We Do a Full Review of Creator LMS: Is It the Right Tool for a Membership Website?
Full Review of Creator LMS: Discover if this platform fits your needs. Unbiased insights on features, value & performance, plus we look at its main competitors.
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 151. In this episode, we’re going to do a full review of Creator LMS, a new, exciting learning management system for creators. Additionally, we’ll review some of the competitors in the area. I’ve got my ever-fantastic co-host with me, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:00:46.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Annen. I own an agency called Manana Nomas, and we work directly with the WP Tonic team.
[00:00:55.140] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t know where the day’s going. I’ll be dealing with all sorts of power, outreaches, fires, all sorts of stuff, which I’ve been sharing with Kurt, haven’t I? But there we go. Let’s go into it. But we need a quick message from one of our major sponsors first. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out that we have some fantastic deals from our sponsors. Additionally, we have a course that Kirk has completed. I think I’ll do that in the second half, actually, I’ll tell you about that. So we’ve actually got some great, I don’t know. Let’s do this again. I’m all over the place. I’m sorry. Shall we start from the beginning? So three…
[00:01:51.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
It takes us a forest fire to get Jonathan off his game.
[00:01:54.520] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Three, two, one. Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 151. In this episode, we’re going to be doing a review of Creator LMS, a new LMS in the WordPress space. We’re pretty excited about it. Plus, we’ll be looking at some of its leading competitors. It should be a great show. Before we begin, I want to introduce my co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:29.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Annen. I own an agency called Manana Nomas. We’re also working with a great team over at WP Tonic.
[00:02:40.040] – Jonathan Denwood
You had to remember that, did you? But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show. I got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Also, I want to point out that we’ve got some fantastic offers from the sponsors. Plus, we’ve got a course done by Kirk that shows you how to build a membership or community website from beginning to end on WordPress. You get it at a tremendously discounted price, plus a load of other free goodies. Where do you get all this? Go to Wp-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. So, let’s go straight into it, Kirek. If someone were asking you about Creator LMS, how would you start the conversation, Kirek?
[00:03:39.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
As with most consultative conversations, it comes down to Questions, answers, and determining the customer’s or client’s use case. Because many people will hear something, and it anchors them. It becomes an anchor piece of data, and they say, “Oh, so I need to use this,” and they have it in their head. But when you explore the use case, you may find they are better suited to a separate tool. Creator LMS, to me, is a coach, an author, someone who’s getting started in courses. It has many features, but it won’t bankrupt you to use it. It’s a powerful platform. It also does some things that I wasn’t expecting. I’m sure we’ll go through it in the review.
[00:04:30.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, right. So I think it’s in the title. Would you say that it’s… I wouldn’t know it’s lightweight, but it’s not fully featured, and it’s not intended to be, as it’s aimed at the creator market looking for a flexible, slightly lighter-weight learning management system. Or that’s how I see it, but I’m not sure I’m right.
[00:04:57.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, see, that’s the dichotomy of trying to talk about these platforms in terms of lightness or features. I think anyone who’s listened to this show before, Jonathan, is going to recognize I’m a fan of Lifter LMS, and I know you are, too. But Lifter is, to me, like a bridge that could be quasi-professional, not even quasi-professional. I can leverage my skill set to make a Lifter LMS site for a university or a site for corporate eLearning at a very high level. Creator LMS also has some strong features, but it’s not the platform I would choose for a deep corporate eLearning platform or for a university or similar institution. It’s very much more for the creator, for the independent learning professional.
[00:05:58.740] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve four main features: course builder, AL, course outline generator, interactive quizzes, and Zoom integration. What are some of the other lead main features I should have added?
[00:06:14.300] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, And this was the exciting moment for me with Creator LMS. So you and I, we both got a sneak peek right before they had released Creator LMS just a couple of months ago. And it was cool to see something like, Hey, here’s a new player in the field. It does some cool things. Yeah, I can put in my course. It has quizzes built into it, has certificates built into it. The certificates actually come with really nice templates. So out of the shoot, we’re seeing some nice things for the creators to use to build their eLearning platform. But the thing that really set it apart for me happened last week or 10 days ago, Jonathan. That’s when I saw the announcement for events. So to me, it’s one thing to be able to integrate Zoom into your WordPress website. We’ve done Zoom integrations for some of our clients in the past, and you can integrate Zoom with WordPress. But Creator LMS has done a really intuitive really great job of integrating Zoom, but building events that display in a list-like event calendar, almost like the event calendar. And that plays in the community portal that the system builds.
