MasterStudy LMS Review: What the Free Version Gets You, Tested
Tested hands-on on our own WordPress install. We may earn a commission if you buy through links on this page. It never changes our verdict. How we test
We installed the free MasterStudy LMS plugin on a clean WordPress site, ran its setup wizard, built a three-lesson course with a quiz, took it as three students, then put a price on it and bought it as a fourth. This review covers what the free plugin does well, what’s locked behind Pro, one quiz default to fix before launch, and what the plugin sets and sends that your privacy policy should know about.
The short verdict
- Who it suits: creators who want a modern, app-like course builder and student area for free, and who may later pay a yearly license for Pro features.
- What’s free: a front-end Course Builder, text and video lessons, eight quiz question types, a distraction-free Course Player, and four payment methods (Stripe, PayPal, wire transfer and offline) with an orders screen.
- What isn’t: certificates, content drip, prerequisites, assignments, PDF and audio lessons, Zoom and Google Meet lessons, WooCommerce checkout and instructor payouts all showed as locked Pro features. Pro starts at $149 a year for one site (checked November 6, 2026).
- Change before launch: set a passing grade on every quiz. It’s empty by default, and in our test a 0% score counted as passed.
How we tested
- Versions: MasterStudy LMS 3.7.58, the free plugin from WordPress.org, on WordPress 7.1.4 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: ran the setup wizard; built a course with three text lessons and a single-choice quiz in the Course Builder; took it as one student who passed, one who failed with the default settings and one who failed after we set a passing grade; then set a $49 price, bought it as a fourth student with offline payment and completed the order as the admin. We also logged which pages load files from other websites and which cookies the plugin sets, and read the plugin’s code where the screens didn’t explain something.
- What we didn’t test: Stripe, PayPal or wire-transfer checkout, MasterStudy Pro or any Pro add-on, emails (our test site sends no mail), the student sign-up form, instructor accounts and marketplace mode, the demo course import, the MasterStudy theme, video lessons, mobile layouts and speed.
- Independence: StylemixThemes didn’t pay for this review or provide Pro. There are no MasterStudy affiliate links on this page. We earn a commission if you buy Tutor LMS through our link below; it doesn’t change what we say about either plugin.
Setting up
After activation the dashboard showed three notices: an offer to install the free MasterStudy Templates, a “Get Pro” upgrade banner, and on the settings screen a request to “collect non-sensitive diagnostic data and usage information” with Allow and No Thanks buttons. The admin menu has the usual Courses, Lessons, Quizzes, Questions, Orders and Settings, followed by a block of 29 locked Pro add-ons and an orange “Unlock PRO” button. Expect to scroll past the upsells.
Watch out for: what Allow does. We didn’t click it, but we read the code behind the button: it sends the admin’s email address, display name, language and the server’s IP address to a StylemixThemes mailing-list service. So it’s closer to a newsletter sign-up than anonymous diagnostics. Click No Thanks unless you want that.
The setup wizard (also under Tools › LMS Wizard) has six short steps: individual teacher or marketplace, the course list page and layout, course page tabs, quiz style, and public profiles. Guest checkout was off. There’s no payment step, so payments wait for the settings screen. The course list page is only created if you click “Generate a page” in step two.
MasterStudy created eight pages, including Checkout, User Account, Wishlist, public profile pages for instructors and students, and two extra course list pages for Elementor and Gutenberg. With Twenty Twenty-Five’s default menu, all of them showed up in the site header for visitors. Tidy your menu before launch, and decide which of the course list pages you’ll use.
Building a course
Add New Course opens MasterStudy’s own Course Builder, a full-screen app on the front end of the site rather than the WordPress editor. A new course needs a name and a category; with no categories yet, we had to add one in wp-admin first. Course addresses sit under the course list page, so ours lived at /courses-page/spreadsheet-basics-for-small-teams/, while lessons open in the Course Player at addresses ending in their ID number.
