesn’t give this much information on their free version.
👉 Get Tutor LMS Pro NOW! 🔥
📌 Unlimited License Pack Available! 😮 GET TODAY! ✅
Conclusion
Both Tutor LMS and LearnPress are the top LMS plugins in the market today. Tutor LMS gives you a free version that has some of its great features. This free version actually gives you a chance to try out Tutor LMS and see if you like it. What we liked about Tutor LMS is the user-friendly approach and the number of features they provide for free. But to unlock the other useful features like the advanced quiz categories, analytics panel, etc. you have to purchase the pro version.
LearnPress has a different approach. It’s like pay-as-you-grow. For example, when you keep creating your courses, you might notice that you don’t have the Gradebook option to track students’ progress. Then you go on and purchase the Gradebook plugin to activate this feature. To eliminate this problem, you can also purchase the pro package which comes with a lot of essential plugins and addons. But then again, this budget-friendly approach installs a large number of plugins on your website, slowing it down.
Overall both plugins were great. With Tutor LMS you can design and create any sort of eLearning website you want. Tutor LMS gives you the simplest LMS solution. You can also check out their native themes that have a modern and responsive design. The plugin maintains the coding standard and doesn’t crash your website. LearnPress also has a large number of themes that you can use and gives us some unique features too.
At the end of the day, it completely depends on how you want to set up your LMS website. We hope that you found this article helpful. If you liked it, you can also check out our Tutor LMS vs LearnDash article. Let us know your thoughts about Tutor LMS and LearnPress. Which plugin did you choose and why?
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