LearnDash Arvostelua 194

For basic uses, LearnDash is quite a good plugin. You can create your courses easily, add quizzes and the design is appealing.

The troubles begin, once you want to build a proper learning management system (be it public or within a company) with clean unenrollment processes, data analysis or ongoing (subscription) products.

For a proper learning management system, we expect it to provide out of the box:
• exact dates of when a user enrolled and when a course expired for a user
• past data, even when a user unenrolled or a course expired
• ability for users to retake a course a second/third… time, still have the first round data for comparison (see separate clean first/second/third round data)

These things are (currently) not possible with LearnDash (unless you pay a programmer and develop something on your own).

1.) Unenrollment process: users are unenrolled after the expiry date ONLY IF they log-in into their account, the admin manually visits their backend page or the admin manually removes them from the course settings page.

There is no option in the ProPanel, where you can differentiate between users that are “enrolled and expired” and actually “enrolled and have access”. This way an admin could at least clean up the data from time to time….

AND the date of the expiry, that you will see once a user is unenrolled is not the course expiry date you set in the course, but the date of the manual action. So if you do one of the actions a year from the expiry date, the data will show the date of expiry a year from the course expiry. This way the data becomes useless.

2.) Data overview: Quality of data put aside, there is no overview of data of users that have already taken a course and are unenrolled. If you updated a course and want to check if users are performing better, or if the close rate went up, you cannot run a comparison to previous participants. The past data is there (kind off, see next point) in the backend within each of the specific user accounts, but only available on a single user basis. You cannot pull a report.

3.) retaking courses: for each user, there is only one instance of a course allowed. You can delete the course data from the user’s account, once it expired, but then you will not have any data for future reference (not even a start date), not even at a single user level. Or you leave the data, but when the user is enrolled in the new course, the dates at the user level for expiry show the past expiry data. Yes, a user shows as being expired in the past even when enrolled and active anew….. Confusing? … yes, totally.

Given the way this works, you can assume that there is quite some useless data even in your current reports (i.e. expired users that did not visit their course after expiry will show as in progress, active users with new course will show as expired....).

I am not the only (and probably not the first) one who brought this to LD’s attention. There are other people in the LD facebook group that actually stated they had to develop own code months ago (after contacting LD), to get around these problems.

What does LD say about these problems:

Support: “At this time, unenrollment after course expiration functions the way it is intended”.

No answer in facebook group: I have also posted this in the Facebook group directly to “the Senior Director of Customer Experience at StellarWP”, during a different topic, after he told me, to give LD a new chance. They were just acquired and promised to improve on the support. That was October 12th. 6 weeks later, still no answers.

No answer during/after online meeting: I gave them another chance and joined the online study hall about ProPanel on October 14th, where I also asked a different person the same question. They were showing the new ProPanel, but if the data is not treated in a proper way, you still get useless data as output. I was promised an answer latest two days after the meeting. No answer after 6 weeks.

In summary, if you want a very simple setup, always delete all the user data after the course, do not want subscription or clean data analysis, this is a good tool for you. Everyone else, look somewhere else.

EDIT 10.12.2024: Deducted a star for the following behavior: Publicly LD replays fast and the below reply states how I should get in touch and LD wants to help. So I did write a day later one more time. I used the LD ticketing system and addressed it directly to Amanda. About a week later, I got a mail to rate their support on ... what? .. I have never received a reply. Now two weeks later, still no reply. I really dislike companies that act great publicly, but do not act on their word when the actions are not visible.

EDIT: 19.12.2024 still no reply

The service I received from the LearnDash support team is second to none. They were very responsive and gave me the answer that I was looking for in a timely manner.

I’ve had an incredibly frustrating experience with their support. Responses are excessively slow—sometimes taking up to a week—and the solutions fail to address the issues effectively. It gives the impression that they lack the ability or willingness to resolve problems properly. If I weren’t so committed to their system, I would have switched providers by now!

This is my second review, and I’ll continue to share my feedback until they make meaningful improvements. I cannot recommend working with them unless they address their support delays and overall service quality.