The Curriculum tab’s Add a lesson button opens a picker. In the free plugin, three types are open: Text lesson, Video lesson and Quiz. PDF, Audio, Stream, Zoom and Google Meet lessons and Assignment all carry a lock. That differs from the plugin’s WordPress.org description, whose list of free features mentions six lesson types, including audio and PDF.
A text lesson has a title, an optional duration, a “Lesson preview” switch for a free sample, a short description, the lesson content (the builder won’t save a lesson without it) and file attachments. Like LearnPress, MasterStudy published our lessons as soon as we created them, while the course was still a draft.
Course settings are spread over tabs. A few things we noticed:
- Access: a time limit is available and off by default, so access doesn’t expire unless you set it.
- Certificate: the tab says “Certificate Builder addon is locked!”, so certificates are Pro. The WordPress.org description lists a certificate builder among the free features; in our free install it wasn’t there.
- Drip and Prerequisites: both locked.
- Current students and Course Views: two number fields the admin can edit on the course. We left them at 0. The real student count also appears on the course page (“3 Students enrolled” after our test).
Quizzes
All eight question types were open in the free plugin: single choice, multiple choice, true-false, matching, image matching, keywords, fill in the gap and ordering. Questions saved without a Save click in our test, and the first answer you add is marked correct until you change it.
The quiz defaults: no time limit, questions and answers in a fixed order, correct answers hidden after submitting, unlimited attempts, no retake after passing, and an empty “Passing grade (%)” field.
Watch out for: that empty passing grade. Our second student chose a wrong answer and saw a green “0%” result. MasterStudy recorded the quiz as passed, counted it toward course progress (25%, with no lesson done) and offered no retake. With a passing grade of 80%, our third student’s wrong answer was recorded as failed, the result showed “Unlimited attempts remaining” and a Retake button, and course progress stayed at 0. Set a passing grade on every quiz before students take it: it doesn’t fix results already recorded.
Grading was instant: our first student got “100%, 1 out of 1 questions answered correctly” and a “You have successfully completed the course” summary straight away. Quizzes weren’t locked behind the lessons by default: the same student opened the quiz before reading any lesson.
What students see
On the course page, visitors see the curriculum, the instructor, the lesson and quiz counts, and an Enroll Course button (Get Course with the price once it’s paid). A visitor who clicked it got a sign-in box with a “Sign Up” link, even though WordPress’s own “Anyone can register” setting was off; we didn’t test whether that sign-up form works.
Enrolled students go straight into the Course Player: a full-screen view with the curriculum in a side panel, a light and dark mode switch, a Discussions panel for questions, and a Complete & Next button that moves through the course. Submitting a quiz asks for confirmation first. When our first student finished, the course page showed “Course complete” with the score, and the lessons stayed open to them, unlike LearnPress, which locked our finished student out by default.
The student dashboard at /user-account/ lists enrolled courses (all, completed, in progress, failed), quizzes, messages, a wishlist and orders.
Selling with the free plugin
MasterStudy’s own checkout is in the free plugin. Under Settings › Ecommerce › Payment Methods there are four methods: Stripe, PayPal, Wire Transfer and Offline Payment, all switched off at first. Mollie, Paystack and WooCommerce checkout are marked Pro, and so are taxes and automatic instructor payouts. The currency fields were also empty, though our prices still showed in dollars.
We switched on Offline Payment and set the course to a $49 one-time purchase. Our fourth student clicked Get Course (it became “Go to cart”), went to Checkout, chose Offline Payment and clicked Pay $49. The thank-you page showed the order with the status Pending, and the course stayed locked: the lessons asked them to purchase it.
In MasterStudy › Orders the order waited as Pending, with filters for status, coupon and date. When we set it to Completed and saved, as you would once the money arrives, the student’s button changed to Start Course. So offline payment works in the free plugin, but you complete each order by hand. Stripe and PayPal are there to take payments online instead, but we didn’t test them. Our payments guide explains the options.
Privacy: a long-lived cookie on course pages
On the eight pages we checked, as a visitor and as a student, we found no requests to Google Fonts or any other outside server from MasterStudy itself. The only outside host was Gravatar, for the instructor’s profile picture on the course list and course pages and for the student’s own picture on their account page.
