LearnWorlds — Is It the Best Platform For Selling Online Courses?

Launch Your Online Business in Just 7 Days

Today we’ll be discussing one of the most unique course builders on the market — LearnWorlds.


Not only will we explain what it is and what exactly it provides, but also the different features that you’ll encounter while using the platform.


Full disclaimer — systeme.io also features a course builder tool, but we’ll put that aside until the end and give you a brutally honest review of LearnWorlds first.


Ready? Set. Go!

What is LearnWorlds?

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Founded in 2014, LearnWorlds is a cloud-based, all-in-one platform designed to sell online courses — a full learning management system (LMS).


Operating in 120+ countries with more than 4,400 entrepreneurs, LearnWorlds is truly a giant in terms of features and the possibilities they open up for the course creation process.


LearnWorlds offers you the ability to create an online school and then integrate it with other platforms to maximize functionalities and marketing efforts.


Sounds promising — so is it actually any good?


LearnWorlds is a solid option for people looking to create online courses — and you better believe that we don’t throw that statement around lightly here at systeme.io.

LearnWorlds’ pros and cons

That said, the matter of whether it is the right option for you and your business is a whole different question.


So before we get into the nitty-gritty details, here’s an overview of the pros and cons of LearnWorlds.

Pros

  • The interface is clean
  • Has ready-made templates
  • Has plenty of ways to engage students with course content
  • Has a drag-and-drop website builder that requires no code or technical knowledge to get going
  • Optimized for all devices
  • LearnWorlds give you the ability to run your own affiliate program

Cons

  • Starting plan has a $5 transaction fee on each course sale
  • Sometimes the platform has annoying bugs that last for a long time (frequently reported by users)
  • Pricing can get expensive compared to other options
  • Lacks advanced options like A/B tests and automation rules
  • Full white-label options start at $299/month

Plus, LearnWorlds has a rating of 4.7/5 on Capterra — yes, the platform is small in terms of the user base, but they do succeed in delivering a unique experience to their users.


But just how unique is it?

Online school creation

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

LearnWorlds is all about giving users access to “online schools” that they can use to run and promote their business.


Any online school within the platform will consist of 3 aspects:

1. A website — to serve as the foundation of your online presence

2. Courses — to monetize your expertise and enroll students

3. Mobile app — to make your course more accessible to mobile-only users (not mandatory)

So how can you build a stunning online school with LearnWorlds that actively generates an income?

Website creation

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

As a course creator in LearnWorlds, there are 2 things you can do to create an online school that looks and feels like it’s truly yours:

1. Connecting a custom domain

It goes without saying that having your own domain name would help with branding, gaining customer trust, and more discoverability in general.


With LearnWorlds, if you don’t have your own custom domain, you’ll be able to purchase one through third-party providers like GoDaddy.

2. Using the website builder

LearnWorlds offers a drag-and-drop website builder to help you build your school website without any coding or technical knowledge.


It has 50+ optimized templates that cover different niches and site flavors for you to choose from and then customize to suit your needs.


When building your website pages, you can edit all the basic elements like fonts, images, videos, etc. — and you can dive deeper into:

  • Adding pop-ups
  • Inserting widgets
  • Customizing search engine optimization (SEO) settings
  • Adding custom code
  • Adding animations

You can also use the website builder to create pages to promote courses and course bundles — remember, upselling bundles can increase sales by 30%!


You can customize all of your regular pages like sales pages, landing pages, and payment pages — plus, you can add a blog and publish content regularly.


Additionally, you get a lifetime, free SSL certificate to ensure that your website is securely connected to the internet.


Now let’s dial it back a bit. Is it all sunshine and roses for the school website builder?


Well, it’s not free of glitches and bugs that’s for sure — and a lot of users feel they have limited customizability design-wise compared to other drag-and-drop builders out there.


And that would show the most when you try to edit templates to fully match your brand.


But considering that your ultimate goal is to sell courses — LearnWorlds gives you all the essential tools on this front to get the job done.

