If you’re reading this review, you’re interested in using LearnWorlds for your online courses and are wondering whether it is the best option for you or not.
LearnWorlds offers some very unique features for course creation and engagement and this is the main reason why it has gained in popularity in the already crowded online course hosting space.
In fact, I have been asked quite a few times about the platform from the readers on this blog, here I’m with this in-depth LearnWorlds review.
In this guide, I’ll evaluate all the features that the platform has to offer for creating and selling online courses, and will also discuss its strengths and weaknesses.
By the end of this LearnWorlds review, you’ll have a definitive answer to whether it is the right online course platform for you or not.
LearnWorlds Review Summary
LearnWorlds is a cloud-based course platform that allows you to create and deliver online courses under your own brand. The platform offers a lot of useful features for boosting engagement in your courses and this is what makes it stand out. In addition, the platform offers the essential selling tools for your courses.
Pros of LearnWorlds
- Professional course player design.
- Offers learning tools like quizzes, certificates, community, etc.
- Support for live lessons via Zoom.
- Allows you to edit your videos on the fly and add interactive elements inside them.
- Offers handy features for copyright protection.
- Offers a powerful site builder.
- Allows you to create a blog natively.
- Beginner-friendly pricing.
Cons of LearnWorlds
- Cluttered user interface.
- Course builder isn’t flexible and doesn’t support bulk uploading.
- Doesn’t offer a native mobile app.
- Doesn’t allow you to offer both card/Paypal options together.
- Doesn’t handle EU VAT natively.
What is LearnWorlds?
LearnWorlds is an easy-to-use, white-label solution which allows you to educate customers, train employees or simply create and sell online courses.
It is used by a variety of people including individual creators, small businesses and even enterprises to deliver their online programs.
Here’s a high-level overview of what the platform has to offer:
- ability to create and deliver engaging courses with multimedia content,
- interactive video and interactive e-books,
- support for quizzes, learning paths, question banks and certificates,
- a built-in community with social networking features,
- a powerful page builder and blogging tool,
- ecommerce capabilities – sell courses, course bundles and memberships,
- integration with thousands of third-party tools.
Moreover, LearnWorlds is cloud-based, so you don’t need to install any software or worry about things like security, updates, or maintenance.
This makes LearnWorlds a plug-n-play platform that allows course creators to focus on what’s more important in their business rather than deal with technology.
With this in mind, let’s get into the specifics of what the platform has to offer.
Course Creation & Engagement
The main focus of LearnWorlds is to let you create and deliver an engaging online course and in this section, we’ll explore all the tools that LearnWorlds has to offer for course creation and learner engagement.
Content Uploading & Structuring
LearnWorlds allows you to use various types of content in your courses. So, you can add videos, audio files, PDFs, ebooks, quizzes, surveys, and even SCORM/HTML5 files to your courses.
As far as videos are concerned, you get unlimited video hosting as part of your subscription. Plus you can also use externally hosted videos from Wistia/Vimeo inside your course lessons easily.
Plus LearnWorlds offers a couple of powerful features for adding interactive content in your courses.
The first one is the ability to host live lessons via Zoom. LearnWorlds has a native integration with Zoom which allows you to set up a live session from inside the platform.
The good thing about this set up is that your students don’t need to download the Zoom app, rather they can attend your live session from inside the course area.
The second one is Interactive Video which allows you to edit your videos on the fly and add interactive elements inside them.
With the Interactive Video feature, you can easily add questions, titles, buttons, forms, etc. on top of your video and it can be pretty handy in delivering a great learning experience.
Another such feature is Interactive Ebooks. With Interactive Ebooks, you can create a well-formatted ebook inside of LearnWorlds and the best part is that your students can even take personalized notes on the ebooks and highlight passages of text.
When it comes to creating a structure for your course, you can have two levels – sections and lessons in your course. Sections are just for organizational purpose and lessons is where the actual content gets added.
Once you add a new lesson, you’re asked to select the lesson type and then you can upload your content into the lesson.
Moreover, you can easily reorder your lessons or move them between different sections by dragging and dropping.
While using the course builder is pretty straightforward, there are a few things that I don’t like about it.
Firstly, you don’t have a lot of flexibility in terms of adding multiple content types in the same lesson. For example, if you want to add some text to a video lesson or add a quiz and a video to the same lesson, you can’t do that.
