AccessAlly vs. LearnDash: a comparison

Our fans tell us AccessAlly allows them to earn more from their online courses and membership sites. We think you’ll love AccessAlly’s power features, along with its sophisticated interface.

If you’re curious to see how AccessAlly really stacks up to LearnDash, read on!

LearnDash uses a proprietary Custom Post Type that allows you to designate modules and lessons. If you cancel your LearnDash license, your content isn’t usable anymore.

When you use AccessAlly’s Offerings Wizard, you get the best of both worlds: easy-to-use templates and ultimate customization options.

When you create your course, membership, or even team or affiliate centers, the wizard walks you through it step-by-step.

Your pages, tags, and menus will be created automatically. Then you can edit and customize until your hearts’ content.

You’ll have access to a powerful learning management system (LMS) features that take your courses to the next level. Use quizzes, tests, progress tracking, video bookmarking, and more.

All of this, combined with the integration to your CRM (like ActiveCampaign or Keap, among others), allows you to create a one-of-a-kind experience for each and every user. You’ll blow them away!

LearnDash has no CRM integration; it sends transaction emails from within the LMS itself, but you’ll need another CRM for things like newsletters and other email communications.

With LearnDash, focuses on the Learning Management System (LMS) functionality at the detriment of the big picture of what’s needed for running online courses on WordPress.

That means you’ll need to purchase and integrate additional plugins to handle:

• payments and payment administration
• membership levels to run cohesive membership sites
• integration with your CRM for marketing automation
• grades and report cards 
• group management
• upsells and cross-sells
• affiliates
• gamification
• communities

and more. In fact, as of this writing, their integrations page lists more than 30 plugins you can add — some for free, and some for a fee — to extend LearnDash’s capabilities. 

It’s not unheard of for LearnDash users to have 6 or more different plugins to make sure everything works together to create a functional learning experience. And the more plugins you have to manage, the more opportunities there are for things to break. 

With AccessAlly, you sign up for one tool that seamlessly handles everything from payments, course creation, LMS functionality, deep integrations, group sales, and member management.

If you want to offer “bulk licenses” or the ability to have umbrella parent/child accounts, where a group leader can assign sub-accounts, say for a corporate training team…

You can do it with both LearnDash and AccessAlly.

However, with LearnDash you’ll need to purchase an additional plugin that is developed by another company. With AccessAlly, you can offer Team management without any additional add-ons, it comes standard.

And AccessAlly allows you to design and customize the “member management” dashboard to your liking. You can have multiple team managers, and even show student progress to the different adminsitrators.

A team leader can see student progress and even quiz results.

AccessAlly also makes it easy for students to upload homework attachments, like PDFs, Word documents, or other files for the administrator.

LearnDash is a strictly learning platform, whereas AccessAlly started off as way to manage access to online courses… and quickly developed into a full fledged membership plugin for WordPress.

That means you can create beautiful searchable member directories, sorted by your marketing automation platform tags. This allows members to opt in or out of your member directory, and even to purchase a premium listing.

You decide what to include in your public or private member directory — like a biography, gamification points earned, and even course progress.

Plus, with AccessAlly’s profile editing functionality, a member can update their name, email, address, and password… or any other custom field inside of your marketing automation platform.

LearnDash does not offer a member directory feature.

In order to understand how the objective list inside LearnDash works, it’s important to understand their 3-tiered course format:

Courses – The Main Page/dashboard of a course.
Lessons – Each course is subdivided into a series of lessons. For progress tracking purposes, each lesson is its own objective.
Topics – Each lesson can also be divided into many different topics.

Once you’ve created your course through the proper categories of course, lesson, and topic, you can add the objective list to a page with a shortcode.

This will create a standard, styled table that will include an element for each of the lessons in your course.

In order to complete objectives within a LearnDash course, the user must go to each of the course pages (with an optional “minimum time” spent on that page), then click the “complete” button in order to be taken to the next lesson.

Essentially it works the same as the AccessAlly Pro checklist, although there is less flexibility in what you can include for components.

The AccessAlly object checklist can include any element that’s a part of your course: video, text, quiz, or homework submission.

The LMS settings of AccessAlly can be found at the bottom of any WordPress post or page, making it easy to add LMS features to any bit of content you’re creating.

Within the Objective setup, you decide what is included on your checklist.

Once you’ve added the completed objective list to the page (via a shortcode), the user is then in control of checking off the text objectives as he or she makes their way through the course.

Any video or quiz objectives will auto-complete after the activity is completed.

The strength of the AccessAlly objective list is that you can include a custom checklist on any page, carefully tailoring the learning experience to fit the students’ needs.

Plus, AccessAlly allows you to create video checklists (with YouTube, Wistia, and Vimeo) that autoplay videos based on the user’s selection.

• You want everything to work seamlessly from one end to the other (payments, courses, and memberships) with as few plugins as possible
• You’re looking to create an amazing customer experience, that’s functional, profitable, and helps you stand out in the marketplace
• You understand the power of your marketing automation platform, and having it integrated with your LMS

• You enjoy duct-taping solutions together, and using a lot of different plugins to achieve your goals
• You absolutely need SCORM or Tin-Can LMS integration
• You’re not picky about the look-and-feel of your course
• You don’t need deep CRM integration to create more personalized customer experiences, but you do need a lot of quizzing options