LearnWorlds Review 2024: Should You Use It?

LearnWorlds is a popular course builder that promises to let you create and sell interactive online courses with ease.

But does it deliver on its promise? How does it compare to other course platforms? Is it the right option for you?

That’s where we come in. We thoroughly tested the platform and evaluated it on more than 60 key aspects to bring you an unbiased and in-depth LearnWorlds review for 2024.

We’ll cover everything from its features and pricing to its pros and cons, so you can decide if it suits your needs.

What Is LearnWorlds?

LearnWorlds is a cloud-based course platform that allows you to create and sell online courses from your own website. The platform is used by all types of users, including online creators and eLearning businesses.

It belongs to the same category as platforms like Thinkific and Kajabi, but obviously, with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Its unique selling point is its focus on enabling interactive learning experiences, and it has a set of tools that help you achieve this, such as interactive videos and eBooks, powerful assessment tools, and communities.

While LearnWorlds isn’t an all-in-one course platform, it offers a range of features to promote and sell your courses, including a flexible site builder, blogging tools, funnels, and eCommerce tools.

With this in mind, let’s dive into our LearnWorlds review. We’ll start by looking at the usability aspect of the platform.

Ease of Use

You don’t want your course platform to be unnecessarily complex and hard to use. Unfortunately, LearnWorlds is exactly that.

To start with, the user interface is cluttered. Whether it’s the main dashboard or individual sections, you’ll always see a lot of elements and options on your screen, which can be overwhelming.

And many of the options aren’t intuitive, and it’s not always clear what they do. For example, when you hover over any lesson in the course builder, you’ll see a bunch of icons on the right, and it’s not clear what each icon represents without clicking on them.

Similarly, there’s no option to add a video to your lesson directly inside the course builder. You first need to add it to the video library and then insert it into your lesson.

A walkthrough of LearnWorlds’ user interface

There are other user experience issues like this. For instance, when you work in the page editor and select an element, its settings appear on top of the page elements instead of on the side, making it challenging to work with.

All of these factors contribute to a clunky and confusing user experience. You can still get used to the platform and figure things out eventually, but it’s not an intuitive platform at all.

Usability is the biggest drawback of LearnWorlds, and it’s something that they need to address in order to compete with other course platforms.

Course Creation and Engagement

The main focus of LearnWorlds is to let you create and deliver engaging online courses, and in this section, we’ll explore all the tools it offers for the same.

Course Builder

LearnWorlds provides the flexibility to incorporate various content formats into your courses. It allows you to add videos, audio files, PDFs, live lessons, quizzes, and even SCORM/HTML5 files to your courses.

Regarding content storage, you get unlimited hosting for videos and other content as part of your subscription.

When creating a course structure, you can add two levels—sections and lessons. Sections are just for organizational purposes, and lessons are where the actual content gets added.

Once you add a new lesson, you can select the lesson type and then upload your content into the lesson. Moreover, you can easily reorder your lessons or move them between different sections by dragging and dropping them.

While the course builder is decent, we aren’t a fan of the user interface; it feels kind of cluttered and messy, and it’s not intuitive.

Moreover, it complicates things unnecessarily. For instance, when adding a video lesson, there is no option to upload a file directly in the course builder. You must first add the file to the video library before you can use it in the builder.

There are a few important features missing:

• You get limited flexibility for adding multiple content types in a single lesson. For instance, you can’t add text content to a video lesson or include both a quiz and a video in the same lesson.
• It doesn’t support bulk uploading or importing from cloud drives like Dropbox. While you can add multiple videos to the video library, you’ll still need to create lessons and add videos individually.

Learning and Engagement

In this section, we’ll discuss the tools LearnWorlds offers to help you engage your students, test their knowledge, and create an interactive learning environment.

Content Dripping and Locking

LearnWorlds has a couple of features for controlling the pace at which your students access course material.

The first feature is the ability to drip-feed your content based on a schedule. The schedule can be based either on specific dates or the number of days after student enrollment.

You can also send an email notification to students when new content is available.