Secondly, you can’t bulk upload your content or import your content directly from cloud drives like Dropbox which slows down the process of course creation.
However, it does have a video library where you can bulk upload your videos but you will still need to create lessons and add videos to them one by one.
Finally, I am not a fan of LearnWorld’s user interface, it feels kind of cluttered and messy. There are simply too many options displayed to the users which can be a bit overwhelming.
Plus various settings are scattered throughout the interface and it can take you some time to figure things out,
Course Player & Content Delivery
The course player is where your students will watch your content and so, its design has a major influence on their learning experience.
The default course player theme is well designed from a user experience point of view. You have a large content area on the right where your videos and other content will appear.
Your users can see their progress as well as start a discussion from the sidebar on the left. You can even turn on the option whereby a user can see all the other learners enrolled in the course.
As far as the course navigation is concerned, your students can use the table of contents available in the left panel. They can also use the previous/next button in the top header to navigate.
And then, your users also have the option to completely hide the left sidebar and go in full-screen mode which is awesome.
As far as the ability to customize the course player is concerned, there are 5 course player skins available which allow you to change the look and feel of the player.
Plus you have complete control over what elements appear in your course player. For example, you can show/hide the course title, progress bar, estimated lecture completion time, course learners, etc.
Having said that, there is just one theme for the course player and you can’t change its layout. While this will work well for digital products with a fixed structure like online courses, it won’t work as well if you’re looking for a membership site platform.
Finally, the course player is mobile responsive by default and your users can watch your content from any mobile browser.
While LearnWorlds doesn’t offer a native mobile app for your students, on their highest pricing tier, you can get a custom app designed for your school for an additional cost.
There are a couple of other useful tools that LearnWorlds offers for content delivery. The first one is content dripping.
So, apart from the option of giving immediate access, you can also drip feed your content based on a schedule. The schedule can be based either on specific dates or on student enrollment.
The second feature is for creating learning paths and course compliance and it allows course creators to control how students navigate through the course lessons. And I like the flexibility that LearnWorlds offers here.
So, you can enable Sequential Navigation whereby a learner will have to complete each learning unit before they can move the next. Or, you can also set specific lessons as prerequisites.
Moreover, you can define conditions for when a lesson can be marked completed. For example, you can force your students to watch a certain % of video lessons or pass an exam before they can move forward.
There is one more feature for content delivery that I like a lot and it has to do with content protection. So, you can add a watermark on top of your videos and PDFs and you can show your school’s name or the user’s email address.
This is a very useful feature for copyright protection as it discourages file-sharing and not many platforms offer such a feature.
Quizzes & Certificates
If your course requires you to regularly evaluate your students’ progress, LearnWorlds has got your covered. You have the ability to create both basic quizzes and advanced exams.
So, you can create auto-graded exams and set a passing score and customize the requirements of the exam e.g. time, retries, show mistakes, etc. You can even create a question bank and use that to create randomized exams.
You also have the option to create non-graded quizzes or open-ended questions (assignments) that can be reviewed and graded by an admin or instructor manually.
In addition to creating quizzes, you can also create assignments and your users can provide a written answer or upload a file. As an instructor, you can grade assignments and provide feedback as well.
However, there are a couple of things that I don’t like about LearnWorlds testing engine.
The first one is that while you can add multiple-choice questions to your exams, they can’t have more than one correct answer which is really an essential feature.
Another issue is the lack of ability to import questions from an external file which means creating a large question bank on the platform is a pain.
When it comes to creating certificates, you have the ability to upload a PDF template into LearnWorlds and it will take care of the rest.
The good thing is that you can display things like a user’s name, date, exam score, credits, unique id, etc. on your certificates.
Moreover, you can decide when the certificate will be issued to your students. So, you can give a certificate when a user passes all the exams or just the final exam or completes all the lessons in a course.
What I don’t like about the certificates feature in LearnWorlds is that there is no native builder. You don’t have any inbuilt templates which you can use for your certificates.
So, you have to first use a third-party PDF editor to design your certificate template before you can upload it into LearnWorlds.
Online Community
If you want to build an active community for your learners, you’ll be glad to know that LearnWorlds comes with a built-in social network functionality. The community tool is pretty robust and it has all the essential features.
So, both admins and users can create new posts and comment on or simply like an existing post. Plus your posts can include text, a URL, an image or even a poll.
