Education sector is one of the most demanding and dynamic space for softwares, everyone is looking for a flexible, robust and full of features product which can be the deciding factor on which eLearning platform they chose. One of the most frequently asked question when user planning to start a eLearning site is which premium education platform to begin with. If you’re looking for a complete education platform in WordPress, there are two main choices, WPLMS and EducationWP.
Brief History
While WPLMS is a 4 year old product still under active development, it is a Education platform (1 theme + 9 plugins) built over social network called BuddyPress. EducationWP is a theme built over a free WordPress plugin called LearnPress which is now over 2 year old. When compared to other eLearning plugins, Learnpress is an exception as free and GPL. However, the free version is very basic and most of its eLearning features are paid, but LearnPress authors make an attractive offer in form of EducationWP theme, which offers all of its premium plugins free. In fact the theme literally took off when it stated that it is offering all of its premium features for free after their first month.
Feature Comparison
When it comes to feature comparison with WPLMS, EducationWP is left far far behind even with its premium addons. Here’s a little comparison :
[last updated 21st January 2019]
| Feature | WPLMS Theme | EducationWP (LearnPress) |
| Course Pursue and management | ||
| Students and Instructors | ||
| Front end Course Creation and Management | ||
| Front end Student Management | ||
| BuddyPress Integration | ||
| BBPress Integration | ||
| WooCommerce Integration | [ $49.99 ] | |
| Notes and Discussions | ||
| User Dashboards with Statistics | ||
| Instructor Dashboards with Statistics | ||
| Download Statistics Course wise, site wise, module wise | ||
| User Notifications and Emails (email template) | ||
| Activity Tracking | ||
| Instructor Commissions | [ $39.99 ] | |
| Instructor Payouts | ||
| Custom Registration forms | ||
| Wishlist | ||
| Course Reviews | ||
| Course Prerequisites | ||
| Course Retakes | ||
| GradeBook | [$39.99] | |
| Content Drip | [ $39.99 ] | |
| MyCred Addon | [ $39.99 ] | |
| Random Quiz | [ $29.99 ] | |
| Membership Integration (Pmpro) | [ $39.99 ] | |
| Co-Instructors | [ $29.99 ] | |
| Collections | [ $29.99 ] | |
| Certificates | [ $39.99 ] | |
| Custom Badges | ||
| Fill Blank questions | ||
| Sort Answer questions | [ $19.99 ] | |
| Match Answer questions | ||
| Select Answer questions | ||
| Upload Assignments | [$49.99] | |
| Multiple Fillblank and Select questions | ||
| Essay Type questions | ||
| Survey questions | ||
| Manual Quiz evaluations | ||
| Quiz Retake with previous results | ||
| Quiz Reset | ||
| Independent Standalone Quizzes | ||
| Unit Locking | ||
| Unit Media Lock (Video completion) | ||
| Negative Marking in Quizzes | ||
| Gradebook | ||
| Course Start Date | ||
| Unit Start Date | ||
| Dynamic Drips (Unit duration, drip origin) | ||
| Unit Assignment Locking | ||
| Instructor manually, complete, units,courses,quizzes for students | ||
| Custom Profile field groups | ||
| Custom Profile fields | ||
| Follow Members | ||
| Sell Quiz | ||
| Student and Instructor specifc menus | ||
| Course Codes for direct assignment | ||
| Apply for Course (manual approval in courses) | ||
| Custom Classes for Courses (sub-group class wise, training centers) | [ $29 ] | |
| Variable Pricing for Courses (different price for certificates, badge etc) | [ $19 ] | |
| Amazon S3 integration (with Instructor privacy) | [ $29 ] | |
| MailChimp Deep integration | [ $19 ] | |
| Custom Learning Paths | [ $29 ] | |
| Live Chat | [ $29 ] | |
| Real time Push Notifications | [ $19 ] | |
| Gifting Courses | [$19] | |
| Student Attendance | [ $29 ] | |
| Parent User | [ $19 ] | |
| OTP Authentication | [ $19 ] | |
| Mobile App | [ $49 ] |
Besides above :
WPLMS offers following premium plugins : Visual Composer, LayerSlider, Revolution Slider , EventOn & EventOn DailyView worth $129
EducationWP Offers : Visual Composer , Revolution Slider + above premium addons worth $582
Biased ? Maybe..
It is clear that WPLMS has more features than LearnPress. However, there are many more areas where comparison can be made, however the main advantage of WPLMS is that it is built over a social network called BuddyPress and it internally uses all the features of Buddypress out of the box, plus you can use all the plugins/extensions of BuddyPress with the WPLMS theme without issues. For example : When a student in your course starts a course, WPLMS would automatically use the BuddyPress’s internal notification system to notify the instructor that the course has been started by the user and even trigger an email in a beautiful template.
User Experience
This is just a glimpse, there many aspects of WPLMS user experience, for example, the Instructor can re-evaluate already evaluated quizzes, change marks and send a message to the users. Instructors can even manually award certificates, badges to users which empowers the instructors on adhoc management of the courses and their students.