Course creation

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

This is where LearnWorlds truly excels — online course creation is at the highest standard with this platform.


For starters, once you choose to create a course through the multiple buttons available on your dashboard, the setup wizard pops up.

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

You can edit your online course title, description, type (there are 6), URL, course price (and offer a discounted price), hero image, and an option to offer drip content.


You have 5 supported “learning units” you can add to online courses:

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

1. Multimedia — Add videos, ebooks, PDFs, audio files, and SCORM/HTML 5 packages

2. Live session — Host live meetings and webinars with platforms like Zoom and Webex

3. Questionnaires — Upload self-assessments, file assessments, graded exams, and graded SCORM packages

4. Certificates — Add course-completion certificates

5. Embed — Add external links and embed widgets

You can even create interactive videos by adding these elements to any video you’ve uploaded:

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

  • Buttons — Can be used to open a specific link, show a certain message, or take the learner to a set point of the video
  • Offers — Directly upsell prospects watching your interactive video
  • Questions — Add questions related to the content in order to trigger the viewer's attention and focus on specific visual and textual clues
  • Embed — Paste the embed code for anything you want to embed

You can also create interactive ebooks as is the case with interactive videos.

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

The trend of detailed settings for all the tools and elements continues throughout pretty much the entire course creation process.


That gives you the ultimate customization experience for all the courses you want to sell — but that also means that things can quickly get overwhelming.


For course creators who are only interested in uploading their videos and concentrating on creating content, the sheer number of settings that can be seen in a single screenshot is almost terrifying.

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

What helps alleviate things a bit is how LearnWorlds’ learning center is rich with documentation.


Plus, with LearnWorlds you get unlimited video hosting and unlimited courses—though the basic plan doesn’t allow you to offer private or free courses.


So, in short, from interactive content to hosting webinars and everything in between — LearnWorlds gives you the chance to bring students the learning experience that you want.


Not having prior knowledge in the e-learning industry could be a real drawback for you, but that’s a choice you have to make.

Mobile app creation

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

LearnWorlds goes the extra mile with this one — they give you the ability to create a native mobile app with a no-code editor.


The premise is simple, you can edit slides or pages that each represents a part of your app.


You already have a template for all the pages to work with, so there’s no need to design things from scratch.


You can:

  • Deploy a fully white-labeled version to the Play Store (Android) and/or the App Store (iOS)
  • Integrate with Google Firebase and Facebook business SDK (a toolkit that simplifies interaction with Facebook business in apps)
  • Set free chapters or parts of your course to be viewed by everyone
  • Send notifications about alerts, reminders, learning objectives, and news
  • Create and manage courses through the app

You can also use LearnWorlds’ online testing engine to optimize your app before launching — plus, all of the content on your app is fully synchronized with your LearnWorlds school.


As far as we can see, not much feedback has been reported on this feature.


Course providers looking to utilize this feature will have to sign up for 1 of the 2 highest-paid plans.


So to wrap this online school creation section up:

  • LearnWorlds’ site builder enables you to create a decent-looking website for your LearnWorlds school
  • The courses creation process is as advanced as it could be
  • And the native mobile app is an advanced feature for those willing to provide a unique learning experience and looking for maximum reach

Marketing tools and integrations

While LearnWorlds excels at course creation, marketing simply isn’t their strong suit — allow us to explain...


Here are the marketing tools that LearnWorlds natively provides:

  • Community tab
Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

The online community feature works similarly to the community feature on YouTube — you can post updates, announcements, and milestones.


It’s functional, but it delivers nowhere near the level of engagement you’d think it should.


Partly because it has weird aspects like “Yeah” instead of the like button on posts?


Nonetheless, you can also create student groups and privately check on any student’s progress via messages.


All in all, it’s your own small social network — which is pretty cool, but you’ll need to put in a lot of effort, time, and commitment to make it come alive.

  • Reports and analytics
Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

The reports dashboard is divided into various categories, including user analytics, sales, exams, and activity history.


