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We installed the free LifterLMS plugin on a clean WordPress site, built a paid course with a certificate, bought it as a student, approved the payment and finished the course. This review covers what the free core does well, what costs extra, and the details that would catch you out on a real site.

How we tested

• Versions: LifterLMS 10.2.1, the free plugin from WordPress.org, on WordPress 7.1.2 and PHP 8.3, with the default Twenty Twenty-Five theme and no other plugins.
• Setup: a private test install on our own machine. We judged features and workflow, not speed: a local test site says nothing about how fast your hosting will be.
• What we did: built a $49 course with one section, two lessons and a quiz, plus a certificate for finishing it; bought the course as a new student by bank transfer; approved the payment in the admin; then completed the course as the student.
• Independence: LifterLMS didn’t pay for this review or provide a license, and this page has no affiliate links.

Setting up

LifterLMS starts with a five-step setup wizard:

• It creates the pages a course site needs: a course catalog, a membership catalog, a checkout page and a student dashboard.
• It asks for your country and currency, and has a checkbox for offline payments.
• One step offers a discount code if you opt in to sharing usage data with LifterLMS. We declined, and nothing else changed.
• The last screen offers to import a sample course and course templates.

Until you add a payment add-on, the dashboard shows a notice that no payment gateways are enabled. That’s the first hint of how LifterLMS makes its money, which we come back to below.

Building a course

A course is a normal WordPress post in the block editor. LifterLMS pre-fills it with its own blocks: course information, instructors, a pricing table, a progress bar and the syllabus.

Below the editor, a Course Options box covers the rest:

• what visitors who haven’t enrolled see: the default page, custom content, or a redirect;
• enrollment periods, prerequisites and a student cap;
• extra instructors;
• reviews.

Watch out for: in our test the course settings and the Access Plans box, where you set the price, sat in a collapsed “Meta Boxes” panel at the bottom of the editor. If you can’t find where to price a course, open that panel.

Sections and lessons live in a separate, drag-and-drop course builder. On first opening, it created a section with three empty lessons for us. Rename or delete them, because they’re real lessons once you save. Nothing is stored until you click Save changes.

Lessons take written content, a video or audio embed URL, a minimum time on the lesson, a prerequisite lesson and a drip schedule (on a set date, or a number of days after enrollment). There’s also a course-wide drip setting.

The Free Lesson switch lets visitors open a lesson before they buy. Free previews and drip are both paid features in Tutor LMS, so this is one of the free core’s biggest advantages.

The builder also has an Assignment tab. Clicking Create New Assignment opens an “Unlock LifterLMS Assignments” upgrade prompt. Assignments are a paid add-on.

Quizzes

Three question types are free: Multiple Choice, Picture Choice and True or False. You can also add a Content item, which is text between questions rather than a question.

The other eight types are shown greyed out. They need the Advanced Quizzes add-on:

• Fill in the Blank, Short Answer and Long Answer
• Reorder Items and Reorder Pictures
• File Upload, Code and Scale

Advanced Quizzes is also needed for a question bank. The practical gap is written answers: the free version has no question type where students type a response.

The quiz settings cover the basics: a passing percentage (65% by default), limited attempts, a time limit, resuming a quiz, showing correct answers, randomizing questions and disabling retakes.

Students see a short intro with the pass mark and attempts left, then one question per screen. The results page shows the score as a chart, a review of each answer and a menu of previous attempts.

Pricing a course: access plans

LifterLMS prices courses with access plans, and one course can have several. The form offers:

• one-time, monthly, annual, lifetime, free, paid-trial and pre-sale plans;
• a sale price with dates, and an access period that ends after a set time, on a date, or never;
• a page to send buyers to after checkout.

Our test plan was $49, paid once, for lifetime access.

Recurring plans are there in the free version, but you can’t charge a card for them without a payment add-on. The plan form says so itself: the site “is not set up to process payments” until you add one.

Selling courses with the free version

This is the big limitation. The free core has one payment method, Manual, which handles offline payments such as bank transfers, and free orders. Stripe, PayPal and Authorize.Net appear in the settings only as links to paid add-ons. Tutor LMS’s free version, by comparison, includes PayPal.

We renamed the manual method “Bank transfer” and added payment instructions. The checkout is a single page that creates the student’s account and takes the order. By default it requires a full postal address, which is a lot to ask for a digital course. LifterLMS includes a block-based forms editor for changing those fields, but we didn’t test it.

After clicking Buy Now, our student landed on an order page marked Pending Payment, with our payment instructions. A popup told them that “a payment is due for your subscription”, although this was a one-time purchase.

In the admin, changing the order status to Completed enrolled the student straight away.

Watch out for: marking the order Completed doesn’t record any money. Afterwards, the sales report showed one new sale, $0.00 of revenue and no transactions.