[00:07:32.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
And so, again, we don’t really want to talk about lightness or separation of features that way to make it seem like it’s entry level. This thing comes, it does the courses, but it also incorporates a full discussion, almost like a fluent community interface that allows you to do live events through Zoom on a calendar inside the community portal. It’s pretty It’s a cool deal.
[00:08:01.640] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s not trying to offer everything like fluent community, but it’s doing enough that would appeal to influence somebody that wants to build an email list in their own private community off of, let’s say, TikTok or YouTube. Am I on the right track?
[00:08:21.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
I would say so, yeah. It’s interesting to me because there’s just certain things that strike you as odd. There’s a drop down menu when you are in there and it says Integrations. So I got excited. I clicked Integrations, says, You don’t have any integrations. Do you want to do an integration? I’m like, Yeah, what is it? Show me what you got here. And then it says, Well, you don’t have any CRMs connected? Use WP Fusion to connect a CRM. Well, to you and I, that’s not really a platform specific feature. That’s just saying you can connect this thing with Fluent CRM. I mean, with help me, not with fluency, well, with Fluent CRM, but using WP Fusion. That’s what I meant, WP Fusion. So it’s not like it has a one to one integration with these tools. You have to use WP Fusion-Or Webhooks. Or webhooks to initiate these things. So, yeah, when you get into, would this be the platform to build my mail list? What’s interesting is it’s run by the same company that makes WP Funnels and Mailment. So if I were to incorporate WP Funnel as my lead magnet, my lead magnet leads to my courses, enrolling in my courses, add you to my a Mailman listing, and that Mailment listing sends out the emails, you’ve got a pretty powerful little package all in one site.
[00:09:51.740] – Jonathan Denwood
You get all that on WP tonic, don’t you? We offer the whole package. I’m going to We also now are going to be offering Creator LMS. On our micro website starter package and on our packages aimed at coaches, we’re going to offer the whole package because I think it’s very suitable because you’re getting that total integration, aren’t you? But plus, you’re getting the freedom of WordPress, aren’t you?
[00:10:22.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, all the ownership, freedom, design. The community portal in creator LMS is a lot like fluent community, as in you click the link and it feels like you went to another website, but you’re within a sublink inside your site. So the design freedom in that space isn’t like you’re building a custom page in your own website. But I think people would need to try it or see it to understand. You’ll see a lot of people using fluent community now. And fluent community doesn’t necessarily feel like you are in a custom page within your website, but it’s a community attached to your website, and it’s working very well. People are very happy with it. I think this will be a very similar result.
[00:11:08.120] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. So let’s go on my little list. How would you rate the course builder and what are some of the key things you notice about it and some of the things that you think people need to know about the course builder?
[00:11:26.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
The course building experience is a linear experience the way they want you to go. That took a little getting used to for me because I’m used to platforms where if I want to go and adjust a lesson, I go to the lesson and make an edit. If I want to go to the course page, I go to the course page, I make an edit. If I want to go to the quiz, I go to the quiz, I make an edit. I’m used to having that access to my content. This particular layout, the way that they have it, it’s like you go to edit the course and you go to this course page, and you can’t You just click on the quiz and go edit it. You have to go through their pages. And so it’s going to be, here’s the course page, here’s the lessons, and you keep going next. So you’re going next to the next thing, next to the next thing, next to the next thing. So if I got through the whole thing and I got to the settings area and I saw something on settings that made me think, oh, I got to put that back on the course page.
[00:12:24.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
You don’t just click on the course page and make an edit. You got to either go out and go the way back in or you got to hit back three, four times to get back to that page. So it’s a very linear development process for the courses. But I can also see people that are new to the course creation arena. This is going to help keep them focused and not missing an element in the development process. So I can see it both ways. I like the freedom to be able to punt and click and do the I like to do, but I can see where other people might actually appreciate the structure.
[00:13:05.460] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, obviously at WP Tonic, we help people. We give some initial training with Lifter so they can get over that blank screen syndrome. But I can see why they’ve done it the way they have done it with creator LMS to avoid trying… Where are all these bits and how do I That’s what they’re trying to avoid with that mythology, I would surmise.
[00:13:35.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Well, and we interviewed Sulton before, but I feel like they were pretty direct on the way that they made it. I think that they’re laying out a process they want the creator to follow. I think in the grand scheme of things, it may cut down on gaps or missing elements in the creator’s process.