While the UI is nice, the actual analytics could be better.


For example, all advanced analytics are locked up until the Learning Center plan, which starts at $299/month — that includes custom user segments, tagging, presets, report scheduling, and more.


Plus, tracking actual user progress is a hassle.

  • Affiliate marketing tools
Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

With LearnWorlds, you can run your own affiliate program and set up the commission rate, cookie duration, and after how much time the affiliate gets paid their commission.

  • Blogs

The platform isn’t really focused on being used as a blogging tool — but you can have a dedicated blog for you to share posts, articles, and announcements.

  • Bundles, coupons, and promotions
Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

You can set up product bundles, discounts, coupons and bulk coupons for both affiliates and regular users, and run general promotions.


All this looks nice — what’s the problem here?


For starters, a lot of the desired features of these marketing tools are locked behind pricy plans — in addition, advanced marketing tools like A/B testing, automation rules, and email marketing are simply not there.


That’s why LearnWorlds resorts to integrations like in the picture below.

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Yes, you can use platforms like these to unlock advanced marketing tools:

  • HubSpot
  • MailChimp
  • ConverKit
  • Sumo
  • Zapier
  • Referral Candy

But at that point, you’re already paying for more tools, dealing with the headache of working on multiple platforms, and investing a whole lot more energy than you anticipated.


Is that really how an all-in-one solution should be?


We certainly don’t think so.

How to sell online courses

Here are the ways you can offer your course content to students with LearnWorlds:

  • One-time payment
  • Subscription
  • Membership

And here are the payment gateways that you can offer to students:

  • Stripe
  • PayPal
  • Shopify
  • PagSeguro (Brazil)
  • Apply Pay (mobile app)
  • Google Pay (mobile app)

You can set up different currencies, and add admins to your online school to help with management and sales.

LearnWorlds’ Pricing and verdict

Source: LearnWorlds.com

Source: LearnWorlds.com

This is a mixed bag — some people think LearnWorlds is too pricy once you start scaling up, others think it’s fine.


Take a look and decide for yourself — LearnWorlds has 4 paid plans:

1. Starter — $29/month

Pretty crippled, to say the least.


This LearnWorlds starting plan only allows you to build a solid website of 3 pages…


To some, that’s simply not enough.


Furthermore, you don’t have access to affiliate marketing features, advanced reports — and you have a $5 fee for each course sale?


That’s easily 5% — 10% of the total price of the course for a lot of online course providers.


The only thing it has going for it is that you can create unlimited courses — but even then you can’t offer free courses or list them as private courses (to sell only in bundles).


Oh, and don’t forget about LearnWorlds branding on all of your products.

2. Pro Trainer — $99/month

It gives you access to full website building capabilities, subscriptions, memberships, the customizable course player, and customizable checkout pages.


You can also access the blog feature, live webinars, file assessments, basic affiliate management options, and more.


But you can’t help but notice that you still have LearnWorlds branding — isn’t paying $99/month enough to remove it?

3. Learning Center — $299/month

Congrats!


For $299/month, you can finally unlock most of the features that LearnWorlds boasts about all the time, like:

  • Interactive video editor
  • Fully-white labeled on all products and pages you create within LearnWorlds
  • 100% off LearnWorlds academy courses
  • Android and iOS apps
  • Advanced reports
  • Advanced affiliate management options
  • Integrations with API

4. High volume & Corporate — custom pricing, you’ll need to contact sales

This is LearnWorlds’ enterprise plan for businesses looking for corporate training more than learning tools.


They promise better hosting, bulk enrollments, a dedicated account manager, flexible invoicing, and more.


Verdict:


In the sea of online course platforms — LearnWorlds is awesome at course creation, but ultimately, you’ll need to put up with drawbacks like a lack of advanced marketing tools, pricy plans, paying for integrations, and a learning curve for those who are looking to post their first online course.


So it’s only fair we give you an alternative, something that doesn’t have those drawbacks, and yet is as — if not more — versatile as LearnWorlds.