The order screen has a separate Record a Manual Payment button, where you enter the amount, source and a reference. Once we recorded the $49, the payment appeared as a transaction with Refund and Resend Receipt buttons, and the sales report showed $49.00. If you take bank transfers, record each payment rather than just changing the status.

Certificates and engagements

Certificates are part of the free core, and they work well:

• Templates: you design them in the block editor, with merge codes for the student’s name, the date and the site name.
• Page settings: paper size, orientation, margins and background.
• Engagements are the automation rules that award them. You pick a trigger, such as completing a course or lesson, passing or failing a quiz, enrolling or buying, and an action: award a certificate, award an achievement badge or send an email, optionally after a delay.

When our student passed the final quiz, the certificate was awarded immediately. Its page has Print and Download buttons, and an option to share it.

Watch out for: the certificate said “Presented to lab-student”, our student’s username. The checkout asked for a first and last name, but the default template prints the display name, which WordPress had set to the username. Change the merge code in your template before your first student finishes.

What students see

By default, lessons use your theme’s normal post layout. In Twenty Twenty-Five that meant an author line, a comments form and “More posts” under the lesson, so it looked more like a blog than a course. Popups confirm progress: after each lesson, students see one with a progress bar.

LifterLMS has a better option built in. Focus Mode, under the course settings, shows lessons in a distraction-free layout with the syllabus in a sidebar and a progress bar at the top (the screenshot at the top of this review). It’s free but switched off by default, so turn it on. In our test it showed the Take Quiz button twice, once in the lesson and again in a bar below it, which is untidy but harmless.

Finishing the course triggered five popups at once: quiz passed, certificate earned, course, section and lesson completed. It’s a lot, but every popup and email can be edited in the notification settings, or turned off by removing students from its subscribers.

The student dashboard has tabs for courses, grades, memberships, achievements, certificates, favorites, notifications, account details, vouchers and order history. It’s thorough, but in Twenty Twenty-Five it was squeezed into the theme’s narrow text column, and so was the checkout. Use a full-width page for the dashboard and checkout, or a theme that styles LifterLMS. Our education themes guide lists some.

Reports and admin tools

The free core includes reporting for students, courses, memberships, quizzes, sales and enrollments, with an export button. Each course has a Student Management box with every enrollment, progress, grade and last lesson, and a form to enroll students by hand. Tutor LMS keeps manual enrollment and its reports for Pro.

The notification settings list sixteen popups and emails, from a welcome email and purchase receipts to quiz results and payment reminders.

Free vs paid at a glance

Feature	Free core	Paid
Course builder, lessons, video and audio embeds	Yes	Yes
Free preview lessons, drip, prerequisites	Yes	Yes
Question types	3 basic types	11, plus a question bank (Advanced Quizzes)
Certificates, achievements, automated emails	Yes	Yes
Memberships, coupons, vouchers	Yes	Yes
Manual and offline payments	Yes	Yes
Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.Net, WooCommerce	No	Yes (add-ons, or Earth Bundle and up)
Assignments	No	Yes (add-on, or Infinity Bundle)
Groups, private areas, social learning, advanced videos	No	Yes (Infinity Bundle)
Reports, manual enrollment, Focus Mode	Yes	Yes

We didn’t build a membership in this test, so we haven’t judged how well memberships work. They are in the free core.

Pricing

LifterLMS sells add-ons one at a time or in three yearly bundles. These prices are from lifterlms.com on October 4, 2026, in US dollars. The site discounts the first year by half and says renewals are at full price.

Bundle	Sites	First year	Each year after	What it adds
Earth	1	$199	$398	Stripe, PayPal, WooCommerce, Authorize.Net, cart abandonment, name your price
Universe	5	$299	$598	Earth, plus email marketing and form integrations and the Sky Pilot theme
Infinity	Unlimited	$799	$1,598	Universe, plus 15 advanced add-ons, including Assignments, Advanced Quizzes and Groups

Single add-ons are sold too. On the same day, the product pages listed Stripe at $149 a year, and Assignments and Advanced Quizzes at $299 a year each. Every purchase has a 30-day money-back guarantee, a lifetime Infinity license is available, and a $1 sandbox lets you try every add-on for 30 days.

The free core is generous, but the paid route isn’t cheap:

• Card payments only: the cheapest option is Stripe at $149 a year.
• Card payments plus assignments and better quizzes: either about $750 a year in single add-ons, or the Infinity Bundle at $1,598 a year after the first year.
• For comparison: Tutor LMS Pro includes its payment gateways, assignments and certificates in one plan from $199 a year.

Who should use LifterLMS?