[00:14:01.580] – Jonathan Denwood
I would imagine it works perfectly for the type of customer that they’ve built it for. But if you were building a massive internal course for an organization, this linear thing would be a little bit painful. But for their target audience, I think it’s probably spot on.
[00:14:23.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, and that’s part of what my original statement was about. If I was doing an internal corporate training website where sales was not the main motivation, right? It was its course completion and enrollment is the main focus, right? For hundreds or thousands of students with 100 or 200 courses, When I look at projects of that scale, this is not the tool I would pick for a project of that scale. I would probably be in the Lifter LMS category for that. But if I were A self-published author that just came out with a book and wanted to create a course to go along with it and sell it for $1995, I mean, this would be the tool.
[00:15:09.680] – Jonathan Denwood
What about the AI course outline generator? What does that do?
[00:15:14.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
I didn’t play too much with the AI side of it. Fortunately and unfortunately, I have a ton of learning content available, so I just picked one of my courses and started plugging content in to see if it would work. I didn’t play with the AI outline generator much. From what I gathered, it’s a lot like, Hey, ChatGPT, what would you suggest as an outline for a course on how to knit Afghans for your grandmother? And it’s going to give you 12 sections and then probably two or three lessons for each of the sections and then help you blow that out.
[00:15:50.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Interactive quizzes?
[00:15:52.740] – Kurt von Ahnen
Quizzes are great. They call them interactive. I think interactive is just a go-to name in the eLearning space. True/false, multiple choice, multiple, multiple choice, meaning you can have more than one correct answer. All of those work very intuitively. You can add pictures or other media to each question that’s built in there, which is nice, which is really nice. And it’s all in one for building purposes, for editing purposes, it’s all like in one screen. You’re not hunting and pecking and looking for things. It’s right there. They have a central dialog box, and they have the question options off to the side, and you just drag the question over and then add your details. The one that was confusing, and it always is confusing, is the fill in the blank structure. Whenever you have a digital version of fill in the blank, somebody somewhere had to figure out how How do we recognize a blank, and then how do you determine what the correct answer is going to be? One thing that they did well was you have your blank, but then you have a field where you can put in the possible correct answers, separated by commas.
[00:17:19.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
And so what’s very common, especially in the e-learning space, is students will misspell or they’ll put in words that are similar but different. And if you have the forethought to put those words in that space, anything the student types in would be recognized as correct if it matches those options. So that’s a really smart way to go.
[00:17:42.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, a couple of days ago, I did a really brief video about Creators CRM, and I said the Zoom integration was quite impressive, what it is. But what I didn’t make clear, and you pointed out to me, is that you You’ve still got to make an app in Zoom, haven’t you? But they’ve done a good job compared to many of the competitors in the WordPress space in linking Creator CRM to that Zoom app, but you still have to make that Zoom app, haven’t you?
[00:18:21.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Creator LMS tells you specifically what scopes you need when you make your app. I’ll be honest, I’m not as generous as Jonathan on this one. I’ve used the Zoom integration. That’s a free plugin in the WordPress repository. And the creator of that plugin has an installation guide or an installation Wizard, if you will, that really walks you through a detailed version of how to build these apps. And so I have a lot of experience from that. Thank goodness I do. If I didn’t have that previous experience, it could have been exceedingly difficult to figure out what are they even talking about? Because it says these are the required scopes for your app. But let’s be honest, how many people that are going to be in this situation have really built apps for Zoom before, and they’re not going to understand what a scope is. They’re not going to understand how to get through the Zoom’s menu to create those scopes or to acknowledge those scopes or how to save believe those scopes. There’s a little room for improvement on the onboarding in that section. I’m very familiar with the process, so it only took me about 20 minutes and I was connected to Zoom and ready to go.
[00:19:43.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but I think they can improve the documentation a little bit more on that.
[00:19:51.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
Probably a helper video or something would be really good there.
[00:19:56.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it would be. I know somebody that could do a video. When it comes to price, what pricing are we talking about?
[00:20:08.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, that’s the crux for me is when you look at the pricing on the creator LMS page. I mean, $140 a year for a single site license, when it’s going to come with an LMS student reporting certification, the ability to hold live events, a community page. Jonathan, this is a pretty feature pack thing for 140 bucks a year. And then, of course, they have other packages, right? They have a 10 site license, they have a 50 site license. But I think community doesn’t pop in until the business level. And so a lot of the benefits that I’m talking about are in that community level. So I’m not exactly sure, because if I were a startup creator year. And I was like, well, I really like everything Kurt and Jonathan talked about. I want to do the live classes. I want to have community. I want to have content protection. Then you would say, okay, so what do I got to do to get all that? And then I put you in the 439 a year. The growth plan at $2. 39, that has everything but community. So you can still do cohorts, you can do live classes with the Zoom.