In addition, all the users get a personal profile and if enabled from settings, they can send private messages to other members as well.
Another useful feature that it offers is the ability to create private, invite-only groups for discussion between certain members (e.g. instructors only, premium member updates, study groups etc).
Finally, LearnWorlds has inbuilt gamification and badges features for boosting engagement. So, when you turn on the gamification functionality, your learners will be awarded various badges based on their activity in the community.
However, the gamification feature is not completely developed and so, it is not very useful.
For example, you can’t create any custom badges or customize the rules for awarding these badges. Similarly, students aren’t awarded any badges for their course activity (e.g lesson completion).
One more issue with the community builder and a big one is that you don’t have a way to restrict access to the community to those who enroll in a specific course or buy a specific membership plan.
As a result, the community feature works very well if you want to build a larger community but this feature isn’t very suitable for building a community around your signature program or your membership site.
Overall, LearnWorlds does an excellent job when it comes to course creation and learner engagement. It allows you to create an awesome online course with multimedia content and deliver it professionally through the course player.
In addition, it offers some handy features like live lessons, interactive videos, quizzes & exams, content dripping, learning paths, certificates, community, copyright protection, etc.
Site Design & Customization
In this section, we’ll discuss all the tools that LearnWorlds has to offer for building your school website and for running your blog.
To start with, you get unlimited hosting and a free SSL certificate for your website as part of your subscription. Plus you don’t need to worry about keeping your school secure and updated as their team takes care of these things in the backend.
By default, your school uses a LearnWorlds subdomain (website.getlearnworlds.com) but you also have the option to use your own custom domain if you want.
When it comes to actual site-building tools, LearnWorlds has this feature called Site Flavors which allows you to quickly modify the look and feel of your website.
To start with, you can select from a library of 8 site themes and the style gets applied to your entire site in a single click. You can also work on a site theme in the background and activate it only when you’re ready.
Moreover, LearnWorlds has a drag-n-drop page builder which you can use to create new pages from scratch or customize your existing pages without touching a single line of code.
The good thing about LearnWorlds page builder is that there are several pre-built page blocks that you can use for showing a hero section, course curriculum, testimonials, FAQs, pricing tables, email forms, etc.
Plus each page block has several pre-designed templates that you can add to your page in a single-click.
And you obviously have the ability to add essential page elements like text, images, videos, etc.
One useful feature is Magic Templates which allows you to easily switch the template for a page block without actually losing any of your content.
As far as modifying these page blocks is concerned, you can easily modify the layout of these page blocks. For example, you can change the order of elements within a block or you can add additional text or images within a block.
Moreover, you have complete control over things like colors, fonts, background, borders, padding, animation, etc. and you can change them easily.
Overall, LearnWorld’s page builder is easy to use and gives you a lot of flexibility to build beautiful pages for your school website even if you have no coding skills.
In addition to the ability to build a website, LearnWorlds also has an inbuilt blogging feature that allows you to create and run your own blog on the platform.
To get started, you just need to enable the blog functionality from the settings and LearnWorlds will create a blog home page for you.
You can customize the blog home page using the page builder. What I like about it is that you have quite a few options to design your blog page header and how the articles will appear on the blog page.
Creating blog posts is pretty straightforward as well. When you create a new blog post, you just need to enter the basic information and then you can add content to your blog posts using the same page builder.
As far as SEO settings for your blog posts are concerned, you have control over only the basic elements like the URL slug, SEO title and meta description.
So, while LearnWorlds allows you to create a fully-functional blog for your school, it can’t compete with a specialized blogging platform like WordPress in terms of functionality and flexibility.
Overall, LearnWorlds has pretty powerful features for building your course website and your sales pages and it also has an inbuilt blogging feature, so you can build a fully-fledged brand website on the platform.
Sales & Marketing
Before we get into the details, you should know that LearnWorlds isn’t really an all-in-one platform, so you won’t have the ability to build marketing funnels or do email marketing.
LearnWorlds is more focused on offering you the essential tools for processing payments and selling your courses.
Product Pricing & Checkout
With LearnWorlds, you can sell your courses individually or as part of a bundle and you can charge a one-time fee, a payment plan or a recurring subscription.
As far as recurring subscriptions are concerned, you can create monthly as well as annual subscriptions. In fact, you can create a subscription of any duration as LearnWorlds lets you define payment cycle in multiples of days/weeks/months.