The second feature focuses on course compliance, enabling course creators to control how students navigate the course lessons. And we like the flexibility that LearnWorlds offers here.

Its sequential navigation feature locks the next lesson until a student has completed the previous one, ensuring that students follow the intended course flow.

While this feature works at the course level, you also have the option to 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.

Quizzes and Assessments

With LearnWorlds, you can create both basic quizzes and advanced exams.

The platform offers options for automatic grading, timed exams, limiting retries, question banks, and randomized exams.

Regarding question types, it lets you add multiple-choice, multiple-response, match and sort, fill in the blanks, as well as open-ended questions.

Moreover, you can import questions from an external Excel file.

Apart from graded exams, LearnWorlds also lets you create assignments for students where they need to provide a written answer or upload a file. As an instructor, you can grade assignments and provide feedback.

One interesting feature worth mentioning is the ability to add self-assessment activities to your course, where students can test their own knowledge, write down their thoughts, and reflect on their learning.

Finally, LearnWorlds allows you to create course certificates. It has one default template, and you can display things like a user’s name, date of completion, exam score, credits, unique ID, etc., on the certificate.

If you want to use a custom design, you can upload a PDF template with placeholders for the above variables. This isn’t ideal, and it would be better to have more native templates.

Additionally, you can choose when to issue certificates to your students. You can award a certificate upon passing all exams, the final exam, or upon completing all course lessons.

Online Community

LearnWorlds lets you create an online community for your school. Within the community, you can create discussion spaces and group these spaces into collections. By default, the platform also creates separate discussion spaces for each course.

Both admins and users can create new posts and comment and like existing ones. Plus, your posts can include text, video, images, and even polls.

In addition, all the users get a personal profile, and if enabled from settings, they can send private messages to other members as well.

Finally, LearnWorlds supports gamification badges to boost engagement, but the feature isn’t fully developed, limiting its usefulness. For example, you can’t create any custom badges or customize the rules for awarding these badges. And the default designs aren’t great, either.

Otherwise, the community lacks important features like events and livestreaming, group chats, member directories, and moderation tools.

Another issue with the community builder 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.

Overall, the community feature should work fine for building a support community for your online course. However, it’s no match for dedicated community platforms and isn’t suitable for creating standalone communities or community memberships.

Live Lessons

LearnWorlds allows you to host live lessons via Zoom (and Webex). The course builder has a native Zoom integration, allowing you to set up a live session from inside the platform.

The good thing about this setup is that your students don’t need to download the Zoom app. Rather, they can attend your live session from inside the course area.

This is a useful feature if you want to host cohort courses on the platform.

Additionally, you can allow students to schedule one-on-one and group sessions by integrating with Calendly.

Interactive Video and eBooks

This is one of the standout aspects of LearnWorlds.

The platform lets you add interactive videos to your course. You can edit your videos on the fly and add interactive elements inside them.

With the interactive video feature, you can easily add questions, titles, buttons, and forms on top of your video, which can help increase student engagement.

Apart from videos, you can also create interactive eBooks. With this feature, you can create a well-formatted ebook inside of LearnWorlds, and the best part is that your students can take personalized notes on the ebooks and highlight passages of text.

Thanks to this feature, your students don’t have to use a third-party app for taking notes.

Content Delivery

The course player is where your students will watch your content, so its design has a major influence on their learning experience.

The default course player theme has an optimal layout. You have a large content area on the right where your videos and other content will appear.

Regarding course navigation, 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 the course content.

The sidebar also displays their progress and the option to start a discussion. They can also see all the other learners enrolled in the course if it’s enabled.

Students can also completely hide the left sidebar and go into full-screen mode, which is pretty useful.

Having said that, the course player doesn’t look polished. The fonts are small, and the design looks outdated. In some places, the options are barely visible, such as the lesson downloads option.

A walkthrough of LearnWorlds’ course player

When it comes to customizing the course player, there are five course player skins available that 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, and a list of course students.

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 free mobile app for your students, you can get a white-label mobile app for your online school at an additional cost.