Best for: creators who want certificates, drip schedules, free preview lessons and memberships without paying for a license, and who can take payment offline at first (bank transfers, invoices or in-person sales). It also suits anyone who wants one plugin to grow with, adding paid features only when they become worth it.

Look elsewhere if you need card payments from day one and want to keep yearly costs low. Tutor LMS includes PayPal for free, and Tutor LMS Pro’s single plan covers Stripe as well; see our hands-on Tutor LMS review. If you’d rather pay for one complete plugin, look at LearnDash. Our WordPress LMS plugins comparison covers all of them.

Verdict

Of the LMS plugins we’ve tested so far, LifterLMS has the most complete free core. Free preview lessons, drip, prerequisites, certificates, automated emails, reports and manual enrollment all work without paying, and those are the features other plugins keep for their paid plans.

What it doesn’t do for free is take money online. For a business selling to the public, that means a payment add-on such as Stripe at $149 a year, and the full set of add-ons costs $1,598 a year from the second year.

Before launch, do three things:

• turn on Focus Mode;
• fix the certificate name;
• record manual payments properly.

With those done, the free version is a solid base for a course site.

FAQ

Is LifterLMS free?

Yes. The core plugin is free on WordPress.org, with unlimited courses, memberships and students. Add-ons are sold separately or in bundles; Stripe on its own is $149 a year.

Can the free version take Stripe or PayPal payments?

No. In our test the free core had only the Manual method for offline payments. Stripe, PayPal and Authorize.Net are paid add-ons.

Does the free version issue certificates?

Yes. We built a certificate template and an engagement in the free core, and the certificate was awarded automatically when our student finished the course.

LifterLMS or Tutor LMS: which free version is better?

LifterLMS if you want certificates, drip, free previews and memberships without paying. Tutor LMS if you want to take PayPal payments for free and have a more polished student area out of the box.

We installed the free version of Tutor LMS on a clean WordPress site, built a paid course, bought it as a student, approved the payment and finished the course. This review is what we found: what the free plugin does well, what is locked behind Pro, and the small things that would trip you up on a real site.

How we tested

• Versions: Tutor LMS 4.1.0, the free plugin from WordPress.org, on WordPress 7.1.2 and PHP 8.3, with the default Twenty Twenty-Five theme and no other plugins.
• Setup: a private test install on our own machine. We judged features and workflow, not speed: a local test site says nothing about how fast your hosting will be.
• What we did: built a $49 course with one topic, two lessons and a quiz; registered as a student; paid by bank transfer; marked the order as paid in the admin; then took the quiz and completed the course as the student.
• Independence: Themeum didn’t pay for this review or provide a license, and this page has no affiliate links.

Building a course

Tutor’s course builder is a full-screen editor with three steps: Basics, Curriculum and Additional. The Basics step puts everything a sales page needs on one screen: title, description, difficulty level, a featured image, an intro video (uploaded or from a URL), categories, tags and the price. Paid courses get a regular price and an optional sale price.

The Curriculum step is where Tutor shines. You add topics, then lessons and quizzes inside each topic, and drag them into order. Each topic, lesson and quiz is saved as soon as you finish it, with a confirmation message.

The crowns in that screenshot are a theme you’ll see throughout the free version. Interactive Quiz, Assignment and Content Bank are Pro features: they’re shown, but locked.

Lessons take written content, a video by upload or URL, a playback time and downloadable exercise files. Two options in the lesson editor are Pro-only: H5P content, and Lesson Preview, which lets visitors try a lesson before they buy. Free previews are one of the best ways to sell a course, so this is a notable gap.

Watch out for: in our test, when we added a second lesson straight after the first, the form opened with the first lesson’s name and text still filled in. It may be a one-off, but check each field before you save.

The third step, Additional, holds the “What will I learn”, target audience, duration, materials and requirements fields that appear on the course page. Everything else on that screen (certificates, prerequisites, course attachments and live classes) is Pro. The small sparkle icons next to the title and description open an upgrade prompt for Tutor’s AI Studio, which is also Pro and, according to Tutor’s pricing page, needs your own OpenAI API key.

Quizzes

The free version includes four question types: True/False, Multiple Choice, Open Ended/Essay and Fill in the Blanks. Short Answer and all eight interactive types (Matching, Image Answering, Ordering, Image Marking, Range, Pin, Graph and Puzzle) are Pro, as is reusing questions from a content bank.

The quiz settings are generous for a free plugin. You can randomize the question order, allow multiple attempts, show a random set of questions from a larger pool, set a passing grade (80% by default), add a time limit, show one question per page or all at once, and reveal the answers after submission.