[00:21:42.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
You can do a lot, right? You just don’t get the community feature. And to be honest with you, I think, and this is where people are going to have some differing opinions, I think far too many people try to leverage community too early in the process.
[00:22:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, I do.
[00:22:01.510] – Kurt von Ahnen
I don’t think community is really a requirement for a startup. I think it’s something that someone should put in place after they have 50 or 60 students or learners or whatever you want to call them in the website.
[00:22:16.680] – Jonathan Denwood
They got on their pricing table, built-in optimization. Obviously, where it really excites me if you’re going to integrate it with their WP Funnel and mint, I I think you get the full benefit, but obviously that increases the initial investment, but it’s still good value. But do you get some form of optimization with just the creator LMS?
[00:22:45.600] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think that’s just another bullet point to put on the list, to be honest with you, because they do have membership, and membership automates auto-enrollment into courses.
[00:22:56.180] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, that’s what they’re doing by that.
[00:22:57.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think that’s what it’s talking about, but in today’s day and age, that’s an expected.
[00:23:03.820] – Jonathan Denwood
What about the advanced analytics and reports? Do they seem reasonably good?
[00:23:10.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
To be honest, Jonathan, I’d need to have 30, 40 people enrolled and doing stuff before I could see the depth of the reporting. I don’t have an active sample site with active users in it to be able to see that. It looks promising. It looks promising. But I am a little spoiled. Lifter LMS has very good advanced reporting, and so they’re up against some pretty stiff competition in that space.
[00:23:40.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, with the starter, just slightly under 140 You are missing, you’ve mentioned community and content protection, but you also don’t have cohort courses. What does the cohort courses do?
[00:23:58.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
Cohort is the The easiest way I have to say it is a cohort allows you to teach a group of people something at the same time. And most e-learning sites are set up asynchronously, meaning people learn at their own pace. It’s do it yourself learning. So it’s usually not an issue. In fact, in most of my learning projects, cohorts is not leveraged because people are just selling courses one on one thing. When you sell to an association or a group or maybe a nonprofit that does an annual certification course or something, in those situations, that might be considered a cohort. You would sign certain people up and they would all start January fifth, and you’d have them all planned to be January 25th be wrapped up. That would be a cohort where a group of people has gone through a series of training at the same time.
[00:24:55.820] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, that’s fantastic. I think we’re going to go for our bit of break now, folks, and When we come back, we’re going to be looking at some of the competition. It should be a fantastic second half. We will be back in a few moments. I forgot to put Lifter on this. We look at Lifter first, of all right? Mind’s gone blank. So three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I wanted to take the opportunity to point out that WP Tonic has got a fantastic newsletter. It’s always its main… It’s always written by myself, and it always has a subject around membership, around marketing, or a review about a specific product. Then it has some sub stories that are mostly about AI, around subjects that will probably help you. It’s totally free. You can get this newsletter by going over to wp-tonic. Com/newsletter, wp-tonic. Com/newsletter, and sign up for it. Like I said, it’s done every week and it’s done by myself. We have a little bit of help from Kurt. Let’s go straight into it. Let’s look at some of the competitors. Let’s start off with our beloved Lifter LMS. How would you compare what they’ve done with Lifter LMS?
[00:26:28.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m partial. I make no bones about telling people I’m partial. I think Lifter is the top of the stack. I really do. And so Lifter does membership management. It can do sales. Pardon me. It can do the course management, right? So the learning content management. And the reporting, like I said earlier, is very strong. And it’s got some automations built into like automatic certificates, or you could set up engagements It has reminders. It’s got some gamification in it. To me, it is the top of the stack. And part of the reason it’s the top of the stack for me is what we mentioned with creator LMS, almost being like a gap. And that’s direct integrations. So Jonathan and I, we’ve been around and used a varied source of products over the years, and so we have access to a lot of things. So if I am working with a customer And I think this is a buddy boss customer. It’s automatically going to be able to integrate with Lifter LMS. Maybe it’s a fluent community user instead. It’s going to integrate just fine. Or maybe I want to use the social learning from Lifter LMS directly because they have their own community plugin.
