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tags: JLU
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# E-learning Platforms

There is a huge range of e-learning platforms out there with varying costs and functionality.

The ability to create meaningful teaching opportunities with a range of media, quiz styles and team support is a hard balance to find.

EDD London are another development partner of Just Like Us and have worked with several platforms over the years with mixed levels of positive experience.

They have recommended the following two as good examples of how e-learning platforms can be done right, with nice easy integration and config.

[Thinkific](https://www.thinkific.com/) has a wide range of course creation options and provides a hosted area for your provision. It has tonnes of useful integrations with other apps such as Wordpress, Typeform, Salesforce.

As usual features rise with pricing, and isn't cheap at 99USD per month for the 'pro' tier (less for annual subs). It does have a free tier to get started, which is always good.

[LearnDash](https://www.learndash.com/) is a premium wordpress plugin that allows you to build and host courses. It isn't quite as feature rich as Thinkific (although there are a number of official and unofficial add-ons that can improve functionality), and requires Wordpress of course, but if you can work with that it possibly has all you need.

Pricing for the 'plus' package is 229USD per year. There's no free option to check it out, but there is a 30 day refund policy and some decent demo content. If you've got a wordpress and you want decent plug-and-play e-learning this is a good one.

## Using these platforms

There are marked differences in the experience of setup and creating courses in these two, as well as key differences in their provision for learning. These are some key points you could consider if planning to use either.

* Thinkific is much easier to set up, given that it requires no specific software or platform to run, whereas LearnDash requires a Wordpress instance just to get started.
* Thinkific has more user-friendly and simple course creation and management area to use, as well as a lot more out-the-box analytics features.
* LearnDash requires a bit more tinkering to set up within the Wordpress environment, and extra plugins to get more features. The Wordpress CMS is also where you will add course content.
* With LearnDash You also have to set up the course page, homepage etc yourself as if they were Wordpress static pages. Although useful blocks are provided for key features (profile details, course details etc) We would suggest this is better for a developer to do unless you are quite confident with Wordpress yourself.
* Learndash has more question types when creating quizzes as part of your course - matching and sorting, fill the blank and free text questions are added in LearnDash as well as the single choice or multiple choice questions that Thinkific is limited to. Usability testing has suggested that the extra question features of LearnDash may make a more efficient and wholesome learning system.
* LearnDash is significantly cheaper than Thinkific, but even to test we had to purchase a license, and to make even a prototype live will likely cost money unless you have an existing host environment you can use (You can however create a local WP enviroment for free, but this doesn't help so much with testing).
* Thinkific gives you one free course straight away, although some features are limited to paid tiers.
* From usability testing the look and features of the platforms provided while doing a course comes down to personal preference. Some preferred the LearnDash environment, and others Thinkific.
* Thinkific provides SSO and has a less demanding signup flow (LearnDash sends an email where you confirm and then add password which was seen as a little tricky in testing).