I’ve extensively tested LearnWorlds and other similar online course platforms.
In this post, I will show you whether LearnWorlds is the best online course platform or not. I’ll also talk about alternatives and ideal use cases.
Disclaimer: This post has affiliate links at no cost to you.
Key Features
Before we dive into how Learnworlds works, let’s take a quick look at what it offers.
- Create and manage as many paid courses as you want
- Add quizzes to your videos
- Use full assessment tools for exams, quizzes, and certificates
- Run live classes and webinars
- Customize your course player, website, and app
- Connect email marketing, lead generation, and affiliate programs
- See detailed reports on learner progress
- Handle large numbers of students or corporate training with dedicated support
But listing features is just the start.
My Experience
Getting Started with LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds offers a free trial, and you don’t even need a credit card to get started.
To start on LearnWorlds click this link and “Get started for free.”
If you’re not ready to sign up yet, no problem. I’ll walk you through everything, so you can just read along! 🙂
(If you want to save time, you can sign up using your Google account.)
First, you need to create a school.
This is different from a course. You could name it something like “Alice’s School” if your name is Alice. I’ll show you how to create courses under this school a bit later.
It takes about 10 to 15 seconds for LearnWorlds to set up your school’s workspace. Just hang on for a moment!
After the setup is done, pick a theme for your school.
Try to answer the questions as best you can. It helps LearnWorlds understand you better and makes your experience on the platform smoother.
Then you can start creating your first course. By the way, I recommend taking the call with the onboarding manager. It’s so helpful!
Great! Your school is set up, and now you’re ready to start creating courses on LearnWorlds. Congrats!
Here’s what the course dashboard looks like:
This is where everything happens: you can see visitor stats, create courses, check reports, handle marketing, customize your website, and more.
For now, let’s start with the most important task—creating a course.
Creating a Course on LearnWorlds
Making a course on LearnWorlds is easy. Just click “Create course” to begin.
Next, give your course a name. I chose “Blogging 101” for my course. It’s meant to be a beginner-friendly course on blogging and SEO.
To make it more attractive, don’t forget to add a thumbnail for your course:
Next, create a URL for your course. This is the link you’ll share with your students, so keep it short and descriptive.
Note: If you choose anything other than “Draft” for course access, your course will go live right away. Use “Draft” to keep it private while you’re still setting it up.
This confused me a little at first.
When I tried to launch my course, I was surprised to see it was already live. No worries—just keep this in mind.
If your course is paid, don’t forget to set the price.
You can also offer a discount and show the original price with a strike-through. This is great for increasing sales, and not many platforms have it. (I still haven’t figured out how to do this on Thinkific, even though it’s a basic feature.)
Now it’s time to add your course content. Since it’s 2024, let’s take a shortcut and use AI.
You’ll need to give the AI clear details so it doesn’t get off track.
For example, tell it about the types of content, section numbers, activity numbers, and more. AI isn’t perfect, so I’m not a huge fan, but it can save a lot of time—especially if it’s your first course or you’re just making a basic version.
Here’s the AI assistant and what you can ask it to do for your course:
Once you finish, the AI will create the course in about 30 seconds. After that, you’ll see a screen like this:
Scroll down and click “Insert” to add the outline to your course.
To move the lectures around, just drag and drop them.
I noticed the AI only created the lecture titles and order—it didn’t add any descriptions or text. To edit a section, click the pen icon and add your content.
By the way, don’t forget to click the save button!
Next, I got a little confused when trying to upload a video to the lectures. I finally found out you can do this in the “Settings” tab.
You can use videos from Vimeo, YouTube, or other platforms, or upload your own.
To upload your video, choose “From course video library.”
This process can be a little tricky.
It takes you to the library page and closes the course outline editor.
Then you need to upload the video and wait a few minutes for it to process.
You can’t add the video to your lectures until it’s fully uploaded and encoded.
I didn’t like this because it meant I had to remember to come back and add the video I already uploaded.
Once the upload is done, go back to the course content editor through the “Course outline” section on the left.
It also lets you change the cover image of your course, which I recommend doing.
If you don’t have images, you can use Pexels or Unsplash.
Then move on to the other parts of your module.
For example, my course is just a video course right now, but that’s not usually enough. It helps to add some interaction along with the videos. This is where activities come in.
What I like about LearnWorlds is that it’s a complete platform with lots of features. One way to see this is by looking at all the different activities you can add for your students:
Surprisingly, there aren’t any quizzes available.
To work around this, I made a small text assignment instead:
You can add questions and answers, and also use different formatting options and more.
Once you’re done, you can preview your course as a student by clicking the top right corner.
The preview lets you see what the course looks like from a student’s perspective:
You can also test everything by completing an assignment you’ve made for your students:
I passed my own test! 😉
That’s how you create your course content on LearnWorlds.