However, it’s not a done-for-you solution. You’ll need to build the app on your end using the visual builder, while the LearnWorlds team will assist in getting it published.

There is one more feature for content delivery that we like a lot, and it’s related to content protection. With this feature, 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 few platforms offer such a feature.

Site Design and Customization

In this section, we’ll explore the tools that LearnWorlds offers for building your website and running your blog.

To begin with, you get unlimited hosting and a free SSL certificate for your website. Your school uses a LearnWorlds subdomain (site.getlearnworlds.com), but you can also use a custom domain if you want.

Additionally, you can customize all of the default interface texts and even change the language by choosing from a list of 15+ languages. It’s also possible to completely remove LearnWorlds’ branding to white-label your course platform.

Now, let’s discuss the specific tools you get for creating a website.

Website Themes

Website themes in LearnWorlds are called “site flavors,” and there are over 50 of them. These themes cater to various users and styles, spanning industries such as business, finance, fitness, and healthcare.

No other course platform offers such a diverse range of themes, making LearnWorlds stand out in this aspect.

After choosing a theme, you can customize it using the Theme Explorer, which lets you apply a desired color scheme, layout, and fonts to your theme. This is extremely useful for adjusting the design to match your brand or personal preferences.

LearnWorlds also allows you to work on a site theme in the background and activate it only when you’re ready.

Page Builder

LearnWorlds has a visual page builder, which you can use to create new pages from scratch or customize your existing pages.

The good thing about LearnWorlds page builder is that there are several pre-built page sections that you can use for showing a hero section, course curriculum, testimonials, FAQs, pricing tables, email forms, and more.

Plus, each page section has several pre-designed templates that you can add to your page in a single click.

One useful feature is Magic Templates, which allows you to easily switch the template for a page section without losing any of your content.

And obviously, you have the ability to add essential page elements like text, images, and videos inside a section. You can also modify the layout of these page blocks.

For example, you can change the order of elements within a block. Or, you can modify colors, fonts, backgrounds, padding, and animation settings.

Having said that, there are several usability issues with the page builder:

• The page builder isn’t truly drag-and-drop. While you can click and drag elements within a section to change their position, you can’t drag and drop sections themselves.
• There’s no default layout/options sidebar when editing a page, which makes it difficult to access different page sections and even change their order.
• When you select a page block, the settings panel opens on the right, but it’s on top of the page elements, making it difficult to see the changes you’re making.

Otherwise, LearnWorlds’ page builder offers much flexibility to build beautiful pages for your school website and customize them as you want.

Blogging Tools

LearnWorlds comes with a 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 we 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.

While LearnWorlds allows you to create a fully functional blog for your school, keep in mind that it can’t compete with a specialized blogging platform like WordPress in terms of functionality and flexibility.

Sales and Marketing

While LearnWorlds is more focused on offering you the essential tools for processing payments and selling your courses, it includes a couple of useful marketing tools as well. We’ll discuss these tools in more detail below.

Product Pricing Options

With LearnWorlds, you can sell your courses individually or as part of a bundle and charge a one-time fee, a payment plan, or a recurring subscription.

For subscriptions, you can create monthly or annual plans. In fact, LearnWorlds allows you to define the payment cycle in any duration, using multiples of days, weeks, or months.

Plus, you have the ability to create a free trial even though you can’t charge a custom setup fee upfront.

To provide discounts on your courses, you can create coupons and offer a percentage or a fixed discount. Plus, you can apply it to specific or all the courses.

You can choose from over 20 supported currencies for payment. However, you can only select the currency at the school level, so pricing your courses in different currencies isn’t possible.

Payments and Checkouts

LearnWorlds integrates directly with three gateways—Stripe, PayPal, and Shopify. However, Stripe is the only supported gateway for recurring payments.

We also like that LearnWorlds has a Sandbox mode, which allows you to make a test payment and check the entire purchase flow from a student’s perspective.

When it comes to checkout pages, LearnWorlds allows you to create high-converting checkout pages.