Plus you have the ability to create a free trial even though you can’t charge a custom setup fee upfront.
If you want to discount your courses, you have the ability to create coupons. So, you can offer a percentage or a fixed discount and you can apply it either to specific courses or to all the courses.
In terms of the payment currency, you can choose from one of the 20+ supported currencies. However, you get to select the currency only at your school level, so you can’t price your courses in different currencies.
When it comes to payment gateways, LearnWorlds integrates directly with five gateways – Stripe, PayPal, 2CheckOut, Shopify and PagSeguro. So, it gives you a lot of options but there are a couple of major issues with it.
Firstly, you can only use one payment gateway at a time which means you can’t offer your students the option of paying via card or via PayPal. This is a pretty essential feature and this is a huge limitation.
Secondly, the only gateway supported for processing recurring payments is Stripe. So, if you come from a country where Stripe isn’t supported or your audience isn’t used to card payments, you’ll find this to be limiting.
When it comes to checkout pages, LearnWorlds allows you to create high-converting checkout pages.
To start with, you can do either a 1-step checkout where your users will be able to complete their purchase without first creating an account on your school or you can also do a 2-step checkout.
The good thing about checkout pages in LearnWorlds is that you have a few different templates for payment form that you can choose from. Plus you can completely customize the checkout page using the page builder.
Having said that, there are a couple of things that are not so good about the checkout process in LearnWorlds.
Firstly, you can’t add 1-click upsells to your checkout flow. So, you can add an upsell on your thank you page but the user will be taken to the checkout page in order to complete the payment which isn’t how it should work.
Moreover, you can’t charge EU VAT (or sales taxes) on top of your course price. For tax handling, you’ll have to use a third-party tool like Quaderno.
Affiliate Marketing Tools
81% of brands rely on affiliate marketing to market their products and services and if you want to have an affiliate program for your school, you’ll be glad to know that LearnWorlds offers inbuilt affiliate tools.
You can decide what products you want your affiliates to promote and you can then set a commission % that they will get on a successful sale.
Moreover, you have control over things like cookie expiration period, commission payout delay and whether to display customer information to affiliates or not.
All your affiliates will get a private dashboard where they can grab their affiliate links and track their commissions as well as payment history.
Overall, LearnWorlds has pretty robust features for creating and running an affiliate program for your online school.
Third-Party Integrations
LearnWorlds allows you to integrate with dozens of third-party marketing tools including analytics solutions, email marketing services, referral marketing tools, etc.
On top of that, you have a 2-way Zapier integration, so you can pass information from LearnWorlds to third-party tools as well as the other way around.
LearnWorlds also has webhook functionality, so you have another way of integrating with third-party apps which don’t have a direct integration with the platform.
As far as integrating with email tools is concerned, LearnWorlds has direct integration with four services – MailChimp, ConvertKit, Aweber, and ActiveCampaign. For integrating with others, you’ll have to use Zapier.
Overall, LearnWorlds does a decent job when it comes to sales and marketing. It has all the essential tools for processing payments and selling courses.
As far as other sales & marketing tools like email marketing are concerned, LearnWorlds doesn’t have much to offer. In fact, LearnWorlds doesn’t even have the ability to send an email to all your users, something which most other online course platforms offer.
Reporting & Administration
When it comes to course reporting, LearnWorlds has a lot to offer. You can easily see your student’s progress or course completion rates or even exam scores.
Under the “User Progress” section, you can see an overview of your students’ activity and their average scores. Plus you can also see their progress and performance course wise.
Here you can also filter your students based on different criteria like their name, email, course, progress %, scores, etc.
One thing worth mentioning here is that you can tag your users in LearnWorlds and use that to group them.
For example, if you sell to corporate clients, you can add unique tags to their employees and then use that to run custom progress reports and share them with your clients.
Finally, LearnWorlds gives you inbuilt video analytics tools, so you can track metrics like average engagement, total plays, play rate, etc. Plus you have visual tools like engagement graphs and heatmap to further analyze your videos.
Now let’s talk about sales reporting. With LearnWorlds, you can track individual orders as well as revenues for your courses and your instructors. But that’s pretty much it.
So, there are no visual reporting tools to help you, say compare the performance of multiple products or see the month on month sales performance.
Plus you have no way to track subscription metrics like churn rate and Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).