I could go through all the other activities, but I’ll leave those for you to explore.
Next, let’s look at the course layout.
Editing the Layout
One of the best features of LearnWorlds is that you can fully customize your course layout. Once your course content is ready, click on “Course page layout” in the menu on the left.
Just click on the elements to make changes. You can move them around, change fonts, adjust colors, and more.
After customizing my page, I realized that LearnWorlds gives more options than other platforms I’ve tried. There are more settings, advanced features, and the editor is easier to use overall.
When your layout is ready, you can preview it by clicking the Preview button at the top right:
For example, my page now looks like this:
It’s not perfect yet, but I’m just testing for now. You’ll want to spend more time adjusting things.
To customize the course player, go to Course Settings > Course Player and choose the layout you like:
There’s a lot more you can do with customizing the course page, but I don’t want this to turn into an e-book.
The controls are intuitive and easy to use, so you’ll get the hang of it quickly.
Now, let’s look at some other useful features!
Other Useful Features on LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds has a detailed dashboard that gives you real-time insights into your course. You can see revenue, student numbers, assignments, and more.
You can also use the Course Insights tab to track how your students are doing.
This is especially helpful once you have a larger group of students who have been active for some time.
Publishing the Course
When it’s time to publish your course, you might be surprised to see it’s already live. I was looking for a “Launch” button, but the course was already live when I visited the URL I had saved.
This happened because I started the course and set a price, which made it public.
Be careful with this!
Luckily, my sample lessons without content are still in draft mode and not visible. To publish your course content, go to the course outline, click on the module, and select “Paid.”
This will make the materials in that module live.
Make sure to do this for all the lessons you want to go live.
Website
Now that your course is created and published, let’s talk about the website.
When you sign up for LearnWorlds, you first create a school where all your courses will live. This also creates a website for your courses.
To access it, go to the Website section on your school’s main dashboard.
From there, you can customize your website. For example, you can pick a design and make changes to it.
Here’s my school’s website, using a Tropic Lake color palette and the Poppins font:
Just like with your course page, you can customize your website by clicking on elements and changing them to look and say what you want.
You can also easily add new pages and blog posts to your website, if that feature is enabled.
There are templates you can use for your pages too.
Like I said, this platform covers everything. You can even build a full website with it if you want.
Marketing
There are also many marketing features available.
For example, you can (and should) set up a sales funnel for your courses to increase your sales.
There are great funnel templates you can choose from, designed to work well for course creators in different industries.
To boost your sales, you can set up an affiliate program, letting your students promote your courses and earn commissions.
You don’t need to do this right away if you don’t have a big audience yet. But once things are moving, this is an amazing feature.
Community
You also get community features. Instead of using Slack or WhatsApp, you can create your community directly on LearnWorlds.
It’s a bit like a mini Slack. You get threads, notifications, spaces, hashtags, formatting options, and more—all inside LearnWorlds. Pretty cool, right?
For example, here’s a space I made called “Testing,” where I’m setting up a poll for my students:
By the way, LearnWorlds isn’t just for web browsers—you can also use it through the mobile app.
With all these features, you might wonder how to keep things organized.
The answer is simple: use the main dashboard. It shows quick stats, notifications, and all the important info in one place.
Pros
- Lots of Features: LearnWorlds has almost every feature you can think of, even more than Teachable and other platforms I’ve tried.
- Great Free Trial: The 30-day free trial is excellent. It’s the full basic plan, so you get to try all the features for 30 days.
- Complete E-Learning Solution: You can build a full e-learning setup with LearnWorlds. It includes a school, a website, landing pages for courses, marketing tools, student support, analytics, and payment options.
- Highly Customizable: The course pages and websites can be customized more than any other platform I’ve seen. But this also makes it a bit harder to use at first.
Cons
Too Many Features for Beginners: While lots of features are great, they can be overwhelming for beginners. If you’re just launching one or two courses for a small community, this might be too much. But if you want to start a full school or expand an existing one, this is a perfect platform.
User Interface Issues: The interface isn’t as smooth as some other platforms. For example, you can’t use a video until it’s processed, and you have to remember to come back and add it. Also, my course was published without me noticing.
Harder to Start: With so many features, getting started is trickier. It took me a while to figure out how to add a video to my course.
Pricing
- Starter: $24/mo
- Pro Trainer: $79/mo
- Learning Center: $249/mo
To Take Home
I really like LearnWorlds for its versatility. It’s perfect for serious creators who want to build full-course academies.
Everything you need is in one place—marketing, communication, content creation, editing, payments, coaching, outreach, and more.
It’s a great tool for anyone starting a serious online course business.
However, it’s not the best choice if you just want to launch one or two courses for a small community.