To start with, you have two options for checkout: a one-step process where users can purchase without creating an account or a two-step checkout where users must create an account before purchasing.

Another good thing is that you have a few different templates for payment forms that you can choose from. Plus, you can completely customize the checkout page using the page builder.

Having said that, there are a few issues with LearnWorlds’ checkout process:

• You can’t create unique checkout pages for each course or bundle. This means that you can’t use different messaging or show unique testimonials for each product.
• You can’t add 1-click upsells to your checkout flow. Although you can offer an upsell on the thank you page, users must still complete the checkout process again, which isn’t how it should be.
• You can’t charge sales taxes on top of your course price. For tax handling, you’ll have to use a third-party tool like Quaderno.

Affiliate Marketing

If you want an affiliate program for your school, LearnWorlds offers built-in affiliate tools.

You have the freedom to select the products you want your affiliates to promote, along with a commission percentage they will receive for each successful sale.

Moreover, you have control over things like cookie expiration period, commission payout delay, registration process, and whether to display customer information to affiliates or not.

All your affiliates will get access to 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.

Other Marketing Tools

LearnWorlds has a handy feature called Funnels that lets you create a series of landing pages to guide potential customers through different stages of the buyer’s journey.

When you create a funnel, you can choose from pre-built funnel templates, and the platform will create the necessary pages for you. There are templates for lead magnet signup, webinar registration, and course sales.

However, the funnel builder is a bit limited. In fact, it’s more of a landing page feature with the ability to keep related pages in one place.

For example, when you create a webinar funnel, LearnWorlds creates a webinar registration page, but it doesn’t let you create an event and register users. You’ll still need a third-party webinar tool for that.

Apart from funnels and landing pages, LearnWorlds also offers popup templates that you can add to your website.

Lastly, LearnWorlds has a few email marketing tools as well:

• The platform takes care of the default notification emails, such as order receipts and drip content emails.
• You can also send broadcast emails to your students.
• You can use LearnWorlds’ automation feature to send out one-off emails based on triggers like course enrollment, completion, or tag added.

However, it can’t replace a dedicated email marketing service like ConvertKit. It doesn’t let you create email sequences or track subscriber behavior.

Reporting and Administration

Reporting tools are essential for gaining insights into your business’s overall performance. Meanwhile, administration tools are there to help you set access permissions, manage user profiles, and a lot more.

Reporting and Analytics

When it comes to course reporting, LearnWorlds has a lot to offer. You can easily see your student’s progress, 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. Moreover, you can see students’ progress and performance course-wise, and you can track metrics like course starts, time spent, and completion %.

Here, you can also filter your students based on different criteria like their name, email, course, and scores.

Finally, LearnWorlds gives you video analytics tools, so you can track metrics like average engagement and play rate. Plus, you have visual tools like engagement graphs and heatmaps to analyze your videos further.

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).

People Management

Regarding student management, you can filter users based on their enrollment. You can also do bulk actions, such as enrolling students in a course, deleting their profiles, or suspending them.

You also have the ability to import multiple users into your school using a .xlsx file, and you can export student information as well.

For individual users, you can track their progress, their course activity, and their purchases.

Moreover, you can do specific actions like modifying student profiles, changing passwords, sending them a message, resetting their progress, enrolling them in a specific course, or removing access.

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 their employees to unique user groups and then use that to run custom progress reports and share them with your clients.

Another useful feature in LearnWorlds is user automations. You can create rules that perform specific actions when triggered by a student’s activities.

It supports triggers for purchases, course enrollments, progress, inactivity, tagging, and more. And the possible actions include sending emails, adding or removing tags, enrolling in a course, and so on.

This can be useful for engaging students, such as reminding them to complete a course, or you can also use it for admin tasks like resetting their progress on request.

User Roles

LearnWorlds allows you to add admin users to your school. There are four types of user roles:

• Admins will have complete control over your school, including your student and financial information.
• Instructors have authoring rights for their assigned courses. They can add content, set prices, and publish, but they can’t access your financial or student data.
• Reporters can access data and reports related to assigned user segments only.
• Managers can access specific areas of the platform for user groups or community spaces.