Two defaults are worth changing:

• Answer Required is off. Our first attempt was submitted with no answer selected, and Tutor accepted it as a failed attempt marked “No Questions Answered”. Switch Answer Required on for questions that matter.
• Multiple attempts are off. After that failed attempt there was no retake button. As the admin, we had to delete the attempt under Quiz Attempts before the student could try again.

Students get a clear results page with their score, the pass mark, the time taken and a review of each answer.

Selling courses with the free version

Tutor has its own shop system, so you don’t need WooCommerce to sell courses. The free version creates cart and checkout pages and adds Orders and Coupons to the admin menu.

The limitation is payments. Out of the box, the free version offers PayPal and manual payments such as bank transfer. Tutor’s documentation lists many more gateways, including Stripe, Paddle, Mollie, Razorpay and Paystack, but in the free plugin the “Add New Gateway” button is locked to Pro. If you want to take card payments through Stripe, budget for Pro.

The checkout works, but it’s heavy for a digital product. Every billing field except state is required, including a phone number and a street address, and the free version has no setting to remove them. The only checkout options are a coupon field and a “Buy Now” button that skips the cart.

Manual payments are handled from the order screen. Our bank-transfer order arrived as Unpaid and Incomplete. Clicking Mark as paid enrolled the student straight away, and added a Refund button and an entry in the order’s activity log.

Watch out for: while the order was unpaid, the course page showed our student the Add to Cart button again, with nothing to say their payment was pending. If you accept bank transfers, say in the payment instructions how long approval takes.

What students see

Tutor 4 has a redesigned learning area. Lessons sit in a sidebar with a progress bar and a label for each item (Reading or Quiz), and students move through the course with Mark as Complete and Next. Quizzes open in a focused screen without the sidebar. In our test, the student pages used a dark design.

When the student finishes the course, Tutor asks for a review. In our test the rating was preset to “Poor” (one star), and the review text was required. A student who clicks through quickly could leave a one-star review by accident, so keep an eye on your first ratings.

The student dashboard shows enrolled, active and completed courses and time spent. Our test student spent a few minutes in the course, but the dashboard showed “1 h+”, which matches the duration we set for the course rather than the time actually spent.

Free vs Pro at a glance

Feature	Free	Pro
Course builder, lessons, video, exercise files	Yes	Yes
Question types	4 basic types	All 13 types, plus a question bank
Quiz grading, attempts, time limits, question pools	Yes	Yes
Cart, checkout, orders, coupons	Yes	Yes
PayPal and manual payments	Yes	Yes
Stripe and other payment gateways	No	Yes
Free preview lessons	No	Yes
Content drip	No	Yes
Certificates	No	Yes
Assignments	No	Yes
Manual enrollment	No	Yes
Automated emails, notifications, reports, gradebook	No	Yes
Zoom, Google Meet and Google Classroom	No	Yes
Course bundles, subscriptions, prerequisites	No	Yes
AI Studio	No	Yes, with your own OpenAI API key

Pricing

Tutor LMS Pro has three plans, each sold yearly or as a one-time lifetime license. These prices are from tutorlms.com on October 4, 2026 and exclude VAT.

Plan	Sites	Yearly	Lifetime
Individual	1	$199	$499
Business	Up to 10	$399	$999
Agency	Unlimited (yearly), up to 50 (lifetime)	$799	$1,999

Every plan includes all the Pro add-ons and a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you expect to run your course site for more than two and a half years, the lifetime Individual license costs less than renewing the yearly one.

Who should use Tutor LMS?

Best for: course creators who want a modern-looking academy, are happy to take payments through PayPal (or to pay for Pro), and like building courses in a visual editor. With Pro, it’s a strong all-round choice for sites with several instructors.

Look elsewhere if you need certificates without paying: LifterLMS includes them in its free core. If you’d rather have one mature paid plugin, look at LearnDash, and if your shop already runs on WooCommerce, Sensei LMS fits that setup. Our WordPress LMS plugins comparison covers all of them.

Verdict

The free version of Tutor LMS is enough to build and sell a simple course. The builder is quick, the quizzes are flexible, and you can take PayPal or manual payments without any other plugin. It isn’t a complete course business in a box, though: card payments through Stripe, certificates, drip schedules, free previews and automated emails are all Pro, so most serious sellers will end up paying. If that’s your plan, the free version is a good way to test the workflow before you buy.

FAQ

Is Tutor LMS free?

Yes. The core plugin is free on WordPress.org. Tutor LMS Pro, which unlocks the add-ons, starts at $199 a year.

Can the free version take payments with Stripe?

Not in our test. The free version offered PayPal and manual payments; the button to add other gateways, including Stripe, was locked to Pro.

Does the free version issue certificates?

No. Certificates are a Pro add-on.

Do I need WooCommerce to sell courses with Tutor LMS?

No. Tutor has its own cart, checkout and orders, which we used for this review.