Marg LearnWorlds

The platform is feature-rich, although they have cut corners on implementation both in terms of quality and flexibility. I like the website authoring tools that let you customize your pages and look & feel, but there are some major limitations that make no sense. The selection of lesson activity types is impressive, though it's missing some that should be obvious. It seems like they just wanted to have a LOT of features, but they skimped on flexibility, usability and quality.

Quality is terrible. It randomly deletes lesson activities that we spent hundreds of hours creating, there's no way to back up or copy to save your work, so it's just gone. Lessons will get into a state where you can't make any changes to them and you have to contact support to fix them (which takes 3-5 days). If you are working to deadlines, or if you don't want to have to constantly re-create your work, this is not the platform for you.

Since we launched the platform has twice deleted our content without warning and then locked us out of making changes. Both times we were up against deadlines with affiliate partners and we had marketing queued up. This destroyed our credibility with our partners and led to potentially tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Finally, even at the highest plan level ($249/month) they do not offer phone support, and their email support response times are terrible. It takes 2 days to get a response, and then they play the "did you try this" game with you, randomly throwing out things to try that have no chance of actually working, and wasting 2 days each time you have to tell them "no, that didn't work."

Stay away from this platform. Although at first glance, it seems to have a wide range of features, when you dive into it, you notice two things immediately:

(1) They have "skimped" on the features by not including obvious settings that would make the features actually useful

For example, you can create coupons to offer discounts, but you can never edit a coupon after you create it. So, if you want to extend the expiration date, or increase the usage limit, you're completely out of luck.

Another example, they have a WYSIWYG web page editor with lots of content templates, but you can't change the layout of any of the templates. So, if you want to add an extra paragraph of text below an image or a button, you can't just add a text box.

Yet another example: often you may have lesson activities that are similar, so it would be really fast to just duplicate one and make some changes. Unfortunately LearnWorlds does not support copying/duplicating much at all, including course content, coupons, discounts, subscriptions, etc. where it would be extremely useful and time-saving to do so.

(2) They have skimped on quality. The system has failed twice on us in the lead up to launch deadlines that we had coordinated with business partners. We had marketing lined up and ready to go, and at the last minute the LearnWorlds platform randomly deleted many of our lesson activities, randomly changed the order of activities within lessons and then refused to allow us to change the order back or add back the content. Clicking "Save" literally did nothing at all. What's worse, support takes days to respond, and wastes your time with preliminary questions (all over extended email back-and-forth cycles because they don't offer phone support).

For the price they charge compared to other online learning platforms, you would expect their software quality and support to be industry leading. Instead, it will destroy your business and your brand.

Create a business selling online professional development courses for educators.

If the platform actually worked, our marketing is actually generating good leads and customers. However, it is hard to translate that into revenue when the platform is constantly buggy and content is being randomly deleted.