These are the predefined roles, but you can also create custom roles with specific permissions and restrictions.

Third-Party Integrations

LearnWorlds lets you integrate with dozens of third-party marketing tools, including analytics solutions, email marketing services, and referral marketing tools.

Regarding email tools, the platform has direct integration with popular services like MailChimp, ConvertKit, Aweber, Moosend, and ActiveCampaign.

On top of that, you have a two-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, providing another way of integrating with third-party apps that don’t have a direct integration with the platform.

And with the LearnWorlds API, you can easily retrieve your school’s data, manage your content and users, or build custom apps.

Moreover, the platform supports single sign-on (SSO) functionality, which creates a seamless login experience for students. You get multiple options here, including a WordPress plugin, SAML support, and a custom SSO option.

Customer Support

In our research, we found LearnWorlds’ support to be responsive and friendly.

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 the support, you need to click on the “Ask for help” widget on the bottom right 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 pricing plans, which isn’t so great.

If you enjoy finding answers on your own, you’ll be glad to know they have a comprehensive knowledge base with helpful how-to articles and video tutorials.

Additionally, on certain pricing tiers, you can also get free access to the LearnWorlds Academy, where you’ll 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.

Pricing Plans

LearnWorlds has beginner-friendly pricing, and it offers multiple pricing plans for its customers to choose from:

• The Starter plan ($29/month + $5 per course sale) supports features like a custom domain, unlimited paid courses, quizzes and exams, community, and website builder.
• The Pro Trainer plan ($99/month) gives you access to blogging tools, subscriptions, certificates, question banks, affiliate management, and Zapier integration.
• The Learning Center Plan ($299/month) offers additional features like white-labeling, bulk student import, interactive video, and copyright protection.
• There’s also a fourth tier for enterprises. For pricing details, you’ll need to reach out to their support.

Additionally, LearnWorlds has a paid add-on for getting branded mobile apps. It costs $169/month for Android or iOS apps and $249/month for both.

What we like about LearnWorlds’ pricing is its “pay as you grow” model and the fact that you can create unlimited courses on all plans.

What’s not so great is the fact that most of its stand-out features, like interactive video and copyright protection, are available only on the Learning Center Plan, which is pretty expensive.

Moreover, LearnWorlds limits the number of active learners on each plan. The Starter plan allows up to 1,000 active learners, while the Pro Trainer and Learning Center plans allow up to 2,000 learners.

LearnWorlds vs the Competition

Before concluding our LearnWorlds review, let’s see how this platform measures up to its competition, starting with Thinkific.

Between the two, Thinkific is a clear winner. Although LearnWorlds has interactive videos and a more flexible page builder, it’s far less user-friendly and more expensive.

Additionally, Thinkific provides a more flexible course builder and free and branded mobile apps. It also has an app store with dozens of third-party apps, so you can easily extend your platform functionality.

Read our LearnWorlds vs Thinkific guide for a detailed comparison.

Another major competitor is Kajabi, which, unlike LearnWorlds, is an all-in-one platform.

It supports more product types (e.g., Coaching and Podcasts), offers free and branded mobile apps, and has more powerful marketing tools.

While Kajabi is more expensive, it’s worth considering for those looking for an all-in-one solution.

LearnWorlds Review: Final Thoughts

In this LearnWorlds review, we’ve discussed all the features that the platform has to offer and its pros and cons.

What stands out the most about the platform is its powerful course creation and engagement features, especially the interactive learning tools. It also boasts a flexible website builder and powerful sales and marketing tools.

Meanwhile, it has a cluttered interface, and the user experience for creators is the worst among all major course platforms. The pricing also gets pretty expensive if you want to use stand-out features like interactive video.

Otherwise, LearnWorlds should work well for educators and eLearning businesses who want to create interactive learning experiences.

If you want to give it a try, you can start a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) by clicking on the button below

We 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 us a comment below.

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