[00:27:47.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
And so to me, Lifter is at the top of the stack, again, not just because of what it does with the learning and the memberships, but with the flexibility to attach itself or to integrate with so many other top-level tools.
[00:28:02.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s more complicated. But like I say, they do offer free product lift at LMS, and with one of their add-ons for Stripe, which is around $150 Now, that compares to what Creator LMS is offering with their starter plan, which is around $150. But where I get really excited with Create is when you buying it with WP Funnelz and their mint. I think that’s where you’re getting a really great system for marketing and email marketing and setting up funnels and everything that somebody that creator LMS is targeted to wants to do, basically. Where with Lifter, you can do all those things, but it’s designed for a much wider market. That’s That’s how I’m seeing it. I’m not saying I’m right, but that’s how I’m seeing it. Let’s look at Kajabi. How would you compare it with Kajabi?
[00:29:11.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s a tight one. I think Kajabi overall is a more complete system because it has more that email capability in baked and things like that. To be clear, creator LMS lists emails in the menu. I just don’t want you to see that on a screenshot or something and get excited. There’s only two emails the system sends out, and it’s to announce, thanks for buying and welcome to the site. It’s not a CRM tool. So it’s a notification email. It’s not email email. Whereas with Kajabi, you’ve got a little more flexibility in messaging, email strings, funneling. It’s more of a full product. But again, Jonathan, We dive into this. It’s a SaaS platform. You don’t have ownership, you don’t have freedom of design in a lot of cases, and it’s not easy. I know the marketing tells you it’s easy, but I’ve worked in Kajabi before, and there’s definitely a learning curve to get pretty decent at using it.
[00:30:19.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s a big beast, isn’t it? Like I say, what they’re asking for a year, you can pay that for month for Kajabi. Obviously, you got the hosting costs. I do truly think with their other plugins, you’re getting a system that It’s very comparable with Kajabi. You’re getting a unified interface, but you’re not getting the flexibility and ownership that you’re getting with this type of setup. But it It is a polished platform, but it is a beast. Let’s look at how does it compare to LearnDash.
[00:31:09.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
I struggle with LearnDash because it’s not a bad product. And we know a lot of people that worked on that team. In fact, we just interviewed one today. It’s a good product. It’s just I haven’t seen anything as far as an update or anything new, no new features in a long time. It’s been years, I think, since I’ve seen an update from them. And I don’t mean like an update to keep up with WordPress core and security. I just mean I haven’t seen any new features. I haven’t seen anything change in quite a long time. Learndash, to me, I still feel a gap in the experience, not the user experience, not for students, but I feel a gap from the creator side of like, how am I really going to manage my members? How do I really tie this reporting to what I need to do? You and I have the experience, of course, through WP Tonic of saying, hey, we can use Sure members. We can use ShortCart to sell. We can do this It’s a commerce thing, right?
[00:32:16.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Or fluent car.
[00:32:18.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, you’re always gluing something to it to get it to do what you want it to do. And that might sound harsh. I don’t mean it to for people that use it and for the people that work there, it’s a great product. I feel like in today’s marketplace, it’s missing a few of the expectations that people have.
[00:32:39.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s excellently put, actually, and fair. Let’s move on. School. How are you doing?
[00:32:49.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
I hate school.
[00:32:50.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I do, but I don’t know why. Is it just the founders? I don’t hate the founders. The founder was highly successful in selling consultancy packages and train people to be a consultant. And then the major investor. But it’s also the way it’s marketed, isn’t it? That I have some problems with.
[00:33:20.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s got this creepy multi-level marketing feel about it.
[00:33:25.300] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s got this- You’re doing much better than me today. You’re spot on It’s gone to die, you are.
[00:33:31.060] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, it’s got a fake level of excitement that annoys me to the core. I feel that way about a lot of products out there, so they’re not alone. The go high level crowds in that pocket for me. It’s like all these people super excited to go meet in someone’s living room and talk about selling laundry soap for Amway. It doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, on some levels, you look at it and you go, well, this is a It’s a great business model. It does this, this and this. And you try to justify it to yourself. And then you run in to these people in the wild and they’re like, oh, my gosh, I just signed up for school. I’m so excited. And I’m like, you’re making a course. Like, hello. But for some reason in this space, these people are way amped up and their expectations for success are way overplayed. I feel sorry for them because they’re told, we’re going to enter you into our marketplace and we’re going to be feeding you leads, and you’re going to have the ability to grow your business. But if they add you into this marketplace, and let’s say you have a course on leadership, you’re in there with 50 other people that have a course on leadership.