That something is systeme.io!

Systeme.io — A free all-in-one marketing alternative

Systeme.io’s logo

Systeme.io’s logo

Simply put, we are a true all-in-one solution for building, maintaining, and scaling online businesses — and online-course businesses are right up our alley!


While we don’t outright claim we’re the best course sales software in existence — no one can deny the power of tools we put in your hands from the get-go.


Here’s a glimpse of what you get:

  • Course builder — upload your course material, upsell physical and digital products, use drip content, track students' progress, and talk with students effortlessly
  • Website builder — a drag-and-drop builder that lets you create beautiful website pages in minutes with no coding skills whatsoever (you also get a dozen of proven templates to choose from)
  • Email marketing — seamlessly run full email marketing campaigns and engage your students on another level (and more importantly, tap into an industry that has an ROI of $42 for each $1 spent)
  • Affiliate marketing — just like LearnWorlds, our platform lets you run your own affiliate program
  • Marketing automation — set up segmentation with tags, run automation rules that are triggered by your students' actions, optimize conversion rates with A/B testing, and more.

Systeme.io’s pricing

Systeme.io’s pricing

Systeme.io’s pricing

We offer 4 plans:

  • Free

Full access to the website builder (design up to 10 pages), the course builder (build 1 course), get access to segmentation, A/B tests, automation rules, full analytics, blog...


And oh, do you like the word unlimited?


How about unlimited premium hosting, unlimited file storage, unlimited students, unlimited emails, and unlimited assistants?


But don’t stop there, you also get a custom domain, full affiliate program management, and not a cent regarding transaction fees on all course sales as well — this plan was designed to get you going at no cost.

  • Startup — $27/month

Fully white-labeled, everything you create in systeme.io with this plan and up is fully yours.


Your content, your brand, and your style.


This plan will give you extra room with the limits you had in the Free plan — more website pages (50), courses (5), automation rules (10), A/B tests (10), etc.

  • Webinar — $47/month

Unlock more of everything that you’re already using and gain the ability to host evergreen webinars.

  • Unlimited — $97/month

Truly unlimited.


You already had full access to everything but this plan removes all limits on all tools you’re using inside of systeme.io.


Plus, the Unlimited plan comes with a free-migration policy where you can import your business in its entirety to systeme.io, and a 1-1 onboarding session — if you opt in for this plan, we’ll make sure that you hit the ground running.


Additionally, the free-migration policy is available on all annual subscriptions — which are offered at a sweet 30% discount.


But hey, don’t just take our word for it — we have more than 1000 reviews on Trustpilot with a stunning rate of 4.9/5.

FAQs

What types of courses can I build with LearnWorlds?

According to their website, you can build 6 types of online courses with LearnWorlds:

1. Paid

2. Draft

3. Coming Soon

4. Enrollment Closed

5. Free

6. Private

What’s an LMS in online learning?

A learning management system or LMS for short is a platform that’s specifically built to provide a complete online learning experience for students and instructors alike.

Is it a good idea to sell online courses?

Yes! The global e-learning industry is projected to reach $325 Billion in 2025.


And with course platforms like systeme.io, it’s easier to get a piece of that pie than you think!

LearnWorlds review — conclusion

Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve learned in this post —

  • LearnWorlds pitches itself as an all-in-one course platform that has everything you need to set up, promote, and sell your courses
  • While LearnWorlds is decent at creating online websites, very good at creating courses — their marketing tools can be a whole lot more advanced and integrated within the platform to be a true all in one
  • You can’t really unlock the full potential of LearnWorlds until you sign up for their Learning Center plan, which starts at $299/month
  • If you’re looking for an all-in-one course platform that doesn’t lock its features behind pricy plans — systeme.io has got you covered!

If you go sign up for free right now, we won’t even ask for your card info.


Plus, we have an amazing customer support team that has an average response time of under 2 hours and is available 24/7 to help you every step of the way!


That’s it folks, cheerio!

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