Learndash support replies quickly and with solution to my issues. Thanks

Great product and the customer service team is great. They are very quick to respond and incredibly helpful. I expect to be using LearnDash for many years to come for my small business.

Generally speaking, the LearnDash plugin has been working very well for us. We encountered an issue after having migrated to a new hosting provider. The learndash support team helped out, and we were able to resolve the issue. Good work :).

LearnDash support was effective in troubleshooting a licensing issue with an Instructor add-on. Christiana (our support contact) provided suggestions for solving the problem quickly.

I LearnDash was the perfect plugin for building my video course on WordPress! I found it extremely easy to use, with an intuitive interface that made the entire course creation process straightforward, even for someone without coding experience. The price is incredibly competitive for the value provided, and it was truly a great deal! I highly recommend LearnDash to anyone looking to create and manage online courses professionally and effortlessly.

Mea made the journey to renew our license very easy. Thanks for the great service.

Their customer service is top notch! Always helpful, always thorough. Highly recommend!

My implementation was complex, and the support team handled it brilliantly.

I needed licensing for a live site, a development site to test new things out, and a staging site once we moved from one host to the next. All of this required some complex changes, installations and re-installations of add-ons and various other plugins that integrate with LearnDash (like Gravity Forms). But I was never prevented from doing anything I needed to do because of licensing; I just contacted the support team to let them know what I was needing, and they responded quickly and positively every time.

Well done. Helped me a ton when I needed it.

Horrible customer services that both cause further problems and take forever to get back to you. Learndash cloud has probably the worst customer services I have ever had the displeasure to deal with. Not only did their own staff seem to cause several poblems with the site, it takes an age to get a reply. The support seems to come from Nexcess who then ask you to get back in touch with Nexcess but when you do they can't help as we are with Learndash cloud. It's a mess. Have only been with them for a project for about 10 days an I would recommend to avoid.

The support was very helpful, I found what I needed, after a few email conversations, they were always diligent and willing to provide a solution.

I had high expectations for LearnDash LMS, but sadly, it feels like a relic of the 20th century. Despite being marketed as a leading solution, it’s severely lacking in modern features that are now standard in the industry. Here are just a few of the glaring issues:

Outdated Interface: LearnDash relies on Gutenberg as its editor, which is clunky and unintuitive for course creation. There’s no dedicated graphical user interface (GUI) to streamline the process or make it user-friendly.

No SCORM Support: Shockingly, LearnDash doesn’t support SCORM out of the box, which is a basic requirement for any LMS today. Without this, integrating with industry-standard content is a nightmare.

No Own Dashboard: It doesn’t even have its own proper dashboard. You’re left piecing together elements from WordPress, which feels disjointed and unprofessional.

Overall, LearnDash feels like an outdated plugin slapped onto WordPress rather than a fully functional LMS. It’s far from worth the investment, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone looking for a modern, efficient learning management system. There are far better alternatives out there that provide true value for your money.

The worst technical support and service from management you can expect.
3 months down the track and the issues are still not fixed. The worst thing is, I told them where the problem was and they spent 3 months trying to convince me that it was a caching problem while I emailed proof that it wasn't.
Each time they say the problem is fixed, then I hear nothing, I need to literally scream at them through email to do something. I mean, you would think that if you have a customer who you have not been able to help for over 3 months, you would give it your full attention until the fix is confirmed. I am locked into their software at the moment, but I am looking at other options, and I don't recommend anyone else to lock themselves in with this company. It seems like their support staff is not knowledgeable.

I have emailed this company numerous times for support and they have not had the decency or professionalism to reply. It feels like they take your money and then lose interest. Waste of time!

Excellent LMS support, very responsive and helpful.
I needed them for the unexpected deletion of a user account.
They proposed me a number of hypotheses so that I could solve the problem by myself but, as I was not technically in a position to validate or invalidate them, they took the time to do it for me.

I got a great service from LearnDash support. Thank you! So far, im happy and i can highly recommend 🙂🙏