[00:34:44.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s like trying to sell a leadership course when you built it in Udemy.
[00:34:48.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking. It’s the same. It’s got the marketplace argument, but it’s got all the liabilities as well as Udemy, isn’t it? That everybody is going to be there, aren’t you? You’re competitors, really.
[00:35:08.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
I thought I had to jump up and grab a delivery, but I think my wife got it.
[00:35:13.140] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, thank you. But yeah, that’s well put. And this multi-sales feeling to it, I thought you were spot on about that. It’s got nothing to do with school. There was a particular a very popular YouTube WordPress influencer, and he’s been selling courses on YouTube through his channel, and the courses are on school, and it’s all about WordPress. I thought that was funny myself at DigDig, but I did find that confusing. I did sign up for one of his free courses, though. I haven’t done much with it, but I thought that was funny. On to the next one, member press. How would you compare it to member press? We haven’t talked. Maybe in the new year, we should do a show about member press, but I don’t know because we haven’t said much about it, have we?
[00:36:18.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
We haven’t said much about it. I haven’t used it in Anger in a long time. It used to be almost a requirement for folks that were using LearnDash. They would have LearnDash and Member Press. And so that’s the frame set that I’m used to seeing member press in. But I’ve never used it as some stand-alone as a course creator, try to create my own empire thing. I would probably have to take another look at that, Jonathan, because I haven’t done it.
[00:36:51.040] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s fully featured. They do have an add-on depending… The pricing structure is a little bit confusing. You get it at a discount when you first sign up, but when it renewals, it goes to full price. But there’s a few plug-in providers use that morphology. It’s got its own way of dealing with membership. That’s a little bit unusual how it’s coded up, but it works. It’s a mature plugin, it’s feature-rich. I think you’re spot on. A lot of people used it because for a long time, it was seen as the natural player with LearnDash. I just think now there’s things like Lifter, LMS, and other solutions in the WordPress space that you get a lot more value than with Masterpress, but other people would disagree with me, but that’s my stance. So let’s look at another one. Let’s try and pronounce it correctly, Jonathan. Marsterio. Marsterio?
[00:38:08.740] – Kurt von Ahnen
Marsterio.
[00:38:09.840] – Jonathan Denwood
I got it right for me. Yes. I used to sponsor the show for a little while. Much appreciated. I see it as one of the natural competitors to creator, LMS, in its target audience. Would you agree with that statement, or would you have a different opinion?
[00:38:28.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
I do I agree with the way that you phrase that. I also, having looked through their website some, it seems like when you look at the pricing page, it’s not the same as what we described when they were sponsoring the show. And so looking at what people can refer to, $99, it says $99 a year, right? That’s pretty dang affordable, Jonathan. Unlimited courses, drag and drop editor, AI course creation, live lessons, course reviews, built-in notifications. I think it’s a pretty good contender When you’re looking at it compared to Creator LMS, I just think Creator LMS is… I think it’s got a little more finish in it with the community portal.
[00:39:27.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s definitely Definitely, if you’re looking at these two, you’re just going to have to make your decision. But I’m swayed by what the other plugins that the Creator LMS have, because I think, and the reason why I’ve already said this three times in this episode, it just having that integration, but not in a wall garden, still having flexibility, but having that level with those three core plugins from the same company, if you’re that particular target audience, I think that’s quite powerful.
[00:40:10.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:40:11.560] – Jonathan Denwood
On to the next one. But it’s definitely all Of the ones we’ve listed, folks, I definitely think you need to look at it’s a main competitor to creator LMS with Lifter LMS.
[00:40:26.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
One thing about Misterio, when you look at them compared to some of these other tools we’ve been talking about, Jonathan, is their depth in choices for a payment gateway is extensive. If you live in one of these countries that can’t use Stripe or needs some other oddball gateway, that’s one reason to go check out Misterio because they use a ton of payment gateways.
[00:40:52.960] – Jonathan Denwood
They’re most popular. They do offer multiple instructors. I don’t know if Creator LMS offers that.
[00:41:00.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
I believe they do.
[00:41:02.120] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t know for sure, but they’re offering with their 149 a year, which is normally 2. 99. They are offering Webhooks, but also API access, but you really got to look at the integrations. You’re going to have to do your own research there, folks. Let’s look at another one, tutor LMS. How would you compare Because Tuta’s strength is it’s got that free product, isn’t it? But the thing is you want to take subscriptions, I think you got to go use WU, haven’t you?