Last but on the least, WPLMS is being used by many successful startups and universities around the world, some of them have close to a million members in their sites.
We at Vibethemes believe in delivering the best and most useful product, we believe that a great product does not require advertising gimmicks. We continuously make improvements in our code so that our customers get the best and that’s what they deserve for putting their trust on us.
But then you may ask why is LP so successful ? LearnPress is now 3 year old plugin and they (ThimPress) provide realtime support which is why it is so successful, it is claimed as one of the best support in Themeforest. However, providing realtime support comes at a cost of lack of development , so their commitments and roadmap would always remain incomplete, people it seems have been waiting for years and left disappointed : http://prntscr.com/k0i3ga http://prntscr.com/k0hqi0
We’ve built the LearnPress to WPLMS migration plugin, and we can confidently say that WPLMS is much better equipped for large scale sites than any LearnPress site. This is because of the fact the LearnPress is adding 10 custom tables in WordPress database whereas WPLMS is an entirely WP based product, no custom tables are added, so it performs much faster as it uses inbuilt WordPress caching. LearnPress is also using PHP Sessions which is another overhead on the WordPress’s stateless architecture.
Recently LearnPress security vulnerability for SQL injection attack was exposed.
Wonderful post! Thank you!
Hi, sounds impressive. Can you provide a link to one of those universty with millions of students using your theme?
Send me an email at [email protected], I can not share this information in public as we do not have explicit permission from them to showcase their site on vibethemes.
I have a website dedicated to teaching of mathematics (for free) and we’ll change from PDF’s to video format. I am interested in using WPLMS. My site is in Spanish completely and the plan is to continue in Spanish. Does the WPLMS template has the option to change language? (at least Spanish)
If not, do I have to translate every wepage manually as I am creating the courses? Or there is a way to translate the template and the created pages will be in Spanish?
(I am new to WordPress)
I thank you in advance for the information.
Yes Wplms can be easily changed to Spanish language.
Where can buy?
here : https://themeforest.net/item/wplms-learning-management-system/6780226?s_rank=1
https://themeforest.net/item/wplms-learning-management-system/6780226
lol ! In wplms you can create own own tables which are better than the screenshot 😛
Hello, great plugin and theme.
I am about to get your Theme but would like to know if this following is possible
1. I want students to be able to buy one “course” or “monthly membership” to access all course
2. The monthly membership subscription shall give access to all courses for their fee and allow materials download of (PDF & Video files respectively) for certain membership level not all level.
Question: Is there a way I can add the PDF and Video files to all courses but shall be available for download to only the membership level I allow it ?
Thanks
Yes this is possible.
Hello. I have no app experience. I dont know how changes can be made in an app. Will you guys be available to add new features for my personal app or do you do it overall only? Secondly, I’ve heard WPLMS makes database suddenly heavy and becomes very slow. As I will have atleast 30-40 courses, I want it to be fast and not slow in anyway. Can you confirm this point?
Lastly, the features you mention are there in Course Builder, some of them in the “crossed” area. Is this your updated list?
Yes, we’ll be available, its now 4 year old theme. Heaviness is because of settings, you can disable them. Every setup needs to be optimised, if you want all the features like trigger an email, a private message and a notification to all the instructors of the course when a student starts the course, you can imagine the load on the server will only increase. The switches are present and all of them do not need to be activated.
Course builder is available in the theme, the WPLMS has the most comprehensive list of features which has been tested on large scale sites as well.
hey is this comparison still relevant today? when did you last update it?
Of course yes. Just udpated it.
This looks great, and I’m very interested. I’d appreciate if you could answer a few questions;
1. Could course sharing be enabled? Meaning, can someone download a course into their own account and make changes to it?
2. Can the option of paid courses be disabled across the entire website?
3. Can an instructor be selective of which students enter their course?
4. Is there a separate gradebook for each course, or does a student have one gradebook for all of his courses?
5. Can one account have multiple users, e.g both an instructor and student(s)? Can those users have separate sign in credentials, but be under one paid account?
Thank you for your time.
is mathematics equation and sub-script and supper-script and fraction allow on quiz
yes :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OBd74dBnd4
Hi, could you solve the following questions?
1- The translation (to Spanish) is automatic or I will have to do it manually with plugins like Locotranslate.
2- Really where I can see what integrations it brings (addons) because in the main info page it talks about paid membership pro for example, but it’s all in English, I dont understand english, I’m not clear if what I pay is an integration or pluging is also included.
3- It is really easy to use or I need to know programming, because I have seen in the evaluations that there are many problems and errors to be corrected with each update and as they update often for me it would be a problem to have to be touching things continuously.
Thank you very much.
how would you compare the loading speed of the both theme?
Custom Classes for Courses (sub-group class wise, training centers) – I would like more information about this feature and how it would work
refer :https://wplms.io/support/article-categories/wplms-batches/
Does it support RTL
Does it support woo-commerce or eCommerce
Does it Support coupon codes
Yes for all.
I wish vibe themes was as good as it advertises itself to be. Its a pity the bugs aren’t all fixed
Please share the bugs with us, we’ll be happy to resolve.