Watch out for: MasterStudy set a cookie named stm_lms_courses_watched on every course page, for every visitor, signed in or not. It lists the courses that browser has viewed, it’s used to count course views, and it lasts 900 days. We didn’t see it on the home page or ordinary pages, and we found no setting to switch it off. If your privacy policy says you set no cookies, or you ask for consent first, this one counts. A second cookie, set by the page’s JavaScript, only remembers a menu display preference.
Free vs Pro at a glance
We tested the free column. The Pro column is what the free plugin’s screens marked as Pro or locked in our test.
| Feature | Free plugin | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Course Builder | Yes | Yes, plus AI course creation |
| Text and video lessons | Yes | Yes |
| PDF, audio, live lessons | No | Yes |
| Quiz question types | 8 | 8, plus question media |
| Stripe, PayPal, offline | Yes (offline tested) | Yes |
| WooCommerce checkout | No | Yes |
| Subscriptions | No | Yes |
| Certificates | No | Yes |
| Content drip | No | Yes |
| Prerequisites | No | Yes |
| Assignments | No | Yes |
| Instructor payouts | No | Yes |
Pricing
MasterStudy Pro is a yearly license. These prices are from StylemixThemes’s pricing page, checked November 6, 2026. Each paid plan includes a year of updates and support, and the page offers a 14-day money-back guarantee. It also has a lifetime option, which we didn’t price.
| Plan | Sites | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Any | $0 |
| Single site | 1 | $149 |
| 10 sites | 10 | $299 |
| Unlimited | Unlimited | $599 |
For one site, $149 a year is less than Tutor LMS Pro ($199 a year on October 4, 2026) and Sensei Pro ($179 a year on October 20, 2026). LearnPress works differently: its add-ons are one-off payments with a year of updates, from $39 for Stripe or certificates, or $299 for the Pro Bundle (checked November 3, 2026), so it can cost less in year one if you only need one or two features.
Who should use MasterStudy LMS?
Best for: solo teachers and small academies who like a polished, app-style course builder and Course Player, want card payments without an add-on, and don’t need certificates or drip at first. It’s also the natural pick if you’ve bought the MasterStudy theme.
Look elsewhere if you need certificates for free: LifterLMS includes them in its free core, and so does Sensei LMS. If you’d rather pay once than every year, LearnPress sells add-ons one by one. Tutor LMS is the closest match in style, with a front-end builder and Pro for certificates and drip. Our WordPress LMS plugins comparison sets them side by side, and our step-by-step guide to selling courses on WordPress covers the whole build.
Verdict
Free MasterStudy LMS gets a lot right: the Course Builder and Course Player feel modern, eight question types are free, and its own checkout takes Stripe, PayPal and offline payments without an add-on. The catches are the empty passing grade, which let a 0% score pass in our test, a 900-day cookie on course pages, an “Allow” button whose code shares the admin’s email, and a long list of features, certificates included, that need Pro at $149 a year or more. Set a passing grade on every quiz, click No Thanks, and check the Pro list against what your course really needs.
FAQ
Is MasterStudy LMS free?
Yes. The core plugin is free on WordPress.org. MasterStudy Pro costs $149 a year for one site, $299 for 10 sites and $599 for unlimited sites (checked November 6, 2026).
Can I sell courses with the free version of MasterStudy?
Yes. The free plugin has its own checkout with Stripe, PayPal, wire transfer and offline payment, all off until you switch them on. We sold a $49 course with offline payment and completed the order by hand; we didn’t test Stripe or PayPal.
Does MasterStudy LMS include certificates?
Not in the free plugin. In our test the course’s Certificate tab said the Certificate Builder add-on is locked, so certificates need Pro.
Why did a student pass a quiz with 0%?
The quiz’s passing grade is empty by default. In our test, a 0% result was recorded as passed until we set a passing grade (we used 80%). Set one on every quiz.
Does MasterStudy set cookies for visitors?
Yes. In our test it set a stm_lms_courses_watched cookie, lasting 900 days, on every course page for every visitor, to count course views.