[00:41:39.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think you have to use WU commerce, or I think you can do short card or fluent card at this point, too, though. I don’t I have to double check. The thing with Tudor LMS that always catches me out, and I mention it to you almost every time, is I don’t know barely anybody in the States using it, but I know a lot of over in Europe and- The Indian subcontinent. Almost, I should say, the Middle East, right? Indian stuff use Tudor LMS a lot. It has a very high adoption rate out of the States, less so in the States.
[00:42:16.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think you’re totally spot on. I have no idea why. I think it’s just because Lifter and LearnDash have been established for a long time, and they’ve really, and also member press, they’ve got a lot of the market share, haven’t they? It’s a great solution, but it’s not something we’re Lifter or LearnDash, and now Creator LMS. Probably going to be pushing Lifter LMS and Creator as our two main tools with LearnDash, if you want to use BuddyBos, because we do offer that on some of our higher plans, folks. But we offer almost all the best WordPress technology as part of our hosting plans. We’re the only hosting company that actually does this, and it’s just an amazing value. Let’s look at a SaaS solution, Circle. How would you compare it, create an NMS to circle? Because I know a lot of its target audience that also look at circle, and they brought up circle, and they brought up school in the same breath.
[00:43:32.600] – Kurt von Ahnen
I am at a loss as to why so many people seem to like circle. I’m one of those people that don’t, even from the user experience. So usually I give my opinion from the developer side, from the implementer side. But for instance, Kevin Geary uses Circle as one of his tools. And So I’m a member. I’ve paid money, and I’m a member, and I just don’t like the interface. It seems very plain Jane-ish unstyled. It’s just not… I don’t know. It’s not a fun thing to use. It’s a tool, but it’s not fun. That’s a weird thing to say when you’re trying to… But it’s meant to be more like a community a tool, but I don’t feel like hanging out in there and being part of the community. You know what I mean? It just doesn’t feel… It’s not a good… I don’t like interface.
[00:44:32.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. It’s the interface. You don’t find it very usable.
[00:44:36.300] – Kurt von Ahnen
Not attractive.
[00:44:38.520] – Jonathan Denwood
It starts at 89 a month, and then the next one’s up to 200.
[00:44:44.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure ain’t the cheapest.
[00:44:46.660] – Jonathan Denwood
It depends on what size community you got.
[00:44:50.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
Who was the influencer that we just saw that moved from circle to fluent and made a big video about it? I can’t remember.
[00:44:59.780] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s It’s all from WP Tuts.
[00:45:01.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
Wp Tuts, right? And he said that as his- It went up quickly. As his network grew, it got more and more expensive to use it.
[00:45:12.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, especially if you’re offering free… That’s one of the reasons why people look. When they’re looking at SAS, that’s one of the things they look at at school, because school, I think they are offering a cut-down version. It was $99 a month. You could have many courses free, but you still had to… You could offer a load of free courses because it’s main influence is about offering a lot of free stuff. But they didn’t offer a free level on school, but they’re now offering a cut-down version, aren’t they? I think that starts at about $49 on school. I might be wrong, I need to check that now. But no, when we get back to circle, and I think Paul from WP Tuts was saying he had quite a large free community. His paid community was growing and it was getting quite expensive. We were talking about over $1,000 a month, which depends on what your prices of your courses, really, doesn’t it?
[00:46:32.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. It’s so weird. I know that there’s the cost of doing business, right? We use that term, right? What’s the return on investment? Well, that implies there’s a cost. But I think, Jonathan, you and I have had this talk before. It’s really cool to have all the coolest things, but at the end of the month, at the end of the fiscal year, you need to have brought in more than you’ve spent. And it’s very important to be frugal and watch, Hey, what are some of the ways in which I am spending my money? I just don’t think circle’s a good investment in that way.
[00:47:10.660] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, they’re offering what they call their hobby version school at $9 a month, and then they got the pro at 99. But if you go with the hobby, they want on top of your Stripe fee of 2. 9, if you go with the hobby, they want 10% on top. So you’d be looking almost at 13 %, where if you’re looking at… I have to research if the Stripe fee is on top, it just says transaction fee. I would imagine the stripes on top. But the pro, they’re wanting to… It’s 99 a month, plus they want 2. 9 %. But they’re pointing out their 2. 9. They’re saying that circle wants 7% on top of their monthly fee. Patreon wants 14%, and Discord wants 16% Yeah. This all amounts up, doesn’t it?