When it comes to student management, you can filter users based on their enrollment and then for individual users, you can track their progress, their activity in your courses and the community, their purchases, etc.
Moreover, you can do specific actions like modifying their profile, change their password, send them a message, enroll them in a specific course, remove their access or simply suspend their account.
You also have the ability to import multiple users into your school using a .xlsx file and you can export student information as well.
The only student management feature and an essential one that’s missing is the ability to select multiple users at once and do bulk actions.
For example, if you want to enroll multiple users in a course or send them a message, you’ll have to do it one-by-one which is a pain.
Finally, LearnWorlds allows you to add admin users to your school. There are two types of admin roles:
- Admins will complete control over your school including your student and financial information.
- Instructors will have authoring rights for the courses they are assigned to and they can add course content, set a selling price and publish it. They won’t have access to your financial/student data.
Customer Support
Customer support is an important factor to consider while choosing an online course platform.
And based on the feedback from LearnWorlds users as well as my interactions with their support, I can say that their customer service is pretty responsive and that the team actually cares about their customers.
On their lowest pricing tier, you get 24/5 email support while on all other plans, you get 24/7 email support.
To get in touch with their support, you need to click on the “Ask for help” widget on the right bottom of your admin dashboard and you’ll be able to send them an email.
However, you don’t have any live chat or phone support option available on any of the publicly available pricing plans which isn’t so great.
If you’re someone who likes to find answers to questions yourself, you’ll be glad to know that they have a comprehensive knowledge base with tons of how-to articles and video tutorials.
As far as customer training is concerned, they create useful blog posts and do live training from time to time.
And on certain pricing tiers, you also get free access to the LearnWorlds Academy where you will find a lot of courses for course creation and marketing.
Finally, LearnWorlds doesn’t have an online community on Facebook or another platform for its users. They do have an online community for LearnWorlds Academy but it isn’t active at all.
Pricing Plans
This LearnWorlds review won’t be complete unless we discuss the pricing aspect.
LearnWorlds has a beginner-friendly pricing and it offers multiple pricing plans for its customers to choose from.
The first tier is the Starter plan and it costs $29/month. Plus you’ll pay an additional transaction fee of $5 per course sale.
In terms of features, the Starter plan offers you the essential features like custom domain, unlimited courses, video hosting, quizzes and exams, community, content dripping, sales page builder, etc.
The Starter plan is the ideal plan for you if you’re just getting started and probably want to try the platform or even launch your first online course.
The next tier is the Pro Trainer plan and it costs $99/month but there is no transaction fee.
Plus you get access to additional features like blog, ability to create payment plans and subscriptions, certificates, question banks, affiliate management, Zapier integration, etc.
The Pro Trainer plan has most of the features that LearnWorlds has to offer and so, it should work well for a majority of course creators.
The third tier is the Learning Center Plan ($299/month) and it offers additional features like white-labeling, bulk student import, Interactive Video, Copyright Protection, etc.
You have a fourth tier as well which is more for enterprises and you’ll have to get in touch with their support to get the pricing details.
While I like about LearnWorlds pricing is its “pay as you grow” model which works both for beginners and advanced users alike.
However, their most popular plan, the Learning Center Plan is expensive and some of the most important features that make LearnWorlds stand out from the competition like Interactive Video and Copyright Protection are available only on this plan.
LearnWorlds Review – Final Verdict
In this LearnWorlds review, we’ve discussed all the features that the platform has to offer and also discussed its PROs and CONs.
What stands out the most about the platform is its powerful course creation and engagement features. It offers all the essential features like course builder, video hosting, quizzes, certificates, professional course player design, progress tracking, etc.
Moreover, it offers some really powerful features like Live Lessons, Interactive Video, Question Banks and Exams, Social Community, Course Compliance, and Copyright Protection.
LearnWorlds even includes the essential selling tools like the ability to create your website and your sales pages, run a blog, process one-time and recurring payments, and affiliate marketing.
Overall, LearnWorlds is a great online course platform option and it should work well for a variety of course creators. However, it will be ideal for you if you want to deliver an interactive learning experience to your students.
If you want to give the platform a try, you can start a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) by clicking on the button below.
I hope this LearnWorlds review helped you make a decision about whether it’s the right online course platform for you or not.
If you have any questions about the platform or any of its features, please leave a comment below. And if you’ve some feedback about this guide, feel free to share that as well.
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