[00:48:20.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
It does.
[00:48:21.640] – Jonathan Denwood
This is the reason why you should look at WordPress. Let’s finally look at Fluent Community.
[00:48:31.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, from a course’s perspective, pardon me, it’s really not my choice. From a community perspective, it’s the golden child over the last year and a half or so. I appreciate the community aspect of it. I do like that it integrates with Lifter. We’ve already mentioned Lifter; can you integrate it with the free version, right? And so if I can manage my members and my course material in Lifter, and then attach Fluent Community as those discussion spaces, private conversations, and personal profile tool, I think that puts me in a really good space. Does it have a course tool? Yes, Fluent Community does have a course tool. Again, it’s just not my choice.
[00:49:20.080] – Jonathan Denwood
No. But yeah, I think using it with Lifter LMS is you’re getting a powerful combination there, aren’t you?
[00:49:30.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, because there’s… I should be clear: at the beginning of the show, I was very clear about asking questions about use cases and related topics. Sometimes, a creator has a course and wants to share some information. They want to put something out simply. They’re not interested in tracking test scores, quizzes, certificates, and continuing education-type requirements. If you’re going to share some information with someone, I don’t know how to make pasta carbonara or something like that. Fluent communities, the core structure is well-suited to that environment. It’s just that, personally, when I’m looking at eLearning material, I immediately go to student journey, advanced reporting, certificates, and recertification requirements. And then that’s why the Lifter LMS thing boils to the top for me. But if I were going to put out something informational, as in the structure of a course, but not to manage it like a university, well then, Fluent Communities courses do fit that structure well.
[00:50:36.460] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I was thinking, should I add it? But I said a circle. But I think one of its other strengths is its similar strength to creator LMS is that you then have access to all the Fluent tools like Fluent Booking, Fluent Support, Fluent Forms, Fluent CRM I think with WP Funnel, you get a landing page builder and more integration, but then you do also need Mint. It’s aimed… But you can still build with a modern page builder using patterns. If you’re using Gutenberg and Cadence WP, which we offer, it’s easy to make a landing page. Anyway, you can integrate. It is like WP Funnel. She got all these integrations, didn’t it? It’s offering. That’s how my mind was working. And that introductory course, you can do it. If you want to build out more courses, you can introduce Lifter, can’t you?
[00:51:56.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I wanted to stress about these community tools that we talk about, because it’s the same with Buddy Boss or Fluent Community or these types of tools, is when you put these tools on your website, they’re community tools. Everyone in the website has access to the community, right? So out of the box, everybody’s in the community. As noted earlier, you need MemberPress to run members into LearnDash, for example. That was the way we used to do it back in the day. Lifter LMS works really well with Fluent Community because you can build membership tiers or course access tiers and then use those access plans to grant access to the community. So it’s one way to say you’re privatizing the community at that level. So it’s essential. When you have these types of tools, you have to recognize: “Okay, I get it.” I’ll implement this functionality. But then the immediate question after people install these tools is: how do I keep everyone from just jumping in? I want only members to see it, or only students to access it.
[00:53:11.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
You need these tools to filter that out.
[00:53:14.680] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s a great point. I think it’s our last show of the year, folks. I want to thank Kirk for being my co-host. I think we’ve produced some fantastic content. I’ve spoken to a few people that have been listening to the show, and they’ve all said really great things about it. About you, Kirk, not about me, but there we go. Kirk, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you and what you’re working on?
[00:53:42.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
As an agency, Mañana No Mas is available for work. So come on in, maniananomas.com or maniananomas on any social channel. But if you want to connect with me directly, the best way to do that is to send a connection invitation on LinkedIn.
[00:53:58.380] – Jonathan Denwood
If you’re looking for a full service plus a great hosting partner. Look at WP Tonic. We offer excellent value and a fantastic team. And come to WordPress because it’s the best option that gives you ownership of your business with flexibility. There’s a reason WordPress powers nearly 43% of the internet. Like I say, we will be back next year. If you want to support the show, another great free resource is the WP Tonic YouTube channel. It has all the Membership Machine show on that channel, plus all the content from our other podcast, the WP Tonic show, and a load of instructional videos on marketing. It’s all on that channel. Over 1,700 videos, I think. It’s a great free resource. Please go there and sign up for it; that’d be fantastic. We’ll see you in the new year, folks